Spent the better portion of the weekend working on the "Teaching Online" course that we are developing to Distance Education. Going through the resources, I'm surprised at how difficult it is to truly "transform" rather than "transfer" content online. We have been focusing on making interaction the larger part of the course (versus content dumping). Two thoughts on that: 1. It's more difficult to design learning where students explore resources than it is to tell students what to think. When communicating, I feel I have to tell people what I want them to know. Not so online...I have to direct them to information and then, through effective assessment, ensure that learning objectives were achieved. 2. It is easy to get lazy as a designer and throw up links that aren't directly related to the intended learning objectives. Developing online resources requires constant focus on outcomes and objectives. In a classroom, if the design process has some inefficiencies, I can always "cover up" through instruction. This crutch is gone in elearning.
Question: I'm always surprised at how proponents of a new way of doing things utilize old techniques to communicate their concepts. For example, several years ago, I attended a session where the speaker focused on the end of the lecture as a means of communicating information. Guess what?...she lectured to get her point across. Or, people yip about how courses are changing...and the instructor is no longer the provider of knowledge (but a guide)...and we use a course to communicate this new approach. Seems silly. So, I'd like to set up a mailing list for approx 12 weeks that is a "non-course" course. Instead of providing any content, at the start of each week, I would post a concept and a link. From there, the group (max 15 people) would dissect and analyze the subject - providing the content through interaction. Not instructor, only a guide. At the end of each week, I would summarize comments and post them in essay form on elearnspace
Interested in this type of learning experience?? See Non-course Course. (It's free...12 weeks...would take some time commitment each week to contribute...done through Yahoo Groups. I'll send a list of weekly topics to anyone who expresses interest.)
Posted by gsiemens at August 26, 2002 8:46 PM