Small group for distance learning

[KimLesley]

Hi Andy

I think the group will get as large as those that feel they have a home here.  Over time it will develop into a more cohesive community.  I think this a one way of coping wiht the sheer scale of MOOCs, by joining a couple of smaller groups of interest and sticking with them.  We can still discuss the course material but hopefully we will develop a group identity as well. There seems to be a wide range of experiences here for us to draw upon.

[Andy Turner]

re: (http://octel.alt.ac.uk/forums/topic/small-group-for-distance-learning/page/6/#reply-1656) Thank Kim 🙂 Seems we reached a limit on the number of post replies.

[KimLesley]

Hi Andy- I think how these forums work is that there’s only two levels – parent and child so you can’t reply to a reply in other words.  You have to add you reply to the parent and it will come at the end of that string.  It’s a very basic forum format.

[KimLesley]

sorry  – three levels.  Oops.  Then go back to the previous level.  This does make it quite difficult to follow a discussion doesn’t it.

[rldly]

I think this is the level as which I work with academic staff – doing simple things to try and change course material.  Instead of recording a 1 hour lecture to be posted in Blackboard; divide the content into short ‘topic’ chunks; record a series of shorter presentations interspersed with learning activities e.g. pause recording to review a section of an article relevant to the topic being discussed; consider a question which is returned to in the next recording; watch a relevant YouTube video;  answer a couple of formative mcq’s.

[rldly]

I posted intro and big question earlier in this forum.  Have had a manic week and never got back to my small group reflection.  Have been trying to catch up on reading and writing this morning so here goes….

Activity 2
What characteristics do you think the participants in this course have in common?
In what ways might they be different or atypical of other groups of learners that might be important or relevant to you?

Curiosity about TEL
Interest
Motivation

Differences:   I like the idea of a MOOC for a professional learning network but do not have a great deal of interest exploring conceptual basis of MOOCs as not relevant to my current professional working context.  I guess I am operating at a more mundane level, trying to integrate/embed technology and the opportunities it can offer within everyday teaching practice.  A bit more about this below.

Activity 3 forms of communication – jiscmail; twitter; blog
What forms of reflection, challenge and learning do each of these do best?
How do they support relationship forming and community building? Is that important for learning?  Which do you prefer and why?

Twitter – very difficult to compose short phrases that accurately encompass thoughts; positives = informal; freedom to be yourself; randomness can generate something very useful.  Also it is so easy to keep up to date on what is going on by following fellow professionals – my preferred MOOC is twitter – confused now:(
Blog:  reflective; makes you think; also can be informal; takes time to compose (for me)
JISCmail: more like email most common form of communication for me.  I am most comfortable with what I use most frequently – familiarity and ease of use (rules in Outlook keep it organised) are main reasons.

Activity 4
Interesting examples of TEL – see online resources

Activity 5 Small group reflection: (Apologies not small group – just mine; will try harder next time)

There is a very wide range of experience amongst participants – primarily appears to be academics/academic developers looking for ideas, support, information around TEL.  I am already familiar with a lot of the resources referenced in Activity 4 and think newcomers might be a bit overwhelmed by the scale of the resources provided as there is a lot reading and new ideas to grapple with, even though of course no-one has to do it.

What challenges does this present for the course?

Challenges for the MOOC are that perhaps people who are at different stages in terms of immersion/engagement with TEL might lose interest and drop out if they are not getting stimulated by the ideas/information/challenges they are finding in ocTEL.  Figuring out how to let some of the communciations just go by is also a challenge as there can be a tendency to try and cover everything thus drowning slowly in information.

In what ways is a MOOC well or poorly suited to these challenges?

I just attended the ocTEL webinar.  I was surprised to find the  focus on concept of MOOCs and opportunities for scalability through innovation in learning design.  I am always wary of TEL being automatically linked by default to online learning, and recently nearly always to MOOCs.  Seems every meeting or discussion I have about TEL these days always ends up being about MOOCs and that is not something that I have any great concern with because it isn’t relevant to my professional context just now.  For example.  I am interested in using technology to explore alternative forms of assessment rather than yet another 3000 word written assignment.  We have about 50 flip cameras available in the School which are basic = simple to use and pretty old technology now, but still working!  We use them very regularly for group assessments with a variety of process and product assessments and the students love it from undergrad to graduate level.  Nothing to do with online and nothing to do with a MOOC but to me the essence of what I should be doing – appropriately applying technology to transform teaching and learning.  It is all fairly simple but at my level has had a very positive impact.

So why am I here in a MOOC ?  Because I need to connect with other people; explore professional experience from other perspectives, engage with and in a community of learning to explore alternative methods and process where technology is appropriately applied to transform teaching and learning.

My previous experience of a MOOC was interesting but not good from a number of perspectives.  It was a lonely online learning space; brief recorded lectures; small number of mcq’s and difficult, long weekly assessments.  The discussion boards were quite intimidating with the amount of negativity and general brusqueness in forum posts  – lots of negative comments about support (or lack of), difficulty following threads,  interspersed with demands for answers to questions.  The tutor support also seemed disconnected in that frequently what was posted did not seem to respond to any particular issue/concern/question.  I did not get any sense of connected learning (although a number of students frequently posted as close to a solution to weekly assignments as they could before the posts were removed by moderators)  or working together to solve problems. I felt there were huge gaps in what I was learning.  I could complete a piece of programming code and get it to work and get full marks.  But I did not really understand the logic behind what I was doing, it was a mechanical exercise and there was nowhere to go to get the kind of answer i needed due to the nature of the communication in the forums.  It was a bit intimidating so I dropped out thinking life was too short for that level of stress in a voluntary activity.

I did find it very interesting reading posts in that MOOC and trying to understand how and why people were responding in this way to a free online course that they had voluntarily engaged with.  I never figured out the answer but I could see elements of the same kind of tensions rising for a while during the first week of this MOOC.  It does seem to have settled now and I am enjoying reading the daily digests and already looking forward to next week.

Sorry this post is soooooo long.  Will really try and get organised next time for a proper group reflection.

[GraphDesProject]

Ridly, I agree with a lot of what you have said, esp TEL and MOOCS being automatically linked these days. My specific interest in TEL is blogging in [design] education and how this can be best practice (or poss not). I did my first MOOC earlier this year and found it very chaotic and the advice to cherry pick was helpful but went against my old-fashioned educator ethics!! But the difference with that one (it was OLDS MOOC, if anyone cares) was that all the materials were already available and I went on ahead and got motivated when there was a hiatus (like there is in ocTEL now).  I got ill and dropped out…..no-one noticed, of course!! But that too went against my habits as an educator. However, I have got more motivated and have signed up for two Coursera arty MOOCs later in the year so I can compare for myself these free, connectivist and “proper” MOOCs to the [almost commercial and] content-led ones…they look really interesting! But my main question is how and when will MOOCs be recognised by employers and industry. At the moment they seemn to be for CPD or fun and I can’t understand how they can help all these global students get jobs when employers cannot yet judge the worth of the MOOCs they have done, or even know whatthey are!¬ Will look forward to later reading what Bill Clinton had to say about that.

I have enjoyed the connectivism of this ocTEL so far and have really tried to Tweet, follow links and leads and get into discussions…some of which are now taking place outside of ocTEL instead with other people. But next week Easter vacation is over, so we’ll see how it goes then!

[Stella Austin]

Hi everyone, I am a late joiner to the course but have read through the postings and find them interesting. I have experience as both a student and a teacher of online learning. I think the biggest barrier for me as a student was trying to keep up with all the postings and you do have to have to decide what you will and won’t follow otherwise you become overwhelemd and then lose the will to live…. I currently work for an organisation that delivers a range of courses on line although my specialism is ITT. In addition to the learning platefom we run realtime webinar sessions which are interactive. I have a particular interest in finding out what the effect of motivation and procrastination is on learning using TEL.

Regards Stella

[ScottJohnson]

I’m late in on this discussion too:-) Been able to read a few of the postings here and am attracted to notion of  “distance learning” as a way of avoiding all the hype over e-learning which includes an endless array of gadgets and programs that flow so fast no one could possibly say with certainty that they enhance anything beyond sales figures for their producers.

As a long time MOOC participant and someone living in a remote location distance is really the only education available. That shouldn’t be the case as I actually work at a small college building online trades courses but the fact is quality courses are few and far between and the institution here builds courses but only as copies of already existing f2f material. We try and do what we can to improve the classes though with constant budget cuts and no administration support in the end up with mostly junk.

I believe it’s time to give up on change emerging from within the educational  industry and start working at the fringe. MOOCs may be the place this will happen. Here I’m thinking of connectivist style open MOOCs and not the commercial ones.

My side project is developing strategies for training heavy truck mechanics online that actually connects with their tactile sensibilities. We have worked on power engineering plant operation courses for the petroleum industry and they are simply used to pass certification tests and have nothing to do with learning. As a note, our power engineer students were given laptops loaded with math writing programs and auto cad capable and they all asked to have them replaced with stylus type drawing tablets. These are people who think with their brains distributed throughout their bodies and confining them to their head brains through the intermediary abstraction of the keystroke to character to screen display was as useful as digital finger-painting is to a kid.

[Diane Hockridge]

Hi all,

I’d like to join this group.  I work as the distance and online education coordinator for a theological education institution in Sydney Australia (Sydney College of Divinity).  My role includes helping our colleges and lecturers to develop and teach effective distance and online courses for our students.  Many of our courses are offered wholly or partly by distance, usually using online technologies, but sometimes using print-based materials where online technologies are not feasible.

I am particularly interested in exploring further how to equip teachers to develop good online courses that actually engage our students and help them to develop the kinds of skills they need for their future professions.  This can be challenging when you are preparing students for people-focussed work and don’t have face-to-face teaching/learning time with them.

Look forward to discussing some of the ideas in this course with you all.

[Stuart Allan]

Apologies if this has been covered already, but I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on the week 0 webinar.

I work on a distance-learning programme in higher education that has 11,000 active students, with a relatively small faculty and support team, so I was interested to hear Diana’s comment that ‘it’s not higher education if you’re not providing support … nurturing and advising’. Is this really the case?

She also talked about using peer assessment or machine grading to increase the scalability of online courses.  Does anyone have experience of this?

Instinctively I’d say that peer learning definitely has a place, but that this is more appropriate to supporting / nurturing than to assessment. What do you think?

[LauraMcLoughlin]

Hi Stuart,

I must say I agree with the statement on providing support and advice. Not so sure about peer and machine assessment, I’d love to hear more. Peer assessment in particular. When I used it, either in class or online, students were reluctant to be too critical but maybe I didn’t introduce it properly, so I’d like to hear positive experiences and how it was done.

As for machine assessment, it has limited applications in my own field (foreign languages), useful for right/wrong kind of answers, traditional grammar drills, but anything else has to be done manually!

I use discussion boards a lot in online courses, I find assessing these very time consuming and difficult too. I would be interested in suggestions.

 

 

[ScottJohnson]

Hi Diane,
I found this organization and the course on Mentoring very useful in helping with course editing and adding a “human” element to content that feels cold and inpersonal: http://evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/61740347/2013Mentoring This course is over but more are on the way.
Scott

[DavidGreeff]

A bit late, apologies, but I would also like to join the group.

I am totally new to TEL, responsible for helping a Theological College move into the e-learning/blended learning environment. Look forward to learning!

[Stuart Allan]

Thanks @LauraMcLoughlin, that’s really interesting to hear. I agree that machine assessment sounds risky. On our course website students can sit multiple-choice questions and get automated answer feedback; they can also sit essay or case study questions, then compare their answer plan to the examiner’s perfect answer and self-rate against it. (I wonder how honest they are in their self-assessment though!)

I should have said that a lot of our students take up the option of studying via an accredited local centre, so clearly the need for support is there. I’m wondering if there’s anything out there that can help our students who learn via ‘pure’ distance learning though (i.e. without the support of a local centre).

Hopefully the course and this small group will give me some ideas! Thanks again for posting.

[Author]

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