Online Collboration

This week's readings talk about choosing a learning medium that supports learner collaboration and cooperation. For adult learners, social mediums provide a platform to share experiences and expertise while enabling the learners to keep track of their own development. It also offers flexibility in using resources.

However, there are a few assumptions that impact how these social mediums foster collaboration and cooperation among learners. The most important one of these assumptions is that the learners understand the purpose of their learning and will thus be responsible for directing their learning process. This is a significant assumption that can result in the failure of the learning process as it affects the level of trust and comfort required in educational collaboration and online community building. There are personal agendas involved. How can an educator or instructor turn it around if the learner is not able to establish this psychological contract early on in the learning process?

Design-Planning the online course

Being totally new to online course creation, I found the chapter, ’Planning the Online Course’ very useful. The chapter discusses how some simple design tools can be used to explain concepts. I took a course in ‘Aligning Training Goals with Organizational Strategy’ over the weekend, at the end of which, all the participants presented their training proposals. One of the issues that came up during the class was that some of us had put a lot of text on the power point slides to explain tedious details. Reading this particular chapter introduced simple tools like concept mapping, story boarding and flow charts that can be extremely helpful in situations which involve painful details. It not only helps in accelerated learning but also focuses learning on key concepts while excluding redundant explanations. The only issue with using these designs is that a lot of information has to be understood in a correct manner before structuring it as figures and diagrams. Sometimes, these visual models appear more complex than the concept itself and should therefore be reviewed by peers before implementation, to ensure that the designs effectively interpret the concept.

The Impact of Technology on Education

This week’s reading reminds me of an advertisement I saw for Kaplan University (see at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e50YBu14j3U), which, besides promoting the university’s online courses, shows how learning has changed due to technology. I find this ad extremely relevant to this week’s reading which discusses how mobile devices have made education available and accessible to everyone. However, learning materials have to be designed according to these emerging influences.

Instructional designers have to develop learning material based on concepts such as ‘chunking’ information to facilitate processing in working memory; developing information in the form of learning objects that allow learners to access learning material according to their needs; implementing pre-instructional strategies like advance organizers and overviews to help learners make sense of the information; and embedding intelligent agents in technology that gather information about what students learnt and what they need help with.

Along with all of the above, instructors must be able to facilitate the communication process between the learners by encouraging open dialogue, recognizing the different learning styles in order to respond to different learners’ needs, acting as a counselor, and making good use of all the tools available to them to promote learning.

Does this impact of technology on learning put too much pressure on the instructors/instructional designers to meet all these expectations?

Addressing Diversity in Online Learning

This week's reading about diversity is particularly inspiring for me. Describing globalization in the words of Thomas L. Friedman, the author of one of my favorite books called The world is Flat, "...any activity where we can digitize and decompose the value chain, and move the work around, will get moved around." With businesses using strategies such as 'off-shoring' and 'outsourcing' to gain competitive advantage, partnerships are being created around the world to secure the best and the cheapest resources. Such changes have created a need for a diverse work force, and therefore, impact the education system to meet these changing needs. Diversity, now, an issue that does not have to be managed, but can be explored to create alternative views and multiple perspectives.

What does this mean for online learning?

Addressing diversity among students in online learning can prove to be a challenging task. Online constructivist learning approach can be helpful to create an environment that allows all learners to share their experiences and views. A design based on a mixture of tools in cultural contexts can be employed. Information resources, such as books or the internet can be used to provide the necessary knowledge required. practical examples, cases studies and problem situations can be incorporated in the design to make learning more meaningful. One of the key features of such a design is encouraging learners to communicate with each other. That too can be developed using social networking tools such as chat, blog etc. To foster collaboration, exercises can be performed in teams.

What other design components can we use to address diversity?

Emerging Interaction Strategies in Online Learning

One of the challenges of online learning is to create a learning environment that is highly interactive. Online learning is not limited to sharing information like web-courses with schedules, course contents, and power point presentation slides, but can actually be used to develop skills through the same interactive processes used in face-to-face class room learning.

To achieve high level of interaction in online learning, the teacher cannot be held solely responsible for the learning process. Instructional designers and technological tool developers must also work on understanding learners’ needs and how they can effectively utilize information technology to meet those needs. With these changes, the role of online learners has also changed drastically. Learners have to be self motivated and take responsibility for their own learning.

The instructors can use a combination of tools that not only rely on simple interaction strategies (interaction between learners, teachers and content), but also employ enriched interaction strategies, based on cases studies, extended readings, concept mapping of subject topic, feedback on assignments, online group discussions and communities of practice etc. They require tools that can help them have better class management for example better distribution of learning material, announcements, easy to use file exchange programs etc. To enhance learning, they can use Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, simple self-assessment tools, and exercises to develop higher analytical skills. In order to motivate students, instructors can ask them to document their reflections on the topics being discussed and share their personal stories (also known as the critical incident approach).

Building an environment based on sharing and collaborating, online learning can not only be used as a tool to provide information but also help with developing more generalizable skills like communication skills, team building, self learning and problem solving.

Issues such as the paradigm shift, from a learning system controlled by an instructor, to a more learner-centered model, are difficult to address. Learners have no choice but to rely on the expert, the teacher. Since the power remains with the teacher, how does that change anything, even in the learner-centered model?

Blogging is becoming increasingly popular for its simplicity and effectiveness out of the many social computing tools. I am glad to have finally created my own blog!

In reference to a recent article I read on usnews.com (See references below), blogging is a simple tool small businesses and entrepreneurs can use to direct internet traffic to their business's web address. With the use of blog-gennerating services like Typepad and Wordpress that automatically format words and contents on the blog so that serach engines can pick up on those words and phrases. According to John Jantsch, a blogger since 2002 and author of the Duct Tape Marketing Blog, "a blog gives a small-business owner the ability to show up much higher in the Google rankings than any kind of static website."

In the coming weeks, I will share information that I find interesting about the tools used in Online Learning and Instructional Design.

I look forward to your views, comments and suggestions.

References:

http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/small-business-entrepreneurs/2008/09/26/how-to-blog-your-way-to-small-business-success.html

http://wordpress.org/

http://www.typepad.com/