Group items tagged

Whether taking a face-to-face or online course, students must be able to manage their own learning.

onsider ways to facilitate self-regulation in your students by encouraging metacognitive awareness, promoting time management, encouraging social interaction, and providing effective, efficient, and appealing learning materials.

To succeed in online discussions and other online course activities, participants must have basic social skills including the ability to: listen (read) and comprehend classmate postings ask appropriate questions assist others through supporting comments build on the work of others take on the role of devil's advocate or other perspectives to promote discussion synthesize information and ideas presented by classmates and make a unique contribution participate in a timely manner

I experienced that learning is socially constructed in the online environment.

I also just talked  to Lisa about what I knew, what I had learned, and about my thoughts and feelings on our topics of … discussion!  I had created my first true discussion post. 

These experiences “highlight one of the fundamental differences between the F2F classroom and the online learning environment. ‘Discussion’, or the students’ contributions/posts/interactions in the online course, take on a significant importance in an online classroom. Rather than an extemporaneous activity by a select vocal few in the front row of a F2F classroom, effectively designed online interaction and learning activities are designed to engage all students in the course with the content, with the instructor, and with each other” (Pickett, 200

Adult learning principles

General instructional strategy

evel Type Description Level I Passive The learner acts solely as a receiver of information and progresses linearly through the course, reading text from the screen, viewing video, or listening to audio. We discourage this level. Level II Limited interaction The learner makes simple responses to instructional cues such as multiple choice or true/false questions. Level III Moderate participation The learners may drag-and-drop objects or respons-es, or answer multiple-choice questions about realistic scenarios. This is our preferred level of interaction because it optimizes the trade-off between active learning and course development time. Level IV Real-time participation This includes highly realistic interaction such as simu-lations of software interactions or role-plays of inter-personal situations.

Instructional MOOCs (xMOOCs) have basically removed learner support, at least in terms of human (instructor) support, but this has resulted in a very low number of MOOC learners passing end-of-course assessments of learning. Indeed, prior research into credit-based learning has established that instructor online ‘presence’ is a critical factor in retaining students. So far, it has proved difficult to scale up learner support on a massive scale, except through the use of computer technology, such as automated feedback. However, Carey and Trick (2013) and indeed faculty at elite institutions who are offering xMOOCs (see Thrun and ‘the Magic of the Campus‘) have argued that such computer support does not support ‘the learning that matters most’.

computer-based approaches to learner support to date has been inadequate for formal assessment of higher order learning skills such as original, critical or strategic thinking, evaluation of strategies or alternative explanations.

In cMOOCs that are more like communities of practice and thus contain many participants with already high levels of expertise, that expertise and judgement can be provided by the participants themselves