We can all relate to the needs of a good course/classroom teacher
- think about your favorite class or professor in college
- why we liked that course or person had less to do generally about the topic
or course content, and more with the individual, the people, and the social
aspects of the learning environment
online learning tends to ignore / forget this and just focus on content
we must remember learning (classroom or online) motivation, engagement, fun
When designing courses, we must think about THE EXPERIENCE for the online
learner
What is "quality online experience?"
- must consider in context with the learner, the topic, and the setting
- and consider if learning took place
joke: no one wants to be operated on by a surgeon who only learned online
- must consider appropriateness of the online setting to the course content:
learning about sexual harrassment or about surgery?
Are online learners having poor experiences
- the answer of this is generally yes
- failures of online perograms: public and hidden
-- the root of eLearning lies in correspondence courses
-- people still look at degrees differently when they come from an online source
- there are a lot of corporate online courses
-- some offer thousands of courses, but few students may be taking them
-- many miss the the classroom environment
high dropout rates exist in general for online learning, higher dropout rates
than F2F
- general corporate focus on cost reducttion
- general educational focus on expansion (sometimes on cost reduction)
there has generally been too little focus on learners and learning outcomes
when designing an online program for the Univ of PR, the focus tended to be
just on technologies and products: they didn't talk at all about their target
student population
- questions about the leaners led to creation of a digital center where the
learners could go to get skills
- understanding learner demographics and characteristics that impace online
learning
- what happens before a course starts, how to be a successful learner
- what happens during a course
-- role of interaction and support
- what happens during a course
how do you manage districttions and your time
- people generally don't receive any instruction about this
what type of support do people need? Do they need peer interaction, int what ways do you want to offer this interaction
few programs give students opportuntieis to share experiences and provide contexts, so people can really build upon their experiences
Examples of asychrconous elearning
- it is easy to find "electronic page turners" in courses
- root of the problem:
-- instructional designers or factulty are moving online without training /
support / understanding
-- focus may be more on cost-reduction over learning, understanding and performance
-- leads to less instructor and peer interaction
Dropouts for online learners idea
- good to start with a pretest (need to say how many questions, what question
you are on, how many questions there are, etc)
think through the interactions from the perspectives of the learners
- video can be used effectively, but if video is used poorly, course can be
worse than it would have been with just good still images
she likes using WebX to incorporating multiple pathways for people to interact
with the content and each other
- showing short video clips, and then challenging people to engage with real
video clips and offer opinions / share ideas
showed good fujitsu developed video indexing tool that lets you easily skim through material to the point you want
Another good example: "You are the historian: investigating the first
Thanksgiving"
- children serves as guides and interpreters
-- 1621 and modern perspectives
- there is mystery in the design
- problem is to solve: what really happened
- raises the queston: what is a historian?
many museums just provide collections online
- challenge is: how can you make this a rich learning experience like a real
museum
rather than spoon feeding facts: challenge was how could we bring mystery into this, get kids to think about what really happened
kids can start to think about history not as just a bunch of facts, but as something that historians discover, explore, continually
like Harry Potter stories and movie spy kids: focus is about exploring, helping kids
Did formative evaluation with Harvard business school about "the game" created
for tgiving website
- what are the myths that exist and why?
- activity: drag and drop captions
- audio rewards, reward at the end, and text update
- raised many issues about gaming
Kids could get into the gaming over the learning: need to have the right balance
between learning and fun
- we were really trying to make learning fun
- was a real revelation for Lynn
- learning should be fun and an enriching experience: but when you look at
courses designed for adults, few are designed with the idea of fun!!!!!
came up with idea of magic lense that they could drag for translation, have
photographs, audio, and video wit hstories
- seasons and circular thought, role of nature, giving thanks, and have a reward
at the end
did lots of longitudinal studies, to see how vocablary changed, understanding changed, etc
talked to students later and asked them about program, what did you learn,
etc
- need to do studies like this: ask them a week later, 3 weeks later, find
out what they learned as a result of their experience!!!!!
themes
- visual richness, replicating the museum
- layers of info
- personal exploration
- rewards and surprises
- interpreters with clothing and dialects
- visit the expert
- draw in children with children, mystery, and the historian theme
- focus on student motivation, fun, etc
rubric cna include: visual richeness, layters of info, exploration, rewards and surprises, guides and experts, mystery, fun, learning (yes for all in tgiving course, compare this to other courses like workplace sensitivity training)
Guidelines for designing online learner experiences
- need to plan based on learner democgraphics and characteristics
plan based on learner demographics, characteristics, topic and setting
- look at best practices, borrow best practices
exploit technologies for what they can do to give people a richer experience, don't replicate (author: Laurillard)
bring creativity and innovation into the course
support learners before a course begins
- selecting and registering for a course
- setting up and using technology
what is the advisory situation for people who are registering online?
- developing digital literacy (search strategies, understand indicators of
quality of information)
Teach others to be successful online learners
- materials, environment, and skills to succeed
Rather than having a pretest which is sort of a weed out process, why not give people guidelines and lists of skills, then support them in the development of their skills
during a course:
- progress: where am I, what have I accomplished, how long will this take
- support when stuck, confused, or excited
- use peer learning and sharing, real people
- learning
-- slow time
- "interruption is part of a tangle of issues involved in cognitive overload" (Kirsh)
-- Kirsh is doing a lot of study on this at Univ of CA
-- studying how many, many times people are interrupted during the course of
a day, what type of deep learning can take place under circumstances where
we are getting constant distractions
- Flow (Czikszentmihalyi)
-- when you are so engrossed in a learning experience that the time just seems
to fly, that is
- setup of most online experiences is counter to this concept of flow
Seymore Papert: joy of learning, joy of mastery, etc
how do you reward someone to enhance sense of accomplishement
- don't just give people a survey
- communities of practice: giving people opportunities for learning, understanding,
and performance
- to support and provide context
Her links
- eLearn magazine: www.eLearnMag.org
- Plimoth Plantation Online Learning Center: www.plimoth.org/olc
Lisa Neal, lisa@acm.org
is happy to share her links for free online courses that you can also take as a hobby like she does
there are big differences about how you teach novices and how you teach experts
- example of medical professionals
- in some cases you just need to "fill the pond" of their existing
experiences
with novices, you may need to teach in a very fundamentally different way
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