Group items tagged

Online learning allows for flexibility of access, from anywhere and usually at anytime—essentially, it allows participants to collapse time and space (Cole, 2000)—however, the learning materials must be designed properly to engage the learner and promote learning.

Cognitive psychology claims that learning involves the use of memory, motivation, and thinking, and that reflection plays an important part in learning.

The development of effective online learning materials should be based on proven and sound learning theories.

Early computer learning systems were designed based on a behaviorist approach to learning. The behaviorist school of thought, influenced by Thorndike (1913), Pavlov (1927), and Skinner (1974), postulates that learning is a change in observable behavior caused by external stimuli in the environment (Skinner, 1974).

Therefore, before any learning materials are developed, educators must, tacitly or explicitly, know the principles of learning and how students learn.

Constructivist theorists claim that learners interpret information and the world according to their personal reality, and that they learn by observation, processing, and interpretation, and then personalize the information into personal knowledge (Cooper, 1993; Wilson, 1997).

The design of online learning materials can include principles from all three. According to Ertmer and Newby (1993), the three schools of thought can in fact be used as a taxonomy for learning. Behaviorists' strategies can be used to teach the “what” (facts), cognitive strategies can be used to teach the “how” (processes and principles), and constructivist strategies can be used to teach the “why” (higher level thinking that promotes personal meaning and situated and contextual learning).

The behaviorist school sees the mind as a “black box,” in the sense that a response to a stimulus can be observed quantitatively, totally ignoring the effect of thought processes occurring in the mind.

Learners should be told the explicit outcomes of the learning so that they can set expectations and can judge for themselves whether or not they have achieved the outcome of the online lesson. 2.  Learners must be tested to determine whether or not they have achieved the learning outcome. Online testing or other forms of testing and assessment should be integrated into the learning sequence to check the learner's achievement level and to provide appropriate feedback. 3.  Learning materials must be sequenced appropriately to promote learning. The sequencing could take the form of simple to complex, known to unknown, and knowledge to application. 4.  Learners must be provided with feedback so that they can monitor how they are doing and take corrective action if required.

Cognitivists see learning as an internal process that involves memory, thinking, reflection, abstraction, motivation, and meta-cognition.

Online instruction must use strategies to allow learners to attend to the learning materials so that they can be transferred from the senses to the sensory store and then to working memory.

Online learning strategies must present the materials and use strategies to enable students to process the materials efficiently.

information should be organized or chunked in pieces of appropriate size to facilitate processing.

Use advance organizers to activate an existing cognitive structure or to provide the information to incorporate the details of the lesson (Ausubel, 1960).

Use pre-instructional questions to set expectations and to activate the learners' existing knowledge structure.

Use prerequisite test questions to activate the prerequisite knowledge structure required for learning the new materials.

To facilitate deep processing, learners should be asked to generate the information maps during the learning process or as a summary activity after the lesson (Bonk & Reynolds, 1997).

The cognitive school recognizes the importance of individual differences, and of including a variety of learning strategies in online instruction to accommodate those differences

The Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI) (Kolb, 1984) looks at how learners perceive and process information, whereas the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1978) uses dichotomous scales to measure extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception. In the following discussion, we consider the Kolb Learning Style Inventory.

Attention: Capture the learners' attention at the start of the lesson and maintain it throughout the lesson. The online learning materials must include an activity at the start of the learning session to connect with the learners. Relevance: Inform learners of the importance of the lesson and how taking the lesson could benefit them. Strategies could include describing how learners will benefit from taking the lesson, and how they can use what they learn in real-life situations. This strategy helps to contextualize the learning and make it more meaningful, thereby maintaining interest throughout the learning session. Confidence: Use strategies such as designing for success and informing learners of the lesson expectations. Design for success by sequencing from simple to complex, or known to unknown, and use a competency-based approach where learners are given the opportunity to use different strategies to complete the lesson. Inform learners of the lesson outcome and provide ongoing encouragement to complete the lesson. Satisfaction: Provide feedback on performance and allow learners to apply what they learn in real-life situations. Learners like to know how they are doing, and they like to contextualize what they are learning by applying the information in real life.

Online strategies that facilitate the transfer of learning should be used to encourage application in different and real-life situations.

Constructivists see learners as being active rather than passive.

it is the individual learner's interpretation and processing of what is received through the senses that creates knowledge.

“the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action” (p. 12).

Learning should be an active process. Keeping learners active doing meaningful activities results in high-level processing, which facilitates the creation of personalized meaning. Asking learners to apply the information in a practical situation is an active process, and facilitates personal interpretation and relevance.

Learners should construct their own knowledge rather than accepting that given by the instructor.

Collaborative and cooperative learning should be encouraged to facilitate constructivist learning (H

When assigning learners for group work, membership should be based on the expertise level and learning style of individual group members, so that individual team members can benefit from one another's strengths.

  Learners should be given control of the learning process

Learners should be given time and opportunity to reflect.

Learning should be made meaningful for learners. The learning materials should include examples that relate to students, so that they can make sense of the information.

Learning should be interactive to promote higher-level learning and social presence, and to help develop personal meaning. According to Heinich et al. (2002), learning is the development of new knowledge, skills, and attitudes as the learner interacts with information and the environment. Interaction is also critical to creating a sense of presence and a sense of community for online learners, and to promoting transformational learning (Murphy & Cifuentes, 2001). Learners receive the learning materials through the technology, process the information, and then personalize and contextualize the information.

Figure 1-6. Components of effective online learning.

Behaviorist strategies can be used to teach the facts (what); cognitivist strategies to teach the principles and processes (how); and constructivist strategies to teach the real-life and personal applications and contextual learning. There is a shift toward constructive learning, in which learners are given the opportunity to construct their own meaning from the information presented during the online sessions. The use of learning objects to promote flexibility and reuse of online materials to meet the needs of individual learners will become more common in the future. Online learning materials will be designed in small coherent segments, so that they can be redesigned for different learners and different contexts. Finally, online learning will be increasingly diverse to respond to different learning cultures, styles, and motivations.

Online instruction occurs when learners use the Web to go through the sequence of instruction, to complete the learning activities, and to achieve learning outcomes and objectives (Ally, 2002; Ritchie & Hoffman, 1997).

Recognize their individuality

The researchers also asked students whether it mattered to them that the instructors knew their names, and more than 85 percent of them said it did

because making good use of the full physical space of a classroom is one of the most straightforward ways to keep both professor and students attentive.

One advantage of the Zoom classes that many of us are teaching right now is that the names are all right there on the screen

Speak to all corners of the room

They bring their unique life stories and experiences, which can help provide new perspectives on familiar questions and challenges.

The obvious solution here is to break that barrier

Use their names regularly.

She encourages children first to recognize and write their own names and then to compare the letters and syllables in their own names with those of the other names on the grid

What is most deserving of our attention in the classroom, of course, are the other human beings in our presence

These digital activities should not be the sole measure of tenure, but they should be counted in the tenure formula. The irony today is that if the open activity is analog (e.g., participation on a committee), it likely counts toward tenure, but if the open activity is digital (e.g., writing an academic blog), it probably does not.

They will push at (and leak out of) the boundaries of whatever learning management system (or other enterprise systems) the institution wants them to use. This is not because they are uncooperative; it's simply that these enterprise systems tend to be locked down, allowing only employees and students to share within these environments

For me, an interesting side effect of sharing on the open web is that I've learned to be more careful about what I say and write.

Looking for indicators of open digital faculty is easier than coming up with a strict definition. The presence of several of the following characteristics should be taken as an indication of open digital faculty: Writing a public blog or maintaining a public wiki to share academic interests Freely sharing what might otherwise be guarded intellectual property (e.g., textbooks, research-in-progress, computer programs, course materials, artwork) Participating in a learning community in a social networking platform (e.g., Twitter or LinkedIn discussion groups) Participating in a social network that includes students, both current and past (e.g., Facebook) Encouraging students to participate in class-related projects that employ web-based media (e.g., student blogs, group wikis) Creating or participating in open courses Sharing video or audio content created for a course (e.g., podcasts) Sharing information and ideas from conference talks on the web (e.g., recordings, tweets, presentation links)

McCrary sees moving formal office hours to the Web as the next natural step in that digital evolution. “I think this is the way of the future,” she said. “I think it will be coming one way or another.”

Lastly, keep the flowers fresh.

A sense of time is created in discussion boards because they have only that week to complete the work and there is an understanding that the conversations happen in time. But often asynchronous discussions have wide gaps of time between student interactions. One way to bring time closer to the students is to allow them to subscribe to forum threads they are involved in. You can do this in most LMS solutions. Students get an email alerting them to activity in the thread they are active in and it brings them closer “in real time” to the events happening in the class. While this can be overwhelming in larger courses, in a class of 20 or 30 students it usually does not amount to an unreasonable amount of email notifications. One of the most effective ways to bring timeliness to an online course is do a quick recap of previous week, as well as provide a preview of what is expected for the current week. Using screen capture software to go through the course and set expectations is a great way to not only share a bit of yourself with students, but it is a pre-emptive way to answer questions students commonly ask.

formal kind of learning

lifelong learning

job, learning from others, learning constantly, learning in any place, and at any time.

how to reconfigure courses into modules

enhance the learning process

ncorporation of multimedia

other technologies

online, multimedia presentations and interactive exercises with instructors and peers

synchronous and asynchronous learning,

attendance by students is not required

materials are being developed throughout the semester

online testing, various forms of assessment, and groupware discussions.

fail a module exam are required to retake the exam

two scores are averaged.

learner-centered environment

pace to match individual learning needs and styles

Web-presence

support new learning environments

increasing on/off-campus access to the teaching-learning community