Just to let you know that I've had my 2nd scan and have been given the all clear! Thank you all for your kind words, advice and concern. It really helped.
So a big, big thank you and wishe for a wonderful weekend.
Nick
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I can hear AC/DC playing in the background...
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Our remit is to serve the needs of our learners by delivering curricula and teaching in ways the can connect with. I would argue that the technological wow of e-learning has faded and allowed us to return to issues of teaching/training and learning. It's interesting to note that some of the participants see that there is a huge amount of work involved in online tutoring. With regard to the discussion tracking and moderation that clearly depends on the emphasis given to this aspect of e-learning. The course we are doing is heavily discussion based because it needs to be. If I was designing an online course and elucidated that three discussions were all I needed (1 for help ad advice and 2 related to activities) then I would have significantly less work. The other thing to consider is that you would spend time talking to learners on a face to face course so the amount of time you would commit to your course should be roughly the same.
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This is also the case when we consider the participants on a course. There is simply a huge spectrum of in terms of prior knowledge between participants about what's covered in your course.
The challenge that you then face as a subject matter expert, is effectively communicating understanding in a way that can be comfortably assimilated into the participant's knowledge structure. When this actually happens, the result is the emergence of expertise or the reinforcement of an already expert understanding. That's far more easily written than achieved. When we consider all the other confounding factors involved in delivering a learning event, we end up with our standard bell curve of some people not getting it, some kind of getting it and a few who really get it (or probably knew it already).
Specifying some pre-requisites might help, but how many times has that really worked for you? In my case I can honestly say extremely rarely, if ever. Creating pre-instructional events or materials can prove to be really helpful, and gives the participant the opportunity to reinforce their knowledge structure or adjust it to effectively assimilate the knowledge that will be presented in the actual course.
You could imply that successful completion guarantees a place on the programme but that necessitates the need for policy and support for such practice.
There's a lot to be said about pre-instruction, but sometimes creating the content and information can be time consuming and a cost too far.
A possible alternative to developing and administering pre-instructional events is to share a declarative conceptual model such as a concept map with participants prior to the course. Concept maps highlight the concepts within a domain of understanding and specify the nature of relationships between the concepts. This visual snapshot of a knowledge structure is easy to engage with and evaluate. The map can be supported by additional resources that explain the concepts and elaborates on their relationships. The process gives the participants a sound baseline with which they could scaffold their learning. You could then even provide a forum where the map is used to create a dialogue between participants both prior to and during the course.
Concept mapping is a technique developed by Joseph Novak and is based on David Ausubel's theory of assimilative learning. It would also appear to relate to cognitive schema as I would argue that a concept map is akin to a visualisation of a schema (or part of a schema).
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Though it's not that frequently thought about outside of the business world, are you thinking about how much value your getting from your content? I'll share an interesting story with you:
I met up with an e-learning developer friend the other day who wanted me to evaluate a learning object they she put together. It was really quite good, I complimented her on going to the effort of keeping an eye on the cognitive load of the content and interactions of the learning object.
I was then advised that the my friend had spent a good 10 weeks developing it. I was taken aback, perturbed, my immediate question was how long had it been available to learners and how many people had used it. She told me it had been available for a month and few had used it (think less than double digits). It was too early to evaluate any improvement on performance or behaviour of the learners who had used it.
On further investigation it became apparent that there wasn't any plan to promote the learning object nor was there a plan to integrate it into the curriculum it served. Now, the academics reading this may be wondering what the problem is. Let me add a little perspective. I'm not an accountant but I'll do a calculation.
10 weeks (dev time) x £576 (weekly salary) = £5770
2 weeks (expert time) x £865 (weekly salary) = £1930
Total cost = £7700
That's an expensive, though very well designed object. So well designed in fact that it could and should replace the 3 hour session that is used to currently deliver the material. The learning object could even be provided as pre-learning as it covers the fundamentals for the course and several other courses. Lets do another calculation based on the assumption that this fundamental is recapped for an hour on 2 subsequent courses.
Time : 1hr (prep) + 3hr (del) + ((0.5hr (prep) + 1hr (del)) x 2) = 7hr
Total time: 7hr x 3 (runs a year) = 21hr
Total cost: 21hr x £16.5 (trainer hr) = £346.5
That total isn't significant and if that was the only benefit then it would take around 20 years to pay for itself. Clearly I've left out a lot of data when working this out as well as a lot of other beneficial factors. I didn't perform an ROI or CBA. But the example is to illustrate the question I posed in the title.
Are you thinking about value for money and how will you go about justifying the expense of an initiative?
What you don't consider and put effort into justifying now will come back to haunt you when budgets come up.
:end
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I will post the opener to the discussion board later today.
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