Personal Blogs

1000 words isn't very many for 12 questions.

It's like doing one of those answer in less than 100 words things 12 times.

Can't believe anyone could even get close to less than 500 words.

Done!

I wasn't really sure in places how much weighting to put on learner choices vs practitioner choices vs my own experience in the activities.

I found the last part quite hard at first, as it wasn't entirely obvious what "learner experiences" could be looked at above and beyond those that had already been covered.  However, given recent experiences with offering our courses to Chinese students and their differences in expectations from the online course, this seemed like a good option to look at and easily gave me 500 words.

As with TMA01, the main problem with the TMA seemed to be keeping to the word limit given the amount of papers we have looked at to discuss, plus the fact they encourage us to include references to forum posts and also wider reading (using the magic extra time we can all summon up from nowhere).

Finding relevant forum posts to include with this one was a lot harder than TMA01, as the forums have been a lot quieter in this block.  There were some useful points raised in a recent elluminate session though, which I included.

In our elluminate session this evening, Bill expressed a lot of concern about being able to measure the educational benefit of certain tools (such as the blog).  This bothered me in a way as I think it misses the bigger picture to an extent.

In the courses we run at work, the measurable effect we have on our use of technology is the fact that since introducing it the pass rates and retention rates of our distance learning students have massively increased.  Also, we've gone from getting feedback highlighting a feeling of isolation to generally appreciating the fact that they can learn as part of a group in spite of being so spread out.

In all our courses, I can see how much an individual student is engaging with the activities, and there are tasks included to assess their progress through the course, so we can see how they're getting along.  We can also see how well students are engaging with particular activities and tools in general.

It's not always possible to see evidence that each individual task has benefitted each individual student.  However, my aim is to get them through the course as a whole rather than each individual activity in turn and I can track progress for that.

OK, if you wanted me to demonstrate the educational benefit of each individual tool and each individual activity, I would struggle, but I could do it for the course as a whole.

What I look for in the courses I design is that students are generally engaging with the activities and demonstrating progress through the course ready for the exams.

I have my ideas for the intended aims for each individual task and tool, but at the end of the day, if a student uses it in a different way, which they feel is of benefit to them and still clearly demonstrates progress through the course, I can suggest other ways they might like to look at things, but I'm not going to complain they're not doing things my way.

For a tool such as blogs, we use Moodle like the OU does for our VLE, so providing these doesn't cost us any extra, the students that use them seem to enjoy using them and find them useful, but they're not actively assessed on them.  I couldn't tell you how educationally beneficial they were in comparison to other tools by themselves, but they're part of a course that demonstrably increases students knowledge and skills to analyse issues within the wine trade.

While the students I have that are in the trade or want to join the trade are at least in part taking the course to be able to demonstrate they have some knowledge and skills relating to the industry, the students that are just interested consumers with no aspirations to work in the industry are just looking for something that's fun that will help them learn a bit about wine.  The course has to cater to both needs, it's got to be both educational and enjoyable.  While you would never want to design a course that was boring, the fun bit becomes all the more important when students become more like paying customers.

In short, if a tool is clearly being used for a purpose that the students feel is useful and enjoy and they are clearly progressing through the course itself, how important is it that you can clearly measure the educational benefit of the individual tool/task for each individual?

So, having said I'd kick-start his blog into life to help with my studies after the Week 10 activity on blogging, we're now one month later and I haven't posted anything.

Best laid plans of mice and h800 students and all that.

In going back into the other activities, I must admit during the week's, while there were occasions where I though "oh yes, I must post some thoughts to that blog", most of the time I just completely forgot about it.  Even at the points I did think about it, I was in the middle of doing another activity.  Then you get to the end of the activity, stop and hey presto the intention has got burried alive by other thoughts.

In H808, there was more incentive to blog as you needed to demonstrate reflection for the assessment, but also I think (although this may just be my memory of the course being wrong) that there were more activities suggesting things to blog about.

This was one of the things I mentioned to Shaun in the forums, in that personally I would find it easier to blog on here if there were occasional prompts of ideas to blog about.

With a lot of the activities on the course, they give you points to think about, and we all write down our thoughts as posts in the forums.  At which point the vast majority of my thinking has already been written about either in my initial posts or in the replies on there.  If I have anything more I feel I need to add, I tend to add it to the forum.

I've just been relistening to the elluminate session we had the other week to get some thoughts out of it for the TMA.  Most of the discussions there are things that we've discussed in the forums, but with Shaun raising thoughts and questions it gives you another prompt to rethink in the light of.

The main reason I've come back to the blog now, is because I've had a prompt to rethink how I've approach the blog in the form of TMA2 without this I think it would have probably continued to sit here collecting dust for a bit longer.