Tropical North Queensland TAFE - Alison Gotts
My students are basically teachers and they come from everywhere, and the course comes from the business services training package. It is designed for teachers who are faced with developing online learning materials and facilitating e-learning, so the course focuses on two sets of skills. Multi-media skills and also facilitating skills. The students come from all around Australia. It is completely online. There is no geographical barriers, but you do need to be a teacher.
I guess the main approach would be project-based, with students working on work-based projects. The students start as a cohort, and they work together from the beginning of the course and build relationships with each other as the course progresses, so there is a lot of peer feedback, interaction and support and each assessment task is a stepping stone to the overall project.
Mentoring would be a major strategy to help them sort out their projects and the associated workplace issues. Another strategy would be peer to peer feedback, using the role of critical friend so that they learn how to provide thoughtful feedback to others themselves online, and they publish their work for everyone else to see and comment on up on the web. I try and model the strategies, so that they can see what a good online course should be, and this is an eye opener for many of them because they all have stories of bad online courses. And during the education class, the students take over the facilitation role themselves, and they drive the discussion and learning activities. I try and have regular chat sessions on scheduled course topics. This really develops the group interaction, and the opportunity for students to learn from each other, and to find out what the others are thinking, and it also motivates them to keep up, and stay together. It is important to design a chat session that can reach out to everyone, so even those who are behind will get something out of it.
I use Blogs to encourage reflective learning and the chronological record is really good for tracking progress in a personal way, and it also helps the facilitator to know what they are thinking in a particular point. I use an electronic portfolio, and within two weeks of the course starting the students are publishing their material to the web. This is a highlight, and students get very excited to see their stuff go up on the web so quickly, and it really inspires them. I use assessment tasks as stepping stones to the overall project and I get students to set up MSN Messenger at the start of the course, so that they actually can talk to each other informally when they are online, and this also is good for peer support. I use email games, forum discussion topics, and a regular weekly email which focuses on what they should be doing each week and also video streaming sessions for each topic.
What are the results? Well, last semester we had 100% completion. I think word of mouth is spreading now, and the number of enquiries is increasing. Students have had a major impact in their workplace, and are becoming leaders and trainers of other teachers. One student won a major prize for excellence with her project in the education department.
Okay, so what quick tips have I got. Well, I would suggest that you design for a group, rather than an individual enrolment. Really try and integrate Blogs and Messenger into your course. Enable the students to take the lead role. Use stepping stones to build the skills gradually, provide authentic work-based assessment tasks, design regular chats, based on application of course content. Use the critical friend as a key assessment component, and use the web publishing to produce a portfolio.
My outcome from doing the diploma of e-learning have been that the course has encouraged me to pursue different options in teaching, and to revisit the idea of continual improvement as a path providing high quality courses and materials. In doing this, I am continually challenged to think outside the square, in meeting the needs of our students, and the course has facilitated this process. During the course, we were encouraged to combine what we learnt in the multi media session, and synthesise it with teaching strategies that we thought would be most effective. I really enjoyed this aspect of the course in which we, that's the diploma of e-learning class, interacted as a group of experienced educators, each bringing a different perspective to our online discussions. Building this repore between teacher and each student over twelve month course was extremely valuable. I have begun to implement a similar strategy with my own distance students, to reduce their feelings of isolation. The impact of the course has been that both my on-campus and off-campus students have demonstrated increased motivation by using e-learning.