[Roger Harrison]

Hi Kulari, thanks for such an interesting reply and your experience and examples were great to read. We provide our students with a CD or others can download everything themselves, which helps those with intermittent contact. In fact we find that many of our students seem to prefer to download the materials and just go online for discussion boards, or to access links to online resources. We have considered in the past providing students in remote areas with mobile phones but we could never get the funding for that and to fund the course for them aswell which is a problem for students more generally now as well.

So we have some common experiences too. Can you tell me a bit more about the work with the Ugandan students and how that is going? We’ve had some scholarship students in Uganda and my colleague went over and did a few days tutorials with them but I always said it would be better in future to do over the internet. But we’ve always thought the internet connection to be unpredictable based on what we were told – what’s your experience been for that?

 

regards

Roger

 

[Roger Harrison]

Hello, sounds like an interesting space. I’m a senior lecturer in public health at University of Manchester. I teach on a fully online distance learning programme in public health and primary care. I’ve been involved with this for about seven years now, having come from a public health research background in the NHS. We’ve been developing the masters programme in public health over ten years now, and I’ve been teaching on it for seven. One of the challenges we have is that it is an international course, with connectivity issues we need to be mindful of. And also most students are also working so there are challenges about getting good discussion activity online and also the extent we move towards more synchronous working.

I’m also keen to find out more about OERs and how these can be filtered and grouped across various OER providers to then provide a summary of relevant information that is out their for public health – this could be an open portal for the public and for professionals.

regards

Roger

 

[Roger Harrison]

Hi Ali, I’m in the process of starting a blog, so a first for me. I can’t work out some of the page settings yet and seem to have a blank in the middle of the front page which I pressume is to get a picture in. I’ll play with it and this is a learning opportunity I suppose. Do you know how the blogs then get fed into the Forum space on here for people’s blogs and twitter?

http://octelrogerharrison.wordpress.com/

 

regards

 

Roger

 

[Roger Harrison]

Hi Kulari, sounds like you’ve got a lot of experience across a range of institutions/organisations and settings. I’m keen to find out more about how online can be used for education in developing countries, especially as my background/current main work is in public health. Whilst teaching on a masters in public health with a fully online distance learning course, I know that students find access to the www a problem, and these are the ones who have been able to sign up for our course. I’m more interested now in finding out how we can get the skills development out to people in other areas perhaps in more need, but who have no or little internet connection.

I’ve never used Google tools much – I’ve done one or two google hangouts with webinars in America but the connection was intermittent at times, and I know my colleagues are not big fans. But the idea of group working through the cloud etc brings possibilities for students so would be good to learn more.

 

regards

 

Roger

 

[Roger Harrison]

Hi Kate, nice to hear from you and about your interests. Well that makes two of us now so perhaps this is officially a group for OlTEC MOOC. I didn’t know anything about David Livingstone and it’s amazing that his diaries etc are now available on the internet. I don’t understand anything about spectral imaging though!

I’ve certainly had plenty of moments (days!) when I’ve been fighting with the technology. But the pace of change is so fast and so much to try and keep up to date with. What happened to when all I needed was a basic understanding of MS-DOS.

What do you mean by a ‘patron driven template’? and by JIT do you mean ‘just in time’?

So do we need to go and look at the questions set for Week O and share some of our ideas/answers in this subgroup here then?

Have you done a MOOC before? I’ve done a couple but dropped out very early so hope to stick with this one. I get frustrated at the different ways of communicating on them as so used to a structured course whereas MOOCs are more sort of organic.

regards

Roger

 

[Roger Harrison]

Hello, my name is Roger and I’m a senior lecturer in public health, teaching on a fully online distance learning programme in public health and primary care (MPH). I’ve been a course unit leader and tutor on the MPH for about 7 years now. I really enjoy working the opportunity of teaching students all over the world, with our international student base bringing a real flavour to the challenge of public health. I’ve written three new course units, and at UoM we have to use Blackboard as the LMS/VLE.  Most of our students on the course are part time, and usually already working in a professional capacity in public health. The international context and that many area working, brings in a number of factors to consider in terms of access, connectivity, and synchronous versus asynchronous learning.

Recently I’ve started to become more interested in some of the course design aspects, pedagogy and technical considerations and possibilities. My research career in public health was very much focused on quantitative research and randomised controlled trials and wonder if some day I’ll be doing an RCT of a MOOC or some other aspects.

In fact I’m hoping to be involved in designing and running a MOOC so this OcTEL is a great opportunity to learn from. I’m also interested in finding out more about Open Education Resources – I think this present some real opportunities for supporting professional development and learning amongst public health professionals (and of course all sorts of professional groups and public). I tend to have a lot of ideas but following through with them is tricky as still new to much of this and just starting to get on my feet really. In the back of my mind I have a potential area for research which is looking at developing web opportunities for ” in time learning”, a phrase I’ve coined which is more of an assertive and planned approach to learning, albeit at the time of need, compared with just in time learning, which has a sense of panic and risk about it. I’m also developing a few ideas about trying to set up like an information portal/social learning platform, naybe using NIng? focused for public health people. Personally I love using Facebook for sharing information and think this could be a good way to support courses and a little surprised that this isn’t been used here on OcTEL.

Not sure if I’m answering any of the questions here, sorry! To try and put some perspective then to OcTEL course: It’s not uncommon for people to say that it is important that we don’t use the technology to determine how we design education/teaching etc and that we need to start by asking, what is it that we want to do. I partly agree with this, but I think back to what the inventors of the motor car must have thought – I doubt they’d have thought, “how do we get people’s shopping delivered to their home?” and then thought, I know, lets invent the van. To me, I think the development of future education strategies need to be more organic and itteratie and interactive. At times it might be the educational need starting as the question and then the technology providing a solution. At other times it might, hey, look at Diigo, perhaps we could use this as part of a learning experience for our students, or Wikis, I wonder if we could use these to help foster some group working amongst our class.

So I suppose in terms of the Big Questions, it’s about what influences what. I’m also interested in following the recent explosion in open online learning and open educational resources etc to see what and how universities are going to respond, with what and how. After all, they do need to make an income to pay their staff like me. And finally, another big question is about how we ensure that we do not disenfranchise people more by relying on technology, when some individuals and some countries/areas, have poor if any internet connections.

Enough said!

thanks for reading if you did,

Roger Harrison

 

 

 

[Roger Harrison]

Is there anywhere on here where we can create a Wiki to put this thread into and we can then edit it as we go along. A great idea though!

 

[Author]

Posts