Hi – below is a rather rough comment I sent to Keith Smyth following his Webinar. I’m intrigued how to encourage my students to interact more on online. I would also like to find out more from other people how I can link them with another student community, as in an example from Keith. Similarly, I wonder how I might develop a community across the course as a whole – currently students work within each of the course units, all at varying points in the part time (some are full time) course journey. So they tend to operate in the course module silo rather than across the course as whole.
Hi Keith, I’m doing the OctEL MOOC and enjoyed your webinar. I’d appreciate your thoughts: I help run an online masters in public health, with students from around the world. I find getting participation/discussion etc difficult and most will only engage with assessed activities (wikis, discussion question) and we’ve tried various things over the year. Secondly, I like the project on communities, and am thinking now about how we can link our students to other students. I wondered why you didn’t consider using something like Facebook or Linkedln (unless you did and I missed it).
All of our students are adult learners, and I think cultural and time issues etc are likely to influence their interest and ability to take part in activities. Some struggle to get internet connection. But aside from the latter, I wonder what ideas you might have to encourage greater engagement. Of course, there is the question why do I think it is important, and yes, I can find pedagogy to support it, but overall, it is considered to be good for students and their professional development.
A bit of a disjoined post – apologies. I need to spend time looking through the work you are doing at Napier more as well as very interesting and helpful.
Hi, I'm a senior lecturer in public health, at the University of Manchester. For seven years I have been course unit leader on a fully online distance learning programme in public health/primary care. I've been designing & running course units for this, using Blackboard now. I work with other lecturers alongside a e-learning team. Having students all over the world helps give an interesting perspective to the teaching of public health and to using online learning. I am keen to learn more about pedagogical principles and development for technology enhanced learning, and how to maximise the student learning experience. More recently I have become involved in developing proposals and hopefully design and running of a MOOC. I am also interested in exploring greater use of OERs for public health and would like to pursue my research interest/hypothesis I am calling "Just In Time Learning". But with a PhD already alongside other things, my friends are trying to keep me away from more studying. I am a convert for free-education across the world, which is frustrating at times working in a university which clearly needs to bring in income too. But massive shifts have taken place with Web 2 and democratic education movements. I would like to find out if there is a local network / northern network for TEHL in higher education, and if not, perhaps we could start one.