[ScottJohnson]

Hi Carolyn,
Good idea to involve older learners. As governments hack away at education budgets there’s certainly a need for renewed participation in education from all groups in society. The internet has to potential to break the isolation many people feel and this includes the impression of no longer being needed or wanted while we are also told we “lack the resources” to have anything better than the garbage we are expected to live with.

There’s a group in the US that matches “retired” people with needed skills to projects that are short of funding. I’ll see if I can find it and post the URL here. My participation here has been limited as I’m dealing with being fired at the college where I work. On the one hand, there’s the temptation to be helpful to the organization I still have a connection to and the other is to say the hell with it.

[ScottJohnson]

I believe our college has used these questionnaires on the general student population though it’s unclear what the purpose was. No one has been turned away based on a low score (whatever that means) so my guess is the ministry requires it so we do it. Numbers? Given that management is fond of numbers using different types of fruit to indicate levels of readiness was likely passed over.

We do a lot of academic upgrading and most of it is face to face or blended. As part of the placement process a lot of personal interviews are done and this is one place where any of these questionnaires might be useful but that presumes person to person give-and-take and time spent clarifying responses, which isn’t available to our purely online students. We also have orientations added to explain computer use though it all comes in a single 1 1/2 hour session, and only once. There is also a digital literacy course online for student use–how do students know how to access it? Unknown.

Our students are from small isolated communities, ranches, farms oil extraction and logging work-sites and have limited digital access. We also have a problem with faculty being largely digitally illiterate as are the students’ parents leaving them unassisted by the most common paths to training.
Our situation is common in our area and we do get some help from the local school district. Schools’ programs are up-to-date which creates the odd problem for some of our students who find college less digitally enabled than their high school. Too bad there isn’t more training for everyone available constantly but I think it’s being held back by unfounded assumptions that all kids are computer adept so who needs it?

[ScottJohnson]

Did the questionnaires and found them useful for picking out strengths and weaknesses though I wonder if an institution in these times would turn a tuition paying student away because they weren’t ready? We’ve been working for six years trying to build a viable online system of support and training for both students and instructors and only through the convergence of some unrelated factors have we begun actually study and learn where the weak points are in preparing people for online success.

There are three battles to be considered in getting an institution ready for online delivery. First faculty has to be convinced it doesn’t threaten their job while simultaneously telling administration to stop threatening faculty with loss of their job if they don’t “get with the program.” Second is creating a student training and support system run by staff that have people skills. This leaves out the whole IT department who are best left to their machines. Third is our model where we get two service people who are excellent and back THEM up with people who can take time off their regular jobs to volunteer without telling anyone outside the shadowy world of how things are actually done in an institution.

There’s a perception among many HE institutions that online is cheaper than F2F because copies of courses need only be made once and broadcast forever. In addition, the idea of the Digital Native removes the obligation provide services as these wonderful (imaginary) students virtually teach themselves.

As a firm believer in online learning I also recognize most of our schools are not ready to serve students who can’t be seen. Regardless of the nice questionnaires, calling a help line that isn’t answered is a reality that every online student faces and no one ever speaks about what that does to the learning process.

[ScottJohnson]

Sharmina posted the following at the Mongrels site:

2. Liz mentioned that students prefer consistency across modules in terms of what’s available online – is that realistic and should students expect that and should/can we maintain this level of consistency?

Can we be sure students prefer consistency. Anything that can be turned to the advantage of the institution makes me suspicious. Consistency and orderliness are what I constantly hear from the upper level editors I prepare courses for but who’s say these people are anything more than herd thinkers or slaves to some school of homogization and sensible behaviour?

There’s a constant debate at our college over safety and comfort for our students and I think this betrays our duty to present the world as uncomfortable, inconsistent and wonderfully weird. Consistency is something you seek in manufacturing to assure reliably similar products and not something to value in human beings facing a changing world.

Maybe we should change consistency to harmless? Or “familiar” sounds comforting. Like Day-Care thinking.

My question is: do we really know what facilitates learning? In design there’s a rule about the interface not distracting form the message. You don’t make books out of bricks or runny oatmeal. Is there one universal principal of presentation for all subjects?

[ScottJohnson]

Critical thinking skills are of particular interest in the trades. Not by the instructional staff who think of themselves as defenders of dying arts but for students who will be working on ever more complex machinery and equipment. The old method of hoping the occasional trades person will rise above the pointless learning by rote are over but we need to tell the teachers that first.

[ScottJohnson]

Hi Tim and Ruth,
Didn’t mean to suggest that hallway and blogging conversations need be separate activities. My only access to education is online and discussion areas built into the course are the equivalent of in-class or hallway conversations that bring life to an otherwise empty space. Also work at a college that is falling to pieces where the tradition of top-down “command control” has left people with no resources to gather and support each other and what bloggers we have seem to live in a world to themselves where everything is fine.

[ScottJohnson]

Facebook works well for discussions and I’ve seen the threads continue for a few years. Some don’t think it has a serious enough reputation and usually end up going off to talk to themselves in more sophisticated forums:-)

[ScottJohnson]

Hi Alicia,
Glad you are back! Not sure where Rebecca has gotten off to? As it’s in my character to wander I’m over with the Mongrels and a bit with the distance education group and some folk educators though my first interest is in vocational. Part of the joy of MOOCs is jumping from conversation to conversation until you wear out and settle except that sounds like a rule, so forget I said it:-)

Our college department builds vocational courses and having worked in the trades most of my life this is a good fit for me. What I find most compelling is the potential at some point for vocational training to include elements of critical thinking, a kind of “studio thinking” (I can explain this later), diagnostics as in medical training, and an appreciation for quality workmanship found in furniture builders and jewelers. Our current project building heavy duty mechanical courses is hoping to reach out to a few of these qualities provided the whole crew doesn’t quit after finishing the first period of courses.

So, I’m still interested in forming a group around this topic–are you still in? By the way, I live in Canada so our conversations will be mostly asynchronous and I hope you are OK with that.

[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

[ScottJohnson]

Reading the Diana Laurillard essay on digital technologies cleared up some of my thoughts on technology in education though I need to clarify to myself why so much of the rush to present everything as having a technological solution leaves me cold. “…using technology to solve a specific problem, not finding the problem that technology is a solution for ” suggests a test by which you remove the person and leave only the technology. Does it still work to convey meaning?
Not sure I understand what I mean here (not uncomon for me) except that most of courses we are building at the moment seem to be going backward while being presumed to be forward thinking because it takes a computer to access them. I.E.: teaching that is unable to read student response and adapt followed by simplistic multi-choice exams read by other machines. Strange how we do everything possible to remove the human element from learning and call it progress.

[ScottJohnson]

Hi Elizabeth,
As someone who helps build online courses I suppose thinking about lectures is a betrayal of the team but I still like the determination that Eric Mazur presents in order to make the lecture form better. Even our online students have f2f labs and coop placements that include being lectured to and real-time limits on learning “events.” Some fields require quantities of information to be passed on and an optimal method needs to be discovered to facilitate that. Even, or maybe especially, online where students set their own learning time limits we need delivery strategies that sticky and not lost by the next sentence. It still could be very cool have a one-time course in understanding everything at once:-) Then the rest could be 4 years of exceptions to that rule Though I don’t think 4 years would be enough, so we are back where we started.

[ScottJohnson]

Hi Elizabeth,
I liked Eric Mazur too. Not a big fan of lectures yet he seems to be one of very few studying that delivery method to find out where improvements can be made. My concern is more along the lines of time shortage being pressed onto education as if somehow the universe was running faster these days. Mazur suggests that time is a factor in properly processing information taken in and I wonder if we can design around this by reducing content or picking global principals that fit many seemingly different questions in different fields? I often feel I studied many things so I could retain a few. Remembering 10% meant losing 90% and raising that 10 to 15% was a matter of two extra years to attain a loss rate of 85%. Maybe more time on math is suggested by this reasoning but it seems time has taken on too much importance in education.

[ScottJohnson]

Hi David,
Our instructional staff have been waiting years for training in the basics of online teaching and working in the office where we build in our VLE Moodle we spend a lot of time helping faculty as do a few of their collegues. The problem is professional development is a mix of many missing pieces and an expectation that after a long day in class teachers will be eager to learn new skills taught by sales staff from a software manufacturer in their spare time. There’s just something about being told how to do your job by someone who has no clue what you do (and can’t teach either) that puts professionals off–hard to imagine as that might be. 
Our new director of teaching has some great ideas about focusing on teaching and learning and then filling in with the technical stuff that would best present what each  individual teacher feels will serve their students best. Unfortunately our trainer is off on indefinite sick leave, her back-up has no training in online delivery herself and won’t begin until this July as part-time trainer, and our online development office staff  has all either been recently fired or are quitting.
There’s free training available through Oxford Brooks coming up call First Steps… and every year Mira Costa College in California does a free online course called Pedagogy First that you might like. MOOCs like this one are a good way to learn how to navigate through chaos but since my first one it seems the polite thing to do to provide some direction. Those of us who naturally ignore direction won’t even notice anyway:-)

[ScottJohnson]

Hi Jennie,
Yes there is something to be said about having documentation of one’s brilliance recorded for posterity on a blog and I do have a blog (and await brilliance). On the other hand the spirit of distributed’ness appeals to my nature. What fires my imagination seems to be that part of my brain that thrives on reading and responding and I wonder if that has to do with my art training in the sense that a portion of myself is reserved for contact with the stimulus  provided by others? Responding seems like a “real world” activity and not confined strictly to imagination–I think:-)
A devoted introvert may find blogging useful, some people think better in the format and there are people who seem to be audience orientated to do their best work. There are some really great bloggers out there in this category. Maybe the point is to stay engaged  however it happens?
 

[ScottJohnson]

Hi David, regardless of theory I find the net to be a physical extension of the “real” world accessable through my keyboard. As a place in my mind resembling the early William Gibson cyberspace cities, distractions abound and a significant amount of learning happens by wandering down the “wrong” path or chasing something of immediate interest. Maybe it would be better to be deliberate but why not let the jumble and messiness let you be drawn wherever you please? Could it be we need new strategies for navigating in a changing world? Yes.

[Author]

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