E-Learning | doug woods

Posts Tagged ‘E-Learning’

E-learning, Why does it have such a Bad Name?

Monday, March 5th, 2012

Image by dougwoods via Flickr

E-learning is unpopular with learners, and not always popular with teachers, there can be little doubt about that but why should that be the case?

I have made quite a bold statement there and some of you may question it, that’s great and please add your view or experience in the comments. Before you do though, I’d like you to consider this question;

If you had the choice between studying a subject being taught by a teacher in the classroom or online via the internet, which would you choose?

Almost without fail, most people would opt for the first option. Why would that be? Is it because that’s what they’re used to? Is it because they feel that offers a better educational experience? Is online education perceived as a second best option?

My own experiences as a learner of e-learning has not been very good; I found the e-learning course to be very didactic and geared more towards instruction or training rather than education or study. I know that I am not alone in this experience as I have come across many others who have had similar expeiences.

Most tools for elearning appear to have been developed first for the commercial sector and were employed by companies or global organisations to train their workforce. The requirement in such instances has been more for training, instruction or presentation. These tools have since been adopted to provide elearning experiences within the education sector but here the demand would be for education and learning. It seems that the tools have not been completely adaptable for these different approaches. The result is that students find online courses restrictive and teachers find themselves limited by the technology.

Of course, this shouldn’t be the case, technology should be enhancing and enabling rather than limiting. If you were to attend a learning technologies conference, you would hear many presenters talk about new and exciting possibilities in using elearning, if you attend a learning technologies market place, however, you are likely to find that what is on offer is the same old tools. Nowhere has this been more evident to me than at the Learning technologies exhibition held in London, where there seems to be a very marked dichotomy between what is presented in conference and what is on sale in the exhibition space.

So, where are we going wrong, if we are? Is it that we are trying to take pre-packaged tools rather than design the learning experiences from scratch? Is it that we still design elearning from the point of view of a teacher or trainer rather than the learner? Is it, quite simply, that elearning is only an option when traditional teaching methods are not available? Or maybe the problem is that there’s a darn cat sat on my computer? (see pic)

Quite honestly, I’d very much welcome any views or comments on this matter, either here in the comments or via twitter.

eLearning Startup Opportunities (elearningtech.blogspot.com)
Focus on the technology or not? (elearningstuff.net)
Mark Smithers: eLearning at Universities: A Quality Assurance Free Zone? ” higher education management group (higheredcrm.wordpress.com)
Lectora Inspire eLearning Software Wins Bersin & Associates 2011 Learning Leaders Award for Product Innovation (prweb.com)
Traditional Learning without Frontiers! (elearningstuff.net)
E-Learning: The Product of a Risk Is a Lesson | American Libraries Magazine (americanlibrariesmagazine.org)
Collaborize Classroom – An Online Learning Platform (freetech4teachers.com)
Stories as instructional design technique for e-learning (sparkyourinterest.wordpress.com)

No sooner had I posted this article than I came across this post http://bit.ly/gVyusu which in part compares traditional learning in the HE sector with online learning. It presents a quite different point of view and is well worth reading.

E learning, Why does it have such a Bad Name?

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Tags: Distance Learning, E-Learning, Education, Educational technology, Learning, Technology
Posted in elearning | 20 Comments »

Designing E-learning for Secondary Schools

Monday, September 19th, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Designing E-Learning for Secondary Schools

In which I argue that using exisiting models of lesson planning which are familar to teachers, would be better for schools than using existing models sauch as ADDIE.

When you learn about Instructional Design, sooner or later, you’ll learn about models such as ADDIE or ICARE. These are traditional models used in the design and creation of e-learning resources but you have to question whether they are appropriate or relevant when designing e-learning material for a school.
Traditionally, most e-learning has been aimed at corporate or industrial training. In such sectors, there is not the same overall ethos of education as you would expect in a school. That is to say that each employee is not expected to spend all day everyday learning, quite unlike a school! In addition, the trainer is unlikely to have regular daily or weekly contact with each trainee, again quite unlike a teacher and a pupil.
In schools, teachers already have their methods of planning, evaluating and assessing learning; it would seem foolish, therefore, to require new methods just for e-learning. It would seem better to use the same methods for the e-learning content within schools.
Most teachers would be familiar with Learning Outcomes and Objectives, it would seem sensible to plan and design e-learning content around these. There are, though, some variations in the use and understanding of these two terms but basically outcomes are what the learner is to have achieved by the end of their learning and objectives are what the learner is to do in order to achieve these outcomes. In essence, though, the principle is that e-learning design for schools should match the planning process already familiar to teachers.
By making the e-learning design fit the processes already familiar to teachers would make it easier for teachers to become involved in e-learning. This I feel is very important; without teacher involvement the e-learning could become little more than an ‘add-on’ to a pupil’s learning. With teacher involvement, it becomes a more integral part of the learner’s learning and can be incorporated, assessed and evaluated alongside all other learning.
In conclusion, let me say that I am not criticising Instructional Design models such as ADDIE but I am saying that they may not be appropriate models for schools. The involvement of teachers in the design of e-learning resources is important and it is important that the design follows processes familiar to teachers. Such processes are already in use in schools and are used in the much wider arena of learning that occurs within schools. By utilising these same processes, we may benefit from e-learning being brought within the wide context of learning within school rather than being regarded as merely an ‘add-on’.

What is Instructional Design? (mriveracrouch.wordpress.com)
Learning Theories and Distance Learning (lynnmunoz.wordpress.com)

Designing E learning for Secondary Schools

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Tags: E-Learning
Posted in education, elearning | 8 Comments »

When I Met the Old Teachers

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

The other day, I met with a group of senior teachers; not ‘senior’ in terms of their position but ‘senior’ in terms of their age and length of service. Amongst other topics, we discussed educational technology, ICT and various approaches to teaching or learning. It was an interesting group within which to discuss technology because this group had been in the profession from the very onset of educational technology, some of them could recall their teaching days before technology, and all could talk about the changing technology they had seen.

I was pleasantly surprised that there were only two members who admitted to not making much use of technology in their current teaching. Both of them felt that they ‘should’ be using technology more. A third member added that it was not simply a case of using technology more but, for them, it was a case of using technology more effectively. There were nods and murmurs of agreement from several others regarding this latter point. There was one ‘wag’ who chimed in that we needn’t worry about using technology as the new government would ensure that pretty soon there’d be no technology in the classroom.

To try to deflect the discussion away from politics, I asked the group whether all their teaching was done in classrooms. This question seemed at first to draw some puzzled looks, until one teacher, who taught science and PE, stated that part of his teaching was done in a gym or a field. It transpired that none of the group had been involved in team teaching, only one had experience of open-plan schools (and not a positive experience, it seemed) and none had experience of working with pupils in ‘learning spaces’. So it seemed that almost all their teaching had been in a traditional classroom, unless, as one chimed in, you count ‘taking assembly’ or ‘residential visits’; it was felt by a few, though, that such activities were not really ‘teaching’.

I wasn’t sure what sort of response I’d get when I asked about Virtual Learning Environments and whether any had used one of these. I was pleasantly surprised though when the immediate response was ‘oh, you mean Learning Platform. Yes we have one of those.’ It turned out that almost all the group were aware of Learning Platforms and were making some use of them. In fact the group seemed quite knowledgable regarding which learning platform their school or Local Authority was using; Fronter, Frog, It’s Learning, Uniservity and Merlin, though those using Merlin were not quite sure it was a learning platform in the same way as others were describing theirs. One member said that her school ‘had a Moodle’ but wasn’t sure whether that was a learning platform as such. Another asked whether Education City and Espresso, things she used to use at her former primary school, could be counted as learning platforms?

Okay, so the group wasn’t always clear about what constituted a VLE, or Learning Platform, but their responses didn’t quite reflect the ‘doom and gloom’ often expressed regarding learning platforms, the way in which they have been implemented, their cost and the limited use being made of them. When the discussion turned to how they used learning platforms, there was a wide response. Almost all said they do, or had, used them for storing lesson plans, worksheets and tests. One member talked about creating geography materials as a follow up to lessons, which pupils could access from home. I asked if anyone had any online courses for pupils to follow, to which only the person whose school used Moodle responded that she had worked with another staff member to create a course.

Finally, as the group wasn’t just there to discuss technology, we talked about other types of technology being used by the group. All now used a laptop computer whereas some had previously used only a desktop and all seemed to feel that this was an improvement. All were using Windows ® based machines and none had used Apple or Linux based computers. All had used a whiteboard and data projector, all bar two, who had just a plain whiteboard, used interactive whiteboards (which seemed to be used mostly to display an image from the projector and were placed at the front of the classroom)

Each member of the group had a mobile phone, which they mostly used to make voice calls, though a few also used txt. None had used their mobile phone to take pictures or video, most said they did not think their phone had that facility. Although most said that their pupils had and knew how to use a mobile phone, none allowed mobile phones to be used in a lesson and most said their school either barred or had some system for collecting mobile phones centrally during the school day. The ‘only acceptable’ use of mobile phones which this group would countenance would be in emergency cases or, possibly just possibly, on a field trip to maintain contact. The group felt there was no place at all for handheld or games consoles in education!

The group also discussed many other aspects of education, including school buildings and design. All were aware of BSF and two said that their schools were included in a future wave of BSF. None were aware of the Primary Capital Programme. All seemed to believe that the purpose of BSF was to replace dilapidated school buildings; something which they felt was of ‘high’ priority. None seemed aware of the significant ICT role in BSF.

Of course, this group met before the recent announcements from the government regarding the cessation of the BSF programme; which only makes the point I made in another post, that working with what you’ve already got is paramount.

One thing that did clearly emerge from the discussion with the senior teachers is the belief that things in education go round in circles, or cycles. Some felt that the call for ‘personalised learning’ was just the return of ‘child-centred teaching’ in a slightly different guise. Others expressed bemusement at the way ‘topic webs’ seemed to have gained in favour in recent years. So I guess none would be surprised at the demise of ICT from the spotlight.

It was clear, though, that all of them were using ICT; even the couple who felt they weren’t, seemed to accept that they ‘should’ be. I feel none of them would welcome a return to teaching without the support of technology. That last statement, though, is possibly indicative of the way in which this group, and many other teachers, view both technology and teaching. Technology is all too often viewed as a tool or a support. Teaching is too often planned as something to be ‘delivered’ from the front of a class. Technology is rarely seen as a tool to access learning, unless the teacher says so.

For those members of the profession who have been teaching for many, say 20 or 30, years, to be told that the methods and approaches you use are no longer appropriate can be very annoying. Yet, as I have written elsewhere, that is the essence of learning transformation. Being aware of and using modern technology is not enough; this is something that was made clear to me from the discussions within the group of senior teachers.

Does ICT Improve Learning? (ictineducation.org)
SWGFL ICT Conferences – Torquay & Bristol (dougdickinson.co.uk)

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Tags: Apple, E-Learning, Education, ICT, Linux, Moodle, primary school, Virtual learning environment
Posted in Classroom Technology, Transforming Learning | 3 Comments »

10 Tips for Effective eLearning

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Image by alice_c via Flickr

Some of you will now that my current work has been involved in running synchronous elearning courses using Elluminate. This blog post is largely a reflection on that work so far and also my own experience of using Elluminate as an elearning tool.

I am attempting to draw up pointers or tips for users in how to deliver effective synchronous (live) elearning sessions for teaching and also for student revision. The tips presented here have been drawn from my observations of various people leading sessions and, as such, have been drawn upon different approaches or styles they’ve used. This post is very much a ‘first draft’ and I’d be grateful for any comments.

1) Teachers need a reliable internet connection with good bandwidth

Elluminate is intended to be used with even the poorest of dialup connections but this does not mean the experience will be equal to that delivered via a solid fast internet line. A poor connection can only acceptable, and sometimes unavoidable, at the client’s end. For the teacher a fast and reliable connection is essential to maintain delivery.

The lack of a reliable connection can lead to participants being dropped from the session and needing to reconnect. This may be unavoidable for students on a poor connection but it is not acceptable from a client viewpoint if the teacher drops out of a session through a poor internet connection.

2) Teachers need the support of well-designed resources

Many sessions have been supported by teacher designed PowerPoint slides. These are generally well based in the subject matter and pedagogy but usually show poor design and do not ‘engage’ students.

Teachers will rarely have the time or resources to design, from scratch, effective materials to engage the students, while also respecting commercial copyrights. In order to do this, it could be advantageous for a professional designer to be engaged to work with teachers to create engaging materials.

However, pretty resources on their own do not engage the students; they need to be appropriate and used in effective ways. Presenting a large number of colourful resources can be just as disengaging as presenting a few poorly designed ones.

3) The secret to a successful online course is interaction

The most effective sessions appear to be ones where there is a degree of interaction or participation from the students. This interaction can be with the teacher, with the resources or with each other. Sessions where the student appears to be just a passive participant tend to be less successful.

However, it can be difficult to generate interaction if the session has only one or two participants. In such cases, the level of participation and interaction can be adversely affected by the personality of each student and also their confidence/experience of using the system.

Equally, a session with a large number of students can be made more difficult to manage if there is a lot of interaction.

In my experience, if there are more than a dozen participants, it is difficult for each one to feel engaged. Consequently there is usually a lot of people dropping out during a session where there are more than a dozen participants. An ideal number would seem to be between 3 and 6 to allow for participation and interaction between students.

4) A successful course is usually a well-planned one

Isn’t this always the case? In a classroom, a successful lesson is usually one that has been well planned; the same appears to be true for online sessions. It is the session that is poorly planned and poorly supported by resources that appears to be the least successful.

However, of course, we all know that being flexible and being responsive to our students are also important to success. Following our plan rigidly during a lesson even when the students are not engaged, does not make for a successful lesson. In face-to-face sessions we can observe the students, their activity and responses. This is much more difficult online.

5) Intended outcomes need to be clear

Successful sessions almost always have intended outcomes; the most successful lessons are those where these outcomes are shared with students and have the agreement, or ‘buy in’, of the students.

In online sessions, it is useful for the teacher to tell the students what the intended outcomes for the session are, what activities are planned in order to achieve those outcomes and what ‘behaviour’ is required/expected from the student

6) Online learning is more than repeating previously learned material

Seems obvious really, but online sessions should not be just a repetition of subject matter previously covered in class. There may need to be some elements of revision but most successful online sessions allow students opportunities to investigate or explore materials in further depth or in new ways..

7) ‘Something for nothing’ is always good

We all like to think that we are getting ‘something for nothing’ no matter how big or how small. Sending students materials which they can use offline, is nearly always beneficial. Such materials might be sample questions, links to online activities, pdf texts etc.. There needs to be something extra that students gain from attending online sessions which could not be gained from face-to-face sessions.

8) Don’t allow time for questions!

I know this sounds almost counter intuitive but it is perhaps good practice not to allow time for questions. We all know the scenario where the teacher tells the pupils that at the end of the lesson there’ll be time for them to ask questions, that’s if there’s enough time of course! This usually gives the message to students that their questions are not really important and we can use them at the end to fill any remaining time, if the students can remember their question until the end and assuming they can withstand the peer pressure to stay quiet as everyone wants to finish early.

Rather than setting time aside for questions, taking and inviting questions should be an integral part of the session. Students should feel free to ask questions or raise points as the session progresses. This leads to better interaction and engagement in the session.

9) Use the tools

I am sometimes heard to be critical of Elluminate, as also with other services, in that they provide more tools for the teacher than for the learner. It is more frustrating, though, when teachers don’t make use of those tools available to them and resort to just basic text presentations on the whiteboard, which they then proceed to talk through. If you have ever suffered ‘death by PowerPoint’, I can assure you ‘death by Elluminate Whiteboard’ is worse. There are several tools available to the teacher, such as ‘application sharing’, ‘breakout rooms’, ‘web tour’ or multimedia sharing, get to know them and explore how each could be used in an online session.

10) Online teaching requires new skills

Online teaching requires new skills, not just in terms of handling technologies but also in terms of delivery. It is clear that a good classroom teacher does not necessarily make a good online teacher, so not every teacher will feel suited to it.

Delivering effective learning online requires practice, training and the development of a range of practical and interpersonal skills. An opportunity to teach online provides a professional teacher with an outlet to develop new skills and acquire new experiences which could hold them in good stead for the future.

This is not to say that a one-size fits all approach is required. Far from it, online learning can benefit from a range of teaching styles/approaches/resources just as face-to-face teaching does. It simply indicates that such styles/approaches/resources need to be different in many cases to fit an online scenario.

This final point is probably one which needs to be developed further. Having said that online teaching needs new skills, it is not yet easy to define those skills. Having said that online teaching may not suit all classroom teachers, there is an implication for ‘blended’ learning approaches. As I say, this post represents very much a ‘first draft’ and your comments are most welcome.

25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #18 Don’t ask questions (ictineducation.org)
Using technology in the curriculum (ictineducation.org)
eLearning Startup Opportunities (elearningtech.blogspot.com)
Online Learning Opportunities Today (elearningcentralia.wordpress.com)

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Tags: E-Learning, Elluminate Live, Teacher
Posted in Classroom Technology, elearning, Online Resources | 4 Comments »

Learning Score

Monday, June 14th, 2010

I confess, I have only recently watched this video. I cannot believe that I have not heard of or seen Learning Score before; I can only say that I must have had my head buried deeply in the sand.

Learning Score appears to be a fantastic tool for devising lesson plans. These things had been the bane of my life as a teacher and I’m sure the same is true for many other teachers. Hours would be spent drawing up lesson plans either by hand or on a word-processor; it was probably the most tedious of all teacher tasks. Also, as John Davitt says in the video, you were never really quite sure how the lesson would appear in reality (and there were many times when the reality hardly matched the plan!)

What I immediately like about the software is that it looks appealling; it’s not a word-processed grid or template that the teacher has to squeeze everything in. It’s interactive and it links dynamically to other resources. What made it appeal further for me is the potential to link to resources on a VLE. So if you’ve been spending hours days uploading content onto you’re VLE now you have an easy way to make use of them instead of just letting them lie there. Or if you’ve not yet started loading content onto your VLE, now you have a good reason to start!

I’ve not used the package as yet but if you are able to save the Learning Score files onto the VLE then I can envisage further potential arising. What I’m envisaging is having a Learning Score containing links to other Learning Score files. Each of these Learning Score files would represent a lesson plan and the Learning Score we’re adding them into would be a Scheme of Work. Hey, if we then save the Scheme of Work as a Learning Score file and link in other scheme of work files, aren’t we creating a syllabus, then a curriculum etc..?

At points in the video, John alludes to collaborative lesson planning; with the learners having a say in how much time is spent on a particular part of each lesson. I very much like this idea, not least because it helps the learner have a bit more responsibility for their learning and having a say in the way the content is being presented to them. It also, of course, could help them manage their workload.

How about going a step further and having the learner draw up the learning score themself? Each learner could have their own individual Learning Score setting out what they are going to do, how long they are going to spent on each part of it and what resources they are going to access, possibly also indicating what ‘output’ (essay, video, discussion etc) they are going to produce. Let’s then say that they each present their Learning Score to the teacher for approval. The teacher examines each one and approves it or suggests modifications such as extra resources that could be used or alterations to timings. The learner then takes their own Learning Score away and embarks upon their own learning path.

I’d guess that another beauty of the package is that it needn’t be confined to class lessons, the Learning Score could cover time spent on activities at home. As I started writing this paragraph, I was thinking of learning activities from home and thinking of supporting Home Access but I guess the term ‘activities’ could well include social or leisure activities … mind you I don’t know if the package has icons for some of these ‘activities’ ;) Nevertheless, the possibility of using the package to include home learning is intriguing.

Overall, this looks a great piece of software that I’m sure many teachers would love. It has great potential for supporting innovation or transformation in learning. I do feel that not just teachers but also learners would love to use it. Maybe this resource should be made compulsory for any school involved in BSF or Primary Capital building programmes?

10 Tips for Teaching Technology to Teachers (edtechpower.blogspot.com)
“Both Adobe AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1:” and related posts (techcrunch.com)
It’s all done! (digital-teacher.co.uk)

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Tags: E-Learning, Instructional Simulation, John Davitt, Learning Score, Lesson planning with technology, Teaching
Posted in BSF, Classroom Technology, Transforming Learning | 3 Comments »

New Ways to Learn

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

I discovered a great blog post at http://theelearningcoach.com/elearning2-0/10-ways-to-learn-in-2010/ which lists 10 new ways to learn. It includes the old one about using visual search engines; these have been around for a while and I womnder whether 2010 will be the year the visual search engine goes mainstream?

It also includes learning from wordclouds, these I thought were ‘old hat’ by now but I guess some people may not yet have come across them. Wordle for me is almost a waste of time, just because a term appears a lot in an article does not make it significant and, for me, a word cloud or tag cloud that is not hyperlinked is not very worthwhile.

Asking Questions, which is the third new way listed in the post, is hardly a new way at all. Asking questions is possibly the oldest method of learning known to man, so it is surprising that websites devoted to allowing people to ask questions have not become more popular. Then again maybe it is the silly answers that you often receive on such sites which has led to their demise.

Thinking visually and using mindmaps is again not new. What does appear to be new, however, is the ability to collaborate and share mindmaps online. This could become a great new tool for collaborative learning; it just remains to be seen whether people take to this approach. I have long been a user of mindmaps, myself, and I feel that such maps are personal; it is notr always easy for another person to interpret one person’s map, so I’m not yet sure whether collaborative maps would be of great use.

Hanging out with professors and watch documentaries are again hardly new ideas but the web is making these a lot easier than in the past.

It is very pleasing to see the growing popularity of TED talks and videos and this blog post lists a few others of a similar nature.

Using Twitter is well worth while in my experience so I wholeheartedly endorse this method of learning.

There are twoi more worthwhile tips for learning in 2010 which are mentioned in the blog post. I recommend that you pop over and have a fiull read of the post for yourself.

Cool Websites and Tools [January 4th] (makeuseof.com)
Ted 2010 (dougdickinson.co.uk)
A Year Later And Are We Using Different Tools To Connect To Our PLNs? (suewaters.com)
Meaning Tool: Training Semantic Search With Feeds (readwriteweb.com)

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Tags: E-Learning, visual search engine
Posted in Home Access, Online Resources, Training INSET and CPD, Transforming Learning | No Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘E-Learning’

E-learning, Why does it have such a Bad Name?

Designing E-learning for Secondary Schools

When I Met the Old Teachers

10 Tips for Effective eLearning

Learning Score

New Ways to Learn

Contact me

Follow us on Twitter

Doug Woods

Posts Tagged ‘E-Learning’

E-learning, Why does it have such a Bad Name?

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Designing E-learning for Secondary Schools

Related articles

When I Met the Old Teachers

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10 Tips for Effective eLearning

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Learning Score

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New Ways to Learn

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Contact me

Follow us on Twitter

Doug Woods