What makes a great self-paced online learning course?

To me, any kind of learning is about the interactivity that you are able to integrate into it. In traditional classrooms, there is a very strong teacher-student level of interaction and in the more modern face-to-face classrooms which follow the constructivist approach, the level of student-student interaction is high, along with continuing to have a great deal of teacher-student contact time. Although, in my mind, the level of student interaction with the content is not that great.
Because of the reduced role of teacher or student presence in a self-paced classroom, we need to find a way to increase interaction, but how can we do that? One way is to increase the interactivity of the material. Now, this doesn't mean that you need to go out and create the flashiest of flash apps, but it does mean that you need to 'chunk' your material and intersperse it with reflection questions, small quizzes and include some types of multi-media, whether it's youtube videos or .jpg images, and include many others. There will still be some types of traditional learning in the form of readings etc., but for the most part, students will increase their level of interaction with the material by taking it in in a different fashion than in days past. Whereas before they were listening to lengthy lectures, now they will be answering questions on their own and working content in an entirely new way, but on their own and creating their own meaning through that.

Now, self-paced learning doesn't need to completely erase all form of teacher-student and student-student interaction. Modern technology has helped us connect with peers and instructors in new and exciting ways with social media. There are many ways to work together, whether they are through private discussion forums on an LMS or over publicly available platforms such as twitter and facebook. Having this kind of network allows you to pose questions at large and get feedback or you can search for questions that have been posed by others in your situation and see how it was handled in the past and you can decide whether it would be relevant to your or not.

So, with a title like the one I provided, I'll bet you came here looking for a definite answer, but you won't get that here. It really depends on what the learning outcomes are for the course and who the audience is. Different strokes for different folks is one way to put it.

Is any one particular way you like to interact with your self-paced online courses? Do you find most courses you do boring and have some ideas for how to jazz them up a little? Let me know in the comments section.

Developing a workshop training course for university students in Moodle

After being with Carleton for nearly a month, I've just been given my first Instructional Design related project. Thus far, I've been mainly dealing with helping instructors with the Moodle courses and looking at other training option for getting everyone transferred over from the old WebCT system. While those were challenging in their own right, I'm pretty excited about this opportunity that I've been given.

What I've been asked to do is to develop a workshop type of independent study course that will help students succeed in their studies. There is current training currently being offered F2F, but putting the information online will be a first for this department. They are looking to start with just one workshop, but over time there are at least five different workshops that will be going online.

I met with the subject-matter expert this morning briefly to outline the capabilities and limitations of Moodle and to discuss what her expectations are for the workshop. She gave me a pretty good picture of what she is looking for. I gave her a few questions to think about so that we can create strong learning objectives and expected outcomes and we'll meet again next week to discuss further.

I've done some reading and I'm trying to decide what the best strategy to take for this type of course could be. I looked at problem-based learning to allow students to work through some issues and transfer the knowledge gained to the problem, however, this will be an independent course and I could see that it may be difficult to manage without more instructor support. I also looked at cognitive strategy instruction, and while this does seem to be a good fit for it, it may pose a challenge for first-year students who aren't really cognitively aware of when they should put these strategies into place.

I'll follow up with further posts as we move along in the process, but if anybody has any insight they wish to share, please provide them in the comments section below.

So in a twist of fate and good fortune, I have managed to find myself in a new position outside of the ESL industry. Last month I accepted a position with Carleton University as an Educational Technology Consultant. Now, I know with my education, this sounds like a perfect fit, but I've never really viewed myself as a pure techie, but then I realized, hey, I know this stuff. Sure there are some things that are somewhat over my head, but so far, I've been able to find solutions to everything that I've been working on.

Some of the bigger problems I face revolve around the Moodle grade book. There are certain problems with the way that it is scored that cause issues. Perhaps it's just the system that the profs here use, but often the letter grades in the system don't match up with the scale that has been in use. I would suggest not using that scale, but it's very important to some people, so I need to find a way around it. Thus far, I've come up with simply adjusting the University's official percentage breakdowns in individual courses, but this won't be a long term solution for so many classes.

One of my colleagues who is much more of a techie than me and mathematically inclined has been working on a more accurate formula that can simply be plugged in, but we'll see how well it works over time.

Other than the gradebook, I've been working on developing Moodle (cuLearn) training, as well as taking the lead on software integration, such as project management software (activeCollab) and community feedback software (useResponse). Developing training and other methods to integrate software isn't completely new to me, but it is a new approach to training that I'm not really used to. Also, I'll be training some staff who are quite comfortable with technology, so I'm hoping that will make the transition easier.

Finally, one of my more 'big picture' projects involves trying to develop new ways to evaluate the effectiveness of our department. For this I've been looking more on the theoretical side of things, such as Kirkpatrick's 4 skills and Diffusion of Innovation theory.

At any rate, wish me luck as I embark on this adventure and new career path.

My first education blog post!

Hi everyone, welcome to my very blog post focused on my interest in education and technology, particularly in the area of English Language Learners. I plan on exploring the many different uses of technology that are available. In my current role as Academic Coordinator at my language school, we are working to implement a distance learning element to our school so students from around the world can take part in our language training. While this is a big part of my focus, we still have regular classes taking place in which I would love to motivate and encourage our teachers to introduce more technology in the classrooms.

First up, I want to tell you a thing or two about what I'm doing right now with my work. Perhaps I can get some advice on how to deal with some of the difficulties that I'm facing. Maybe I'll just work out the problems on my own as I'm typing. Who knows, but I just want to share my experiences and hopefully we can all learn from each other.

Currently, I'm trying to get an online placement test up and running so that our students will be able to have their tests logged and scored almost instantaneously. Of course the written part will have to be graded, but the rest can be given as feedback almost right away. I would like to use moodle as a simple way to get things up and running because I'm familiar with their quiz function. The problem is that there are currently two factions within our school having difficulty deciding on what platform to use; Blackboard or Moodle. In my opinion moodle acts as a better LMS, but there are internal politics to consider. Question: Does anybody know of a quiz/test creation software that would be compliant with both platforms? I've looked at a few different ones, such as Hot Potato and Articulate, but I was wondering which one would be best for me to easily adapt to either LMS.

Thanks for reading and I expect to be writing more soon.