Highway to Hell

Short post. Group activity going slow. My daughter takes up my whole weekend so wont get much done. Will probably make a slideshare slideshow or flickr slideshow to stimulate things tonight.

I can hear AC/DC playing in the background...

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Week one reflection

The first week has been interesting. The discussions on e-learning were good. I particularly liked Carl's comment on the downsides it was interesting. Unfortunately, there are a lot of individuals in Carl's position. Unfortunately change is also inevitable. I'm sure our predecessors felt the same about changes that needed to happen in education and training as a result of technology as well. Michael Wesch is clearly an inspiration in this area.

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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Apology for getting too excited

I'd like to apologise about having posted an article that wasn't relevant to the context of the course and have now removed it. As I tend to do 99% of posting from my mobile phone I was adding my WordPress blog and my Blogger blog as recipients of the post. I will now make sure that I only route relevant posts to this blog.

Prior Knowledge and conceptual models: levelling out the learning field a (bit)

It's a common fact that everyone knows a little (or a lot) about something. That knowledge could be at the level of an expert or completely trivial. It could be well formed and reasoned or, well, just plain wrong.

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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Are you getting value for money on your learning resources?

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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Opener activity

This activity was quite timely as we're soon to release a module and needed an opener. I ran the one that I wrote for the activity past the course director and it was approved. Two birds with one stone! My favourite way of doing things.

I will post the opener to the discussion board later today.

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Blogging via e-mail

One neat feature of most blogging tools is the ability to post to your blog via an e-mail. This is a great time saving feature as there is no need to fire up our web browser, head over to our blog, log in, forget the password, have the password reset...you get it.

If you are using blogger, setting up publishing via e-mail is as simple as going to 'settings' and turning the thing on.

The disdvantage is that we can't see our blog and are therefore somewhat removed from it. We also don't get a chance to check out whether anybody has commented on our posts. Then again, there is a setting for that in blogger too.

I find it really helpful as I'm making this post from my mobile phone.

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Benefits of e-Learning

One of the first week's activities was to post in a discussion on the benefits of e-Learning. There are loads of hypothetical benefits to e-Learning such as Return On Investment, flexible delivery, availability of access, reuse etc.

We can sometimes look at the benefits of e-Learning in such an incredibly naive way. There's almost a danger of thinking that having e-Learning is a benefit in itself. I've noticed that Distance learning (via printed material) has been around for a really long time, so why the interest with e-Learning? I ask this because I have seen and experienced some e-Learning from a number of HEIs, FE institutions and commercial organisations and am dumbfounded by the amount of 'e-Learning' content that could just as easily have been printed pages from a book. Once the pretty packaging is taken off, the surprise inside is really not that significant.

There are so many factors involved in making effective e-Learning. There's the instructional model for a programme or a module. The design and creation of the learning content in terms of learning opportunities and activities. The sequencing and contextualisation of all the sessions. There are different learning styles that need to be accommodated and this can protract the construction of online learning sessions. It can be a very expensive process and highly time demanding (though the benefits can be realised in the future). There are accessibility issues, technical issues, effective support issues (hence why I'm doing this course) and many more. I think that we need to remember that e-Learning is a method of delivery just like a lecture, book or an article in a magazine. I'm not against e-Learning or it's success; If I was I'd be out of a job.

It's easy to see the generic benefits of e-Learning without thinking of how effectively those benefits can be realised. Effective e-Learning courses are usually the ones that provide great activities and experiences for the learner. Ones that they can connect to their own experiences and goals. They normally require a fair amount of commitment and upfront effort, thats why the OU is so good at them. For some HEIs aspects of online learning aren't even considered in the workload model...

This blog is about...

If you've stumbled across this blog while searching for useful resources for online tutoring don't get too excited. This blog has been set up as an ongoing activity for the online tutoring course run by Oxford Brookes.