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?