Just a personal list of "strong" and "weak"

[imogenbertin]

I should start by saying unfortunately I cannot attend the webinars “in person” which makes you feel a bit “outside” the course experience… and that I know my contributions here are rather more specifically technical than those of others.

Support good – comments on blog posts that add or criticise with positive intent. I think we are all too afraid to criticise these days and you learn by your mistakes!

Support good – Martin’s responses to to some of the technical issues which have meant it felt like someone was listening and trying to do something despite being volunteers with limited time and resources.

Support good – Anna reinstating my subscription to the course quickly and fixing a password issue.

Support good – someone listened about getting the webinar recordings up quickly so that with such limited time we didn’t get “left behind” because the cohort thing is important…

Support good – a technical moderator in the webinars. I attended one recently with no second person. I felt really sorry for the person giving the class even though it was a small group.

Support weak – recordings of webinars not converted to YouTube for offline watching but I suspect this is hard (impossible?) to do and time-consuming.

Support weak – the OcTEL website is occasionally slow and unresponsive. I am snatching slots of 5-15 minutes here and there to do the course. If I can’t use the forums then I’m stuffed, slot lost, in danger of falling behind.

What do we need? I still don’t think we have tackled the shambolic nature of most people’s home PCs, Internet connections, or their ability to take notes they can find again so they can start to create and synthesise knowledge into learning. I think we need to think about induction sessions and other sources of technical support in more detail and perhaps some sort of better “alarm system” when someone is having problems either in relation to technology or content that can work for larger groups.

Finally, we seem to be sailing along getting carried away with lovely ideas like peer assessment but certainly in Ireland, where sadly a lot of second level teaching is still “by rote” to pass the Leaving Cert, many people never move out of that group described in Nancy’s webinar by one participant that does the minimum to pass the assessment.

That group tends to be suspicious of new methods like peer teaching. I have experimented with most of these things and while a lot of people love them and enjoy them and start to become more self-directed through their shared and changed experiences, there is a group who consider the whole thing a conspiracy to deprive them of the marks they feel they are entitled to.

This is not in any way an invalid view. It’s what it feels like to them – that you are leading them along a risky path where they don’t understand the destination… So how can we turn that around? Resistance to pedagogies not previously experienced is something that requires extra support…

I think Sandra’s point about being concerned posting online is highly relevant. While there are people who will post that won’t contribute in f2f class, there are people who contribute f2f who really find “in writing” and specifically writing online an anxious and problematic way to learn.

[James Kerr]

Many parts of the US are also caught up in “rote” teaching practices, where competency exams and “common core” achievements are the measuring bar to which students are taught.  The luxuries and benefits of peer instruction are missing at lower levels, and most certainly in all but the affluent areas.  Peer instruction is widely used in graduate programs, and somewhat in undergraduate education.

[Author]

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