[imogenbertin]

They all did it in the end (and some were excellent) but a lot of cajoling was required in a few cases… Most teachers are used to writing most days for a public audience. Many learners, particularly mature learners returning to education, are not. They can find the process confusing, painful and uncomfortable at first. I designed the course with low-stakes small posts of one or two paragraphs to start with (initially only visible to the tutor) and ending up with a full public “eportfolio” aimed at future employers. We should remember when designing blog assignments that we are unusual as a group in the amount of public writing that we do and our familiarity with drafting and publishing generally…

By the way your blog looks lovely, Helen and is very interesting – I’m sure we’ll probably cross paths face to face via NUIG/CELT or ILTA one of these days…

[imogenbertin]

Post the webinar recordings faster Rachel. I still can’t finally complete the course because the webinar you are mentioning is not available to view as a recording… and I want that input (what others said in the webinar) before making my feedback and evaluation.

This has frustrated me throughout the course as I try to carve out time and then can’t use the timeslot because no recording available. But I absolutely appreciate the incredible hard work of the volunteer team so I’m not giving out, I’m just saying it is important to post the recordings fast otherwise the feeling of “cohort” is lost because everyone’s not considering/posting on the same issues a the same time.

More info when I’ve seen it… 🙂

Imogen

[imogenbertin]

Bookmarked! Thanks Roger.

[imogenbertin]

Hi Marcus

I got that URL to work by taking the /edit off the end…

I’ve never heard people using the term d-learning at all but I remember your linking that piece about the Lunar Society on this forum before!

To me discussion has two basic functions: to bring in other perspectives and paths, and to provide sufficient peer pressure to keep learners motivated to complete! Perhaps that is harsh but my experience of distance learning whether e or not is that I need the feeling of  other people being on the same path to keep me going too, even when the topics are of great interest to me, such as TEL.

Best wishes Imogen

[imogenbertin]

Hi Roger

A former colleague of mine, Dr Catherine O’Mahony, did some great work on “what’s wanted” ie graduate competences in Ireland back in 2009: http://www.nairtl.ie/documents/GradCompetencesReport.pdf

That HETL group on LInkedIn is great – lots of interesting ideas and discussions and a great international perspective due to the global membership.

I hope Martin Hawksey’s going to develop a “slightly more x-” MOOC on Learning Analyticsas his next ALT project… that would be fantastic!

Best, Imogen

[imogenbertin]

Thanks for the comment Roger!

I think there is quite a lot of research on what employers are looking for and funnily enough what’s wanted generally ties in with what academics and students also want. The problem is how we are doing the assessment/credentialling aspect. (Example:  the teamwork/groupwork debate currently running on the HETL group on LinkedIn – we all want teamwork but the way education does it is through immensely unpopular groupwork activities that most students find scarring and unfair and that we could design better – http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=2774663&item=246517602&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_pd-ttl-cn&ut=3uxRsLB4SnFlM1).

I haven’t had time to reach out to friends and colleagues working in the learning and development end of HR to find out what’s happening there at the moment…

Six Sigma – that IT Sligo course also covers the basics of LEAN too. I think revising the basic statistics involved is also great preparation for acquiring Learning Analytics skills – though I’ve failed to complete George Siemens’ LA MOOCs twice… 🙁 they are  too cMOOC for me as I can’t find the basic knowledge element to sense-make…

[imogenbertin]

David thanks for the response. LEAN is hard to figure out to start with, but in the end it IS about keeping what the customer/learner finds valuable and removing waste from what they don’t find valuable. So if we believe they want that agility and negotiation, then what you are doing is “leaning” out the boring bits they don’t want.

I understand your not wanting to use jargon that may seem counter to natural language. I entirely agree! I just had this jarring feeling about the use of the word agility in the context that you used it… because it can mean something different in a bean counting context.

In modern supply chains customers (or in our case learners) do negotiate their product, their price, their timescale, their outcome. And the supplier has to respond. There’s actually a whole branch of (mostly not very well written) supply chain literature about the bidirectional nature of the process in services such as health and education whether the customer is “transformed” by the service supplied. I do agree about transformative/transactional effect of the process of education – which definitely adds a layer of complexity.

Some educational courses are innovative products, and some functional. It depends on the teaching, the learner’s relationship with the institution and the degree of negotiability. The approach you are pushing back against is the standard supply chain management response where a functional product is involved.

I will précis my waffle above. I think the sort of courses we are starting to want to develop with TEL are innovative products rather than functional, and that they are probably unsustainable economically without changes that allow mass customisation. The main stumbling block is how you credential/formally assess such a course.

Damn. I should have titled this post “The appification of edification.” It would have got more views…

[imogenbertin]

Niall, what options would you think should be given on the five point scale here? Would it be “not at all” to “all the time” or “never” to “often”?

Sorry for late reply… 🙂

[imogenbertin]

That sounds super! I have thought about doing this but never quite got over the hump of what happens politically/institutionally if the picture the students decide to present proves controversial.

The JISC website I found that was really helpful with thinking about the patchwork bit was: http://dpta.wordpress.com/

[imogenbertin]

I couldn’t get that link to work, Niall – but the same report appears to be here: http://sxills.nl/lerenlerennu/bronnen/Learning%20styles%20by%20Coffield%20e.a..pdf

 

Thanks for posting it.

Imogen

[imogenbertin]

Great post! I should have written that!

 

I love YouTube private links and I use them for video feedback too. The Firefox add-on downloadhelper is also great for downloading YouTube videos to your computer so that you can view offline in the real world where the Internet is never “always-on”.

 

However one caveat – the automatic subtitling still isn’t that great in terms of accuracy. What is *really* clever is that if you have a transcript of the video, then YouTube will match it brilliantly to the soundtrack. And uploading the transcript (if it’s a video you want public) means it becomes easier to find through Google and other search engines.

 

 

[imogenbertin]

Agree with all of this but most particularly Martin’s comment about the usefulness of a 5 minute limit… It’s a fantastic discipline for making sure that you stay on topic. And if it’s not enough… think about your material and produce another 5 min block/video/screencast of learning with different objectives/assessment… I found this out when I used Jing, but as a result of this thread, next time I shall try Screencastomatic…

[imogenbertin]

Good point Niall!

I work in technical support and I would say this is the vital missing link for a lot of people and one reason that blended learning generally gets better results than pure eLearning though I haven’t read enough of the methodology behind the main studies in that area to know if I’m correct there.

Does anyone know any way of making webinar recordings from Connect or Collaborate available without the use of Java? (Can they be uploaded to a private link on YouTube?)

I cannot view the webinar recordings from work which causes me major problems trying to do even the minimum on this course. I know from my work that the constant security issues and updates to Java are extremely frustrating for people too.

I think we really underestimate the basics – password problems, outdated browsers, Flash, people not backing up work and losing it – when we’re getting high falutin’ about eg online peer assessment.

I was disappointed to read somewhere during this course that one UK college had tried what I’ve always wondered might help – “we visit you” tech support for lecturers trying to use TEL and that it hadn’t taken off. My version of that was called “barefoot tech doctor” but I never managed to get enough support to try it. So then I did it freelance for people who were interested…

How to get the technical side of learner induction working online is definitely a big challenge…

[imogenbertin]

I have used wordpress portfolios for assessment, and was concerned about whether, in relation to visual design tasks, there was an element that was less than fair to students who had stronger graphical than verbal/written skills. I tried to design tasks to avoid this but I think blogs can be extremely difficult for those who find writing hard.

If you are the admin of the WordPress site, I think there is a way around the public private issue. First of all, create the blogs as “multisite” (ie a group of “child” blogs belonging to a specific site). Second, don’t put them online in public view (visibility option) during the “formative” phase. Include the comments, record them as needed for your exam process if required. Then let the students decide which comments if any they want to be visible, then make the blogs public on a pre-arranged date.

[imogenbertin]

And I have given up trying to sort out the beastly formatting on this forum. Life is just too short. Sorry.

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