Learning from Reflections - Issues in Building Quality Online...
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Saved by 6 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2009-04-18
- Dedmunds on 2009-07-11 - Tags onlinelearning
- Sachauncey on 2009-07-07 - Tags E-Learning , instructional_design
- Mguhlin on 2009-07-05 - Tags OnlineLearning , research-onlinelearning
- Edcccdean on 2009-06-15 - Tags NUTN
- Kdb163 on 2009-04-18 - Tags elearning , elearning_articles , quality
Public Sticky notes
"It takes both technical
competence and effective pedagogy to teach in an e-learning environment"
(Southern Regional Education Board, 2001, p. 2). In addition, an instructor's
attitude, motivation, and true commitment toward instruction delivery via
distance education programs affects much of the quality of instruction. An
instructor's approach to instruction will depend upon whether he/she views
the e-learning environment as one in which technology is used to replicate
traditional pedagogical methods or to improve instruction (Valentine, 2002).
Highlighted by mguhlin
Reading the literature
(e.g., Collison, Elbaum, Haavind, & Tinker, 2000; Palloff & Pratt,
2001; Salmon, 2000) about the online learning environment is a first step
in becoming an online teacher.
Highlighted by mguhlin
Courses should feature strong professor-student and
student-student interactions, in-depth engagement with course materials, and
faculty/student technical support. Evidence of academic maturity, such as
critical thinking and synthesis of knowledge areas, is prese
Highlighted by mguhlin
"Good
online teaching encourages student-faculty contact, cooperation among students,
active learning, provides prompt feedback, communicates high expectations,
and respects diverse talents and learning styles."
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"Online
students must take responsibility for their own learning …Success
can be measured by their commitment, ability to write well, and to manage
their time. They need to recognize that an online course is not easier than
a face-to-face course."
Highlighted by mguhlin
The success of an online course is affected by
its pedagogical richness, which is the degree to which a course addresses
learning styles, use of media, and interactivity with content, testing and
feedback, and collaboration. Other success factors include content quality,
delivery support functions for instructors, administrators, and students,
including those with vision and hearing impairments; pedagogically driven
instructional design with well-defined objectives, web site usability factors,
and technological factors (Sonwalkar, 2002).
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Students stated that
a sign of good content is when students continue to contribute after a course
is over.
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Students found that an
entire course should be completed before its implementation and pre-tested
because once the class starts, course delivery, management, and communication
with students might consume more than double the time required for a traditional
class, an observation with which this author agrees.
Highlighted by mguhlin
According to Tinker and
Haavind (1997), the capacity of the software and network strongly influences
the quality of interactions and the ability to build functioning virtual communities.
Technologies that allow high interactivity seem necessary to allow high interaction
(Roblyer & Ekhaml, 2000).
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Using multiple instruction delivery systems in a single course might be ill
advised.
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Sufficient orientation time needs to be built
into instruction design for students to use the features of the system, as
well.
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Elements of instructional design include a learning model, selection of objectives
that address the highest levels in Bloom's Taxonomy, and application of cognitive
and learning theories such as Gagné's conditions of learning. Design
also includes a detailed syllabus, assignments that promote interaction and
collaboration, assessments that guard against cheating, implementation of
strategies to ensure instructor-student and student-student interaction and
community building, and provision for course closure.
Highlighted by mguhlin
According
to Sonwalkar (2001), cognitive-based learning models that can be used for
online asynchronous learning include apprenticeship, incidental, inductive,
deductive, and discovery. The apprenticeship model is a building-block approach
to presenting concepts procedurally. The incidental model is based on presenting
events to introduce concepts and provoke questions. An inductive approach
introduces concepts using a set of specific examples that pertain to a broader
topic area; whereas, a deductive approach encourages learners to identify
trends through presentation of broad data. The discovery method is inquiry-based,
and was the learning model of choice for the NSU course.
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A detailed, well-written
syllabus will leave no doubt as to instructor intent and student expectations.
The syllabus might contain the course description, learning objectives and
outcomes, assignments, grading policy/rubrics, university/class policies for
academic honesty, course-related resources, and reference materials (Muirhead,
2001). Instructor contact information and virtual office hours with a statement
of days on which students can expect responses to e-mail or other instructor
feedback enhances communication and might alleviate student frustration regarding
response-time turn around.
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Assignments should contain
due dates, point values or their relationship to the course grading system,
and an alternative method for assignment submission for when technology fails.
To help organize incoming assignments or e-mail into folders, this author
suggested a standard file name format for students to use.
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Consider
collaborative assignments revolving around discussion groups, role-plays,
seminars, sharing assignment solutions, collaborative compositions, debates,
simulations, case studies, brainstorming, forums, and group projects (Pitt
& Clark, 1997).
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Neufeld (1997) found posting student work on a
web site increased participation in lectures and group tutorials and fostered
better performance on assignments.
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Successful online courses have low student/faculty
ratios (University of Illinois, 1999). Hiltz (1995) recommends class sizes
of 10 to a maximum of 30 because interactions take a great deal of instructor
time
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With fewer than 10 active
students, interactions may be insufficient to develop ideas in depth.
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Students are
required to communicate with the instructor and instructional activities require
them to work with one another and outside experts and share results. Technologies
allow two-way exchanges of text information. Video or videoconferencing technologies
allow synchronous voice and visual communication among participants. By the
end of the course, 75% of students in the class are initiating interactions
voluntarily
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Students also need a
social-oriented chat thread to assist in building community and to discuss
assignments, technical issues, and other group-related concerns, which is
apart from threads in which they are expected to participate. According to
Alley and Jansak (2001), such a "cyber café" also assuages
feelings of isolation, helps to minimize a student's potential frustration,
and is an application to help maintain student motivation.
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Instructor reply to student postings can stimulate dialogue and promote further
exploration. However, instructor reply to questions can also be perceived
as the final word on a topic, and might stifle or cut off discussion. According
to Muilenburg and Berge (2000), if ongoing discussions are going well, the
best action for instructors is to take no action to add their comments until
conversation is waning, at which time an instructor might summarize key points
and ask another prompting question to recharge discussion. Making content
summaries takes time and their usefulness in a constructivist context has
been questioned, however (Burge, Laroque, & Boak, 2000).
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According to Alley and Jansak
(2001), assigning discussion board threads to student teams for moderation
is also a technique to provide students with high levels of feedback without
exhausting the instructor. This author found that asking students to summarize
a discussion also helped them to analyze and synthesize the body of knowledge
presented by their peers.
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Even with pedagogically
driven instructional design, an author's credibility and content might be
questioned if web pages are poorly designed
Highlighted by kdb163
Students expected course
closure. One stated, "Communication and follow-up from the online instructor
through the final grade is essential to the development of confidence in and
respect for online learning." They expected e-mail with a final grade
in each mini-course and details of how the grade was determined.
Highlighted by mguhlin
"Although I entered
the course with high expectations regarding the utility of course management
tools such as WebCT to enhance the online learning environment I left thinking
that such tools leave much to be desired. Such issues as slower-than-expected
response times, less-than-intuitive layouts and navigation proved to be
a small source of irritation and an impediment…"
Highlighted by kdb163
A course web site should
contain chunked material, which is a metacognitive feature that helps to minimize
learners' feelings of being overwhelmed by content (Jones, Farquhar, &
Surry, 1995). Consider use of menus, online h
Highlighted by kdb163
A course web site should
contain chunked material, which is a metacognitive feature that helps to minimize
learners' feelings of being overwhelmed by content (Jones, Farquhar, &
Surry, 1995)
Highlighted by mguhlin
Within each model, media selection
provides the cognitive pathways to learning and ranges from simple to complex--text,
graphics, audio, video, animation, and simulation (Sonwalkar, 2001).
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According to the Southern Regional Education
Board (2001), an effective instructional design team will be essential to
quality distance learning
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here is no single checklist by which to design or evaluate
quality.
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Online learning is not just
about putting course materials on the web. Authorship involves creating a
collaborative learning environment that supports knowledge acquisition, inquiry
and questioning between faculty and students, individual learning styles,
social interactions, and authentic assessment.
Highlighted by mguhlin
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