Download What is e-learning?

Blended learning in WebCT
some practical approaches
Institute of Psychiatry, 16 November 2006
1. Some concepts
What is e-learning?
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A technology?
A philosophy or doctrine?
A community of experts?
A different kind of teaching?
Something we are imposing on students?
Something entirely new?
e-Learning is using new technology to provide exciting,
flexible, more effective learning experiences that relate to
the real lives of students today.
‘It isn’t e-learning, it’s just learning’
What is ‘blended’ learning?
Blended learning is using e-learning to complement
conventional on-campus teaching and learning, within a
single course, so as to create a more effective learning
experience.
2. Planning your course
Advantages of online course
elements (1)
• Students can work in their own time, in their own space and at
their own pace
• All materials remain online, so students can refer, re-read,
redo as necessary
• Well-designed material can work with a wider variety of
learning styles than most conventional teaching can
• Elements may be reusable in other courses or other parts of
the same course
• Links to online resources (websites, databases, libraries, KCL
e-journals) are direct and easy to create
• Collaboration is easy to set up and easy for students to use
Advantages of online course
elements (2)
• Some exciting learning tools (eg blogs, wikis) only exist online
• Well-designed materials can make use of technologies
already familiar to students (eg podcasts, Skype, blogs, social
networking, bookmarking tools)
• Some types of assessment are easier online (eg peer
assessment)
• Off-campus learning experiences (eg interaction with realworld practitioners) can be incorporated
• Students can submit work in various online formats
• Some students find participation in discussions, activities etc
easier online than face-to-face
Disadvantages of online course
elements
• May require more time, effort and money to create
• Authors may need to learn new styles, skills
• Technical problems may hinder content creation and/or
use
• Online assessment requires particular care (plagiarism,
impersonation etc)
Elements of your course
• Which elements must stay face-to-face?
• Which elements work less well (eg waste time) face-to-face?
• Are there any administrative matters that might save you time
and effort online (eg virtual office hours)
• What new learning materials might be offered online (eg
animations and other visual material)?
• What can’t you do face-to-face that might be a good learning
experience online for your students (eg anonymised real case
studies, live access to experts, collaborative research)
Online content recommendation 1:
Think Outside the Box
Don’t use WebCT Vista as a guide to what’s possible in elearning. e-Learning is much more than authored copy with
a few token quizzes.
Plan a good learning experience first, then work out how to
create it. You don’t have to use Vista’s tools.
Some strategies for blended
courses (1)
Divide course by element, eg:
• F2f tutorials, assessment ‒ online content (authored and
student research)
• F2f content (eg lectures), tutorials ‒ online assessment (eg
case study report, collaborative or individual)
• F2f content ‒ online formative assessment and discussion (eg
student posts presentation for discussion) plus summative
assessment (student submits revised presentation)
• F2f content, discussion ‒ online major assessed project
running concurrently
Or:
Some strategies for blended
courses (2)
Divide course by timetable, eg:
• Week 1 ‒ f2f lecture, tutorials etc
• Week 2 ‒ online research, collaboration etc
• Week 3 ‒ f2f lecture, tutorials etc
• Week 4 ‒ online group activity (eg role play with reflection etc)
Or:
• Term 1 ‒ f2f conventional teaching
• Term 2 ‒ online practical activity and report (eg shadowing
real-world practitioner)
Or, use VLE for extension materials/ ‘added value’ only (eg
recorded guest lectures, podcasts, tutor blogs etc)
3. Creating your online
elements
Think about look and feel
• e-Learning materials are mostly webpages, not monographs
or textbook chapters
• Students today have grown up with the web: they expect
visually interesting material … but 90% of current e-learning
– looks like 1990s web design
– has little or no editorial oversight (bloated text, poor punctuation,
spelling and grammatical mistakes, inconsistency)
– has poor usability (broken links, poor navigation, confusing
structure, poor accessibility)
• Universities, departments, even individual courses need a
consistent look: this is about usability, authority and integrity ‒
and it makes creating content easier for you
Some look-and-feel solutions
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Use a consistent design with appropriate visual branding
Use templates, not ad hoc pages
Learn how to write web copy
Follow basic usability guidelines
Make your online material visually interesting as well as
pedagogically sound
• Find ways of using images, video, new technologies as far as
your budget allows
Get some input from a designer/editor/web developer
Online content recommendation 2:
Don’t use the VLE’s tools
• Don’t upload ad hoc collections of Word docs, pdfs etc: this
produces content that’s hard to use, disorganised,
inconsistent and locked into the VLE
• Don’t use the VLE’s ‘HTML Creator’: it’s hard to use and very
limited (if you’re comfortable with web design, use a proper
tool like Dreamweaver)
Online content recommendation 3:
Don’t use CourseGenie
• CourseGenie is KCL’s recommended content creation tool
• It claims to produce HTML pages from Word documents
But:
• It’s hopelessly limited and inflexible for visual design
• It produces very dated, simplistic web pages
• It produces very poor quality HTML
A content creation solution
• Get a web developer to set up Dreamweaver templates for
your course, as simple or as complex as you want, in XHTML
with CSS
• Use a web authoring/updating tool like Contribute to add
content to your templates
• Create your HTML content remotely, review and check it, then
upload it to the VLE
• Use the VLE’s tools only to create organiser pages and inplatform elements like discussions
Ask the WiMW team about our content-creation system