Distance Learning Conference – My notes

I’m currently attending the Distance Learning Conference in Madison, WI (when I have time I will post the conference stats/details), and will post my notes and general reflections on the lectures that I attend.

Please note – these notes are not complete, I’ll fill out the details to some of these notes more as I go along.

Problem Based Learning for Online

Margaret Drew and Lori Mardis

Note: clicking on the image above will open up the full concept map.

 

Suggestion: Provide a collaborative lab project.

• Provide something that’s broken and get people to fix it.
• Multiple solutions to complex medical prob. (suggestion – use blog).
• Idea-make people take an active task oriented solution
• What…about using blogging to facilitate discussion/collaboration on the process.
• Creation of individual learning scaffolds… learning is meaning full
• Began with open-ended ill structured problem that initiated discussion.

Building Virtual Communities

Dr. Rena Pallof & Dr. Keith Pratt
Importance of online Community

Now, I’ve always suspected that it’s not okay to just dump and run when it comes to delivering online content, but now it seems that the novelty of this realization is becoming dated. This presentation highlighted the importance of instructors establishing a rapport and building a ‘community’ among the students. Big takeaway for me was the presenter’s suggestion not to openly communicate intent of building community because many learners will protest because they’re just in the class to get credit… and or NOT to make friends.

I believe that it’s important to demonstrate the value in learning from your peers by providing learning experiences that allow the students to do this. Those people who continue to want to be anti-social can do so, but not at the expense of the rest of the students. Also courses an the purveyors of a curriculum who employ this social approach to learning should continue to do studies and investigations to the efficacy of this method of learning and provide education on the importance of virtual communities.

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Note: the “suggestions” are part of my notes to myself not the lecture.

Construction of Online learning community in which instructor is on the same level as students as a contributor… research says.

Intentional work on the development of presence online as well as other means which community can emerge are important… on student learning satisfaction.

Give the instructors and opportunity to communicate with students as a human level.

Suggestion: Encourage Office Hours / Train Instructors on how to do this effective

• Need to be intentional and create the environment… you have to make the effort.
• Aspects of learning:
  • Teaching students howt o inquire/construct knowledge
  • Teaching students to become self-direct

Suggestion: I-Search Papers

Competencies of Online Instructors (Martha Davidson):

• Creating a Learning Community that is Intellectually Exciting and Challeging
• Pepper collaborative activity throughout the course
• Encourage learners to perform to the best of their abilities
• Demonstrate Effective Use of Group Dynamics and Dialogue – need to know when to intervene and when not to intervene
• Use a variety of methods other than lecture
• Stress the interrelatedness of the complete curriculum and the value
• Know workplace trends and perspectives
• Draw out creativity, innovativeness, and ideas in a collaborative manner
• Integrate curriculum designed to provide learners with experientially based learning environment
• Evaluate learning outcomes
• Continue personal development

Presence

1. You must be able to connect with the people in the course.
2. You need to establish a sense of rapport/ and portray yourself as a ‘real’ person in the online environment
   1. Non Example: professor who put his whole CV online
   2. QUESTION: Do you think there’s a level of infomality in creating this presence that some instructors might not be comfortable with? How do you get them comfortable with this?
3. When there is a high degree of interaction between these participants…

Social Presence Online Correlates with:

• Increased learner satisfaction
• Greater depth of learning
• sense of belonging to a learning community
• Increased perception of learning
• Begin the course by focusing on the development of social presence.
• BUT DON”T TELL THEM THIS…. (They say…I didn’t take this class to make friends… I just want to take the class to get a grade).

Techniques

• Give minimal guidelines (note to self – don’t make up fussy rules)
• Let students know -It’s NOT okay to do all your posts on the same day
• Agree on what’s a substantial post
• Allow them to disagree

Suggestion: offer modeled examples and many practice opportunities for instructors. For example show them samples of chat discussions (recordings, simulations), have them practice in various online activities

Working as a Team: Collaborative Online Course Development

Emily Hixon, Ph. D

This was the best lecture/activity I’ve attended at the conference so far.

She provided 4 case studies of working with Faculty and SME’s talked about the challenges of working with faculty to develop an online course. She outlined the challenges and provided suggestions for selecting Faculty participants. I’ll post more details later including some interview criteria she listed for selecting good Subject Matter Experts (or Faculty).

One of the biggest takeaways I got from this was… bottom line – you need to find SME’s who are collaborative and can work on a team of folks who also communicate their process and progress along the way. Moreover, you have to find a SME who really believes that teaching online is possible.

FRIDAY’s LECTURES:

Managing Flash Game Development

Jon Aleckson

Another great lecture and probably one of the best here at the conference, that I was able to attend… because the presenter basically confirmed my hunch that creating really great learning activity requires a well-balanced team with the right skills and doing this takes moolah. If you want to be stuck with word documents and handouts then discount the need for these types of people on your team or look to moving into the online publishing business.

Biggest Takaways

• Good Game Design Requires a Superlative Team including:
  • Instructional Designer/Writer
  • Artistic Illustrator
  • ActionScript Flash Programmer
  • Project Manager
• DONT SKIMP IN HIRING (Note: I will post my notes on each of these position descriptions later)
• Using CMMI (CapabilityMaturity Model) – importance of logging time for data collection purposes and learning for future teams and projects. It is important to communicate intent for data collection to employees (positively)
• Use a Wiki for Knowledge Management/Capture – Saves time builds knowledge
• Brainstorming tools:
  • Learning objectives and content outline
  • Activity List
  • Benchmarking
  • Include people with different roles!
• Game or Simulation Continuum (3 dimensions)
  • Roles
  • Goals
  • Interactivity

Using Webcasting technologies

Coco Kishi and Tomoko Traphagan

What students wanted out of player technology

• Wanted to see what the instructor was doing clearly
• Synchronized audo, video, slides (clearly see the blackboard or slides
• Content Searching
• Playback and Speek Control
• Flexible Viewing Controls
• Bookmarking
• Annotation

MySpace is not YourSpace

View the slides from the link here: http://flynnfoley.typepad.com/alan_foley/presentations/index.html

Christy actually took better notes than I did during this presentation. Check them out.

I really liked the fact that these presenters encouraged us to think about the consequences of technology and also really question whether or not some learning media were truly appropriate for all learning.