Imagine you were running a pretty traditional formal course composed of face-to-face classroom sessions, backed up by handouts or reference books. Chances are that you are using the classroom elements to enthuse students about the topics covered by the course, to explain key ideas with the benefit of visual aids and interactive exercises, to stimulate discussion and provide opportunities for working with the new ideas. The complete body of content is most likely covered more formally in the handouts and other reference materials.
So, let's now imagine you want to convert this course into a predominantly self-paced e-learning format. Should you now set about creating interactive tutorials that cover all the elements of the existing course, handouts and all? I don't think so. Interactive tutorials can be really effective for doing what you previously did in the classroom - bringing the subject to life, helping the learner to understand complex new ideas and test these out in realistic scenarios - but do you really want to package up all that reference material in an interactive, multimedia format? My recommendation is not to go there. Some learning material requires quiet reflection and note-taking. A text document, video or podcast is much better suited to this task than a tutorial and, assuming it isn't already available as a web resource, is much easier to put together.
Of course, if you want to more than match the traditional classroom experience, you'll probably also include forums, live online sessions and individual or group assignments. Try and accomplish all this as highly-structured e-learning modules and you'll be taking a step backwards, not reshaping the future.
Thanks to my fellow participants at the Second European Articulate Conference in Leeds this morning, for helping me to clarify these ideas.
A topic to embrace:
ReplyDeleteAAs a current doctoral student and experienced adjunct instructor who transitioned from the traditional teaching and learning setting of higher education to a higher education online setting, I must say that I have been intrigued by what technology has to offer to online learning. While I will agree that e-learning modules “should not" replace all elements of traditional learning, it has been my experience as a student and instructor that e-learning modules capture the essence of "Differentiated Instruction." Another positive is: what e-learning does for an instructor in the online learning setting is decrease the foot-work that goes into planning a course. The courses are pre-planned-course-shells which allows more opportunity for engagement in the teaching and learning process. Perhaps for those who just cannot embrace the idea of "highly-structured e-learning modules," blended courses (those that include e-learning and face-to-face elements of learning) would be more appropriate.
MiaT