[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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