[LINK] Proposal for Teaching ICT Masters Students How to Teach On-line

Jan Whitaker jwhit at melbpc.org.au
Tue Feb 12 10:46:57 AEDT 2013


At 08:42 AM 12/02/2013, Tom Worthington wrote:
>my
>not-very-revolutionary conclusion is that the basics of education are
>the same on-line and off-line: what is important is preparation and
>contact with the students.
>
>Something else I learned is that being a university student is not like
>the TV ads: it is hard work and very frustrating much of the time.

[warning - long]

I started my training in educational delivery in the mid-70s, July 
1975 to be exact, and began my full-time career doing it in 1979 
after a few years of full-time post-grad pursuits in it. I have 
worked with every delivery medium from paper to satellites, local and 
internationally, so have done my time in the field. What you say, 
Tom, are givens in terms of prep and contact. What gets a bit tricky 
is what is prepared and what the contact with the students is in 
terms of the messages given and matching their expected frequency of 
contact in an affordable way, for them and the delivering 
institution. In some ways, the tools themselves are irrelevant, 
except for how they provide a means for information exchange for that 
contact and how they impact the budget for doing the contact needed 
(and sometimes wanted). I don't know how you do the sort of personal 
contact that a single student might want when they are one of 40,000. 
They may intellectually understand they are a one of many half the 
size of a sporting event attendance at the MCG, but they may not have 
the right model in their subconscious of what that means in terms of 
their learning strategy.

The second point you make about it being hard work is absolutely true 
for some people. It doesn't have to be hard and can be seen as 
stimulating, interesting, boring, useless,  or some other perception 
by the learner as well as the course leader. We're back to 
expectations again. There is so much baggage that people bring to the 
experience in terms of what it means to 'go to school', as well as 
legitimate demands on their time, particularly for adult learners, 
that the course manager/tutor/teacher/counsellor/guide is only able 
to do so much. Everyone brings something to the table, mediated or 
not, and does what they can to come out the other end, so that as 
many stakeholders as possible see it as a worthwhile experience. I 
agree, the messages about sweetness and light is not exactly realistic.

The woman in the Coursera course was perceived by the students as the 
problem. My guess is it was a combination of factors, some of which 
she had no ability to change. But since hers was the face of contact 
for the 40,000 people, she got the kick. I know I feel awful when our 
Moodle system fails for some reason. Thank god it doesn't  happen 
often. It is a bit embarrassing, though, when the spell-checker won't 
work on IE9 or the simple messages aren't consistently emailed to 
students from the system, and I only have a handful of students, not 
40,000. It creates a dissonance of the expectations for me and the 
students, which is something that adds to everyone's frustrations. 
Same for this poor woman with the Coursera course with the 
limitations of the system she was given to work with. I can't imagine 
getting even 20,000 complaints about a broken spell-checker, or about 
anything, really. What would you need to do? My email system would 
crash for a few hours with that many messages!

That doesn't excuse any real poor design aspects. Note: 'real'. It's 
difficult to judge the reality without seeing the course materials. 
One of the objections was about the range of theories presented and 
"wasting an hour" taking a personal learning style. Yes, and? It's a 
masters level course, not a Q&A subject spoon feeding the answers. I 
would present reading materials about multiple theories, too, because 
there are multiple theories. I'm guessing now, but if the students 
who complained about that aspect didn't understand that there is a 
reason to study multiple theories because they didn't read the 
context of the presentation of those materials, then the mirror 
should be turned on the complainers, not the tutor. Maybe that 
complainer is an accountant where there are only 'right answers'. Who 
knows? Maybe the tutor didn't explain why they were doing the 
exercise, before or after having them do it. Those are legitimate 
questions. And I can share: students don't read carefully. I deal 
with that weekly, no matter how many boldings and underlinings I put 
in the materials to emphasise critical information.

One thing I think the article exposes is the coming clash of 
expectations of those who enrol in these monsters for a certificate 
and the ability for the institutions to deliver, and then the 
employing organisations who find the outputs aren't quite what they 
expected either. Education and learning is an ecosystem, and that 
*is* hard, frustrating and complex work.

Jan




Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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