This is an archive of the 2013 version of ocTEL.

#ocTEL Re: Understanding Learners’ Needs: Activity 2.1

Hi, I appreciate it can be frustrating to try and understand the learning experience from the perspective of the student. I have many years experience too, meeting students who enrol for an online distance learning course. Our students have varying levels of ICT or digital literacy skills. This can make one question why they have then decided to enrol on an online course. About a third of our students are based overseas - some of these students have extremely limited broadband activity at home, or none at all. They have to use a local internet café, and even when using [...]

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.