The Land of e-Learning Experiences

We were fortunate to have two employees join the class today to show us a presentation about the goals and objectives of the Department of Community Service (DoCS). Basically, the lesson was presented through a traditional powerpoint slide presentation, outlining much of the statistics and things, which the DoCS is involved with. DoCS focuses mostly around the area of child protection services and has many links to community centres around NSW in helping younger people stay off the streets and providing a place where they would be more comfortable in. There was also mention of having a team of social workers that dedicated to helping DoCS reach out to these younger people .

The presentation was more or less very informative and provided me with a better understanding of what DoCS is doing for the wider society. Hence, it also makes me understand why DoCS is sending out Brett to develop and incorporate some sort of e-learning component or technology into the department. Whether it’s going to be incorporated internally or be used for external purposes, I can see that it’s important for it to be done as the internet continually expands and new tools or technologies need to be used by the department to create awareness and allow the department to continue to achieve its objectives for the benefit of society.

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Web-based applications generally refer to online applications, which are created in order to allow users to use the application in the same fashion as their non-online desktop counterparts. An example of this would be Google’s implementation of document editing tools, which could be used online to replace the need for using a desktop equivalent e.g. Microsoft Office. However of course, this is assuming the user has access to the web, hence the term “web-based”.

Web 2.0 refers to the emerging use of web-based applications , which generally promote the sharing of information, whether they be personal information or items such as photos to research development projects. Nowadays, many of these applications are used to foster collaboration in research, archiving or creating amateur or end-user content through a range of various web-based tools e.g. YouTube. The biggest point is that it’s a mixture of various technologies, which allows the relatively quick creation and distribution of information.

The relevance to learning to is that the process and creation of information can be created, modified and shared either through individuals or through collective communities. As such, the search for information is much quicker and far more moderated as opinions from others will influence the resultant information which is presented. e.g. Wikipedia. At the same time, desktop applications such as Second Life provide a bridge between web-based applications and non-web based applications allowing for the teaching and learning to occur in virtual classrooms in a non-synchronous manner. e.g. Not everyone has to be in the virtual class at the same time, students can be allowed to explore the learning material freely at their own leisure.

Some of the web-based applications I’m currently familiar with are:

• Chat
• Weblogs
• Social networking
• e-Portfolios
• Virtual worlds

Some, which I would like to further explore are:

• Wikis
• RSS & Aggregation

At work, my experience to e-learning has varied to a certain degree, but is mostly presented through web 1.0 forms. By this, I refer to the typical slideshow method of web-based learning, where after a certain set of slides or at the end of the entire presentation, a simple quick quiz is used to test the learner’s memory to ensure the content has actually been read and understood. Currently, my workplace places a heavy emphasis on learning about Telstra products and services and again, there is an e-learning portal/site called “Learn.Achieve”, which uses the teaching methods above. However, even though they might vary slightly and may attempt to make things interesting by encouraging things such as ’scroll overs’, ‘mix and match’ sort of activities, it remains very time consuming and unengaging.

Another method of delivery is through using audio pre-recorded voice to give the text character. At the same time, other visual appealing flash-based activities might appear, but rarely differ largely from the overall layout and feel of the learning material. Some of these slideshows try to incorporate a story into it by making the user see things from a third party perspective.

They relate to earlier findings of e-learning as these e-learning applications contain a larger degree of visual/audio as compared to past applications. Alongside this, the overall raw content e.g. text/words are incorporated in more visually appealing ways as to encourage learning. This is a general trend as e-learning applications become less slideshow oriented and become more “3D”. Again, Second Life could be used as an example of how learning could take place online as compared with using slideshows.

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Second week of e-learning and already, it feels like there’s lots of continual homework, which needs to be done. Was told there’ll be a group of people from DoCs who will be presenting next week. That’ll probably give me more insight into what’s required of us from the presentation. Started working on activity 1.2 and discussed the RSS and aggregation questions.

Alot of the discussion at the moment revolves around alot of the technologies in e-learning and I have yet to see when we’re going to actually discuss the principles and theories behind actually designing some of these e-learning programs/courses. I guess I’ll hear more later when we focus on the individual assignment where we have to design one.

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What are the 6 key emerging technologies identified by the 2008 report?

1. Grassroot videos
2. Collaboration Webs
3. Mobile Broadband
4. Data Mash-ups
5. Collective Intelligence
6. Social operating Systems

Which of these technologies are you familar with, and in what context have either used them, or heard of them?

1. Grassroot videos are sites such as YouTube, which lets users upload their own edited/home-made videos, extremely popular for carrying across user opinions and many other uses, very much like watching TV.

2. Probably more common in business contexts, the closest experience would be using Voice chat programs with a group of people to discuss assignments or projects.

3. Surfing the internet with your mobile. Better devices, which allow you to tag photos the moment you take them (e.g. Geo-tagging)

4. An example would be Netvibes, which is a personalised page that can connect to various other webpages. Used at university forlearning.

5. Wikipedia, which can be edited by anyone. Used whenever general information is needed, educational purposes of finding out more about a certain topic.

6. Facebook uses ‘applications’ to connect people through examples such as games.

Review the significant trends – how do these relate to your experiencs of technology in learning contexts?

I have noticed that UTS and its lecturers within the education department have taken up more interest in utilising e-learning technologies especially in our e-learning classes where we are encouraged and allowed to demonstrate usage of technologies such as second life. However, on a broader scale, UTS Online appears to be continually improved with more e-learning tools such as the electric blackboard and the wiki pages.

At work, more and more of the product training is usually delivered via some sort of interactive flash based presentation and it is fairly effective in giving a general idea of what the expected outcome of the training is.

Review your familiarity with the key emerging technologies from 2007 and your current technology experiences?

Most of the key trends are correct except maybe for the last one where massively multiplayer gaming has been used in an educational context. I have yet to see an rising example of this and I do not believe Second Life to be a good example of this, because Second Life encompasses much more than just gaming. Some of these trends have yet to be experienced, such as using a mobile phone for educational purposes and at the same time, I believe that the younger generations are mroe likely to expand on this area of mobile learning where entertainment and learning on the mobile phone meet.

However, in a business context, mobile phones are becoming much more advanced and user friendly in providing an internet gateway which connects business and leisure together. An example would be the ability to surf youtube whilst syncing with e-mails on an iphone.

Although at the end of the day, it comes down to hardware and software capabilities. Broadband coverage is slowly increasing, however the costs associated with download usage isn’t whereas, the internet is becoming more content-rich and download-intensive, a majority of Australians mightn’t be able or interested in learning how to use all the new software tools out there.

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Looks like a promising start to the semester with e-Learning Design being one of the more interesting subjects to follow up on. As usual, an outline of all the subject’s assignments was provided by the teacher, with alot of setup work dating back to the tools we used last year in e-Learning Experiences.

So here I am re-activating my Edublog and Delicious account, while the subject teacher, Anne Bartlett-Bragg, opens up my mind on the possibilities of using different web techologies such as podcasts or videocasts to enhance my blog this semester. This might take a while to fiddle around with as I’ve never used stuff like this before.

Otherwise, most of the class was spent re-activating our old tools, joining a new wiki to start on one of our assignments and also going through Activity 1.1 questions. Also, a special mention to having a guest teacher, Brett, from the Department of Community Services, who’ll be in our classes each week to pick our brains and see how we can help him incorporate e-learning technology into the DoCS.

The emphasis of this semester seems to be on the practical intergration of e-learning in corporate, business or educational contexts and I believe that is why the teacher has invited Brett to our weekly classes so that we can have some experience in discussing with our employers in the future on implementing successful e-learning practices or technologies.

Let’s hope that these classes will be fun! =)

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After a semester’s worth of blogging, it gets me thinking about what and how much I’ve learnt about e-learning. Initially, during the first few weeks, the classes seemed alright and eventually, as the assignments started to get me running, I started to take more initiative during classes. Towards the latter half of the semester, e-learning classes seemed pretty fun and opened my mind towards the possibilities of maybe focusing on developing e-learning programs/processes that’ll become profitable.

What can I say about e-learning? What does it mean to me? Am I answering from a students’ perspective or perhaps a facilitator’s perspective? Maybe both? At the end, I’ve looked at my very first blog and thought about whether or not I’ve achieved the objectives this blog was setup with. I have blogged regularly on a weekly basis with my class reflections on the material and activities. I’ve kept the weblog neat, tidy and easy to navigate. I’ve also regularly updated the module activity pages on a weekly basis as we worked through them during class. One thing I do regret is not having read my classmate’s blogs as often to get a view of their opinions and perspectives on the whole e-learning scene. Even with the Netvibes tool, I would only scan the RSS headlines of their blogs and maybe open it every now and then to see what they were blogging about.

In regards to Delicious and Netvibes and Edublogs, all 3 are excellent tools, which I would recommend to anyone, but again, not everyone might be bothered with sharing links of the sites they’ve come across or like. I know I have a huge list of bookmarks for my browser, but I don’t really see a need for sharing links all the time. However, I can understand how handy it is to have all the Delicious links all come up onto your blog as a widget or whatever instead of manually linking every site in. Netvibes is pretty useful for scanning headlines, however, it really does kill the appeal of visiting websites with all the fancy pictures and all. Really depends on what you’re reading.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed this course as most of our work has been based online, but at the same time, the physical/conventional methods of classroom teaching is still there, which really helps to cater for everyone’s learning styles. Even students who don’t feel as comfortable with doing all the work online would feel better knowing there is a teacher they can go to for support face-to-face every week. I guess that’s one major thing about e-learning, which facilitators and trainers would always try to improve on – recreating that degree of support in e-learning programs and courses.

To You

Of course, this wouldn’t be a proper reflection without giving thanks to the teacher who has had to “put up” (hahaha I kid) with our class’s antics during the semester. You’ve been pretty cool and flexible in the way you handled our requests and supported us through the work. Your whacky activties and afternoon tea treats went well together and of course, you pretty much surprised me completely with the last afternoon tea… hahahahaha

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading my weblog and if there’s anything awry, just e-mail my uts webmail.

Cheers!

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Hahaha, where to start…?

Previous Readings

Ok, so referring back to the activities I completed in module 3, my learning style does play an important influence on the online courses I have chosen. How? Having re-read my answers and VARK quiestionaire results, it’s pretty obvious why I enjoyed the first online course I chose. The WebWise course contained all the visual, aural, read/write and kinesthetic elements to keep me motivated as a learner. On the other hand, the GoodTyping course had only appealed to mostly the kinesthetic and read/write side of my learning. Of course, everyone’s learning style is different and even though I enjoyed the WebWise course and not the other, other learners might actually find the typing course more appealing and easier to learn. However, I also realise that learning styles do not take into account for previous learning experiences and that our learning styles could possibly change during the undertaking of these online courses.

Initial Expectations

My initial expectations of the WebWise course was a “this looks like a course for children”. However, as I went further into the course, I saw the course from a e-learning facilitator’s perspective and was impressed by how well the content was intergrated into the navigation, etc. On the other hand, I thought the typing course would be fairly interesting and well, the course was well below my initial expectations. The course provides very little to no support for the learner and especially for beginners that might strugle if they aren’t already accustomed to using a keyboard (albeit not properly with correct fingering, etc). It’s pretty motivating to come across something, which is much better than your initial impressions and expectations. In the case of learnimg, it really does help when an online course has more material/facilitator support.

Overall Thoughts

Reading through all my blog entries on the courses I took, I have to say I’m looking forward to creating an e-learning course next year in one of my subjects. After undertaking a course, which I percieved as impressively designed, it’s easy for a person to critique and point out the flaws in a course. As a learner, I believe it’s necessary to look beyond what the course offers and take more initiative for self-research and self-study on the parts where the course is lacking. However, with any educational online course, the developers/facilitators of these courses have done a learner out there a favour by creating an online course. Just because it doesn’t suit the learning style of one learner doesn’t mean that the course wouldn’t suit the learning styles of other learners.

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Here’s an overall evaluation of the second course I chose to supplement with my first course. This was a free online typing course, which lasted about a couple of hours.

Course Title: Free Online Typing Course
Course Provider: www.goodtyping.com
Stated course objectives or outcomes:
The website states “Learn how to type correctly in just a few hours using all your fingers.”
Achievement of outcomes: Partially successful
Stated course duration: Few hours Actual course duration: 2 hrs or so

Administration:

There is very little support involved in this course and the only point of support contact was provided through the administrator’s e-mail. I didn’t need to contact him/her during the duration of this course.

Materials:

The website provided very little support material, brief learning instructions was provided in each lesson (27 in total) through web text. There’s also a visual layout of the keyboard with colour coded keys to inform the learner of which fingers should be used for which keys. Other than that, there’s no other physical material made available to the learner.

Technology:

Very simple web tools used to create this page. Most likely a java apple. Simple and effective in many ways, but the lack of any fanciness (looks of the site, etc) made the course feel really boring and dry.

Virtual classroom:

The only major material, which would be useful to the learner is the colour coded keyboard layout and the brief instructions that come with each lesson. Other than that, the typing course was pretty simple and straightforward, that uses an instructional approach to teaching the learner.

Interacitivty:

I was constantly engaged with typing in the box provided and the only sort of interactivity was the box not allowing me to hit the wrong key and would only continue if I hit the right character key. In many ways, there was very little user interactivity, however, considering the nature of typing courses, this probably limited the number of interactivity options available, but at the same time, there are many ways to spice the site up to be more GUI-pretty/nice.

Feedback:

There is feedback at the end of every lesson, which also informs the user of their typing speed (keystrokes per min) and the number of errors made during the lesson. If the total number of errors exceeded 3% of the entire lessons, then the user would be recommended to retake the lesson until the learner has an error % of only 3 or less. Hence, the feedback is computer generated and very lacking in terms of offering guidance. e.g. telling the user which keys the keep hitting incorrectly would help. Overall, feedback was very lacking in scope and offered little help the me as a learner on how to improve my typing.

Content:

Overall, each lesson basically offered different combinations of keys/characters to practice on. To me, it seems like the course wasn’t designed to be catered to a wide range of learning styles. Some learners may feel disgruntled with the lack of quality feedback. Eventually, the last few lessons offered typing exercises on whole words/sentencs. However, the site did progress sequentially in regards to the content. ie. learning the asdf jkl; keys first, then etc etc Unfortunately, the level of difficulty with the typing exercises remained the same throughout and could not be changed. Unlike some typing programs, which allow the user to set typing goals e.g. typing accuracy at 60%, then 70% and so forth.

Navigation:

The course was fairly simple to navigate, however, one of it’s biggest flaw is that it didn’t allow a user to backtrack to earlier lessons for repetition/practice. Combined with this, the lack of a real facilitator and lack of support/help material made the course overly bland, boring, and unmotivating for a learner who wants to learn how to type.

Additional Comments:

There’s many ways I can imagine to improve the interactivity, navigation and content of the online course. However, due to the nature of typing courses, there’s one challenging issue. How can the course provide users with constructive feedback to answer the tailored learning needs of the learner? An example is if a learner wanted to whether or not they are using the right fingers to hit the right key all the time. Something like this is hard to monitor online and practically impossible in many ways. Unlike conventional classroom learning methods, a trainer can visually monitor a learner’s typing habits, etc. Overall, the course is simple to follow and contains a basic, but structured guide in learning how to type properly. However, I would recommend the use of more professional typing programs instead such as TypeQuick.

Coming up next, a final reflection on my 2 online courses…

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The teacher brought up a few important questions during our final class today.

1. What did you think of using blogs as a learning tool?

2. What do you think of your online course?

3. What was your key learning in this subject?

My answer to the first question is that the use of blogs as a learning tool has been a mixed result for me. There certainly a big possibility that I might need to use blogs again in the future to keep track of a learning/experience or entertainment-related activity/event. Blogs aren’t for everybody, but for me, in terms of what blogs have done for my learning this semester, I would have to say this blogging experience has made me reflect on my own learning more often than I normally would. I can see myself in the future using blogs in the workplace, but of course, that’ll depend on my profession and career path.

Blogging is a powerful tool in that it can be used for a multitide of purposes outisde of educational boundaries. I believe that the convenience of internet/computer access may truly encourage more people than before to keep track of their own learning and development. Unlike in the past, where people were accustomed to manually writing out their thoughts and ideas on paper, it seems like the internet has encouraged more people to blog even the most random of things. Essentially, for me, because of this experience, I might use blogs as a way of developing my career path and using it to keep recor of my learning/work experiences.

2. I believe my WebWise online course had demonstrated the amount of potential in e-learning courses. At the same time though, it undoubtedly probably took the developers/facilitators a considerably amount of time to develop all the learning activities, which are present in the course. To also continually maintain/update this course and effectively link it to real-life competencies would also have been a major challenge. Overall, I believe it was a good experience and would recommend it to e-learning developers to use as a good example of an online course.

3. My key learnings…. would be that there is no doubt going to be a larger market for e-learning products in the future, which will extend past the current offerings. From what I’ve seen, I have a feeling there’s educators out there working  hard on a wonderful concept to utilise internet tools in such a unique way to provide both educational institutions and organistions with the most flexible and effective learning tools/programs. And of course, other key learnings would be how useful blogging is when it comes to reflecting our past and current work.

I’ve also chosen another online course to sample and will evaluate that one soon.

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Course Title: The WebWise Online Course
Course Provider: BBC Learning UK
Stated course objectives or outcomes: None stated in the course itself, however, you can refer to my first post of this assignment for this.
Achievement of outcomes: Yes. However, there is no form of strict assessment that specifically awards the learner with a pass/fail.
Stated course duration: 10hrs Actual course duration: 2.25 hrs

Administration:
Were you provided with any support contact details? Yes Did you need to contact admin support? No

Materials:
Were you supplied with any support materials? Yes
If Yes, what materials? Glossary, FAQs, Trainer’s notes
Were you issued with a certificate? No

Technology:
Did you have any issues with any of the technology used by this course? No

Virtual Classroom:
Which components of the virtual classroom did the course offer?

- A guide/teacher (the spider mascot)
- Notes/handouts/printouts
- Flash-based games
- Online multiple choice quizzes

Did you use any of them? Yes

Interactivity:
Rate the degree of interactivity: Very High

Feedback:
Was there any feedback during the course? Yes
Was it personal? No
Or Computer generated? Computer generated
Rate the quality of feedback: Good

Content:

Did the content cater to differing learning styles? Yes

How?
The tutorials offered a text-based version where it was in a read/print-friendly format, thus skipping out all the flash-based interactivity. Some learners might prefer to read the text instead.

Was the content logically sequenced and organised? Yes

Were there options for different levels of expertise? No

Were there any exercises that allowed you to practice skills? Yes

Was the content in plain English or jargon? Both

Was there a “real” facilitator? No

How could you make contact with the facilitator if you chose to? E-mail

Navigation:

Was the navigation of the course content logical? Yes

Were there “breadcrumbs”? No

Was it simple to navigate to the last point where you had left the course? Yes

Did the site have FAQs? Yes

Did you use them? No
Did they help? No

Additional Comments:

This course was very well designed with lots of guided interactivity, which places more emphasis on learning through interaction and subtle assessment methods that aren’t overly complicated or difficult. Highly recommended for beginners.

Even for experts, the course serves a good example of how web design tools e.g. flash can be combined with educational tools/methods in delivering learning content effectively through to the target learners.

The course is presented as user-friendly, but at the same time, isn’t limited in its’ scope of activities and for those seeking to learn more, can attempt to do the extra activities at the end of each unit.

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