I have done this twice and scoring over 82% both times I was able to join the waiting list to become a mentor. I became a menot a year or 18 months later. This role has diminished over the last 2 years as Coursera have moved away from the volunteer mentor approach. It's hard to mentor over 1 million students however many mentors you have! Peer support within each cohort is now favoured (as happens on FutureLearn).
Click here to join > Learning How To Learn
This an industry series of presentation and panel discussions hosted by Kineo showing how far ahead the world outside education has advance in terms of online training, developing its staff and solving business problems.
Keen to include what industry is doing with elearning to compare this to learning. This is the from the Kineo website. Digital First
Increased agility – ability to respond to ever changing needs at great pace.
Learner-centric UX – content and delivery are in a medium that suit and engage the learner.
Self-service approach – access to content, where and when learners need it.
Enhanced collaboration – facilitate better learning, knowledge sharing and problem solving.
Improved impact – better results for business and employee performance.
Increased satisfaction – higher levels of engagement through improved experience.
Innovation – continuous improvement, adding value faster with less disruption.
Reduced costs – a shift to just in time delivery and learning in the flow of work.
ELearning in industry is not produced and delivered by a teacher; it is designer, producer and managed by a team within a business
I believe the provenance of this blog post it my analysis of the stages of e-learning design taught during the MAODE, modelled on the OU's approach and based on Gilly Salmon's 'five steps' of e-tivities. Though EMA suggests it was part of an 'End of Module Assessment'. It looks handy so I want to know I have it somewhere!
What you should do (the corporate perspective):
Identify a clear business problem or opportunity to which e-learning can be effectively applied.
Choose the provider based on two things:
their clear solution to the business need
a means of measuring the value that solution delivers
H800 EMA on Learning Schedule (OU MAODE) Flowchart
Learning Technologist | Course | Students | Tutor |
Work to support students onto the ‘learning journey’ we’ve created. Field technical, subject and course questions where necessary turning to IT or the Tutor. | Introduction Activity Details and Schedule Resources References Outcomes | Read through activity Gather thoughts Gallery of photos Blogs Share something | Set up notices, links and timings for activities and resources in VLE Prompt actions Handle matters arising |
Moderate/Mediate the ice-breaker. Even if the students know each other, the LT will be new to them, and possibly the room too. Support individual students to locate, grab and load an image. Add captions and tags. | Activity Ice-Breaker Share experience, knowledge and insights relating to this part of the course. | Have them share something about their personal experience of the platform or topic. A task they enjoyed, a memorable event, a tool they have come to love or loathe. What are their expectations for the next year? | Insights into students and expectations. Encourage them to study independently. Set this as an assignment. Give grade and feedback. Or quiz them on it at next session. |
Help them put these thoughts/memories down somewhere in words or with visuals. (This can be preparation for adding something to the blog later on). | Share your ideas with others. Read and comment. Create lengthier blog entry with photos, drawings or maps. Seek out and share further references. | ||
Discover and link to content related blogs. Save the links to these. Add a note on them and maybe do a screengrab. | |||
Collaborate with a.n.other in the first task. Basic collection of data: research the topic, Grab an image. write some text. Ad the image and text. Add credit. Add tags. Title and publish. | |||
Share ? To class and tutor. To the wider world. To the LT only? | |||
Reflect on the activity. Open session heads away from the screen. | View, review and provide feedback. | ||
Read student blogs and provide feedback. | Blog on your own. Press on with the activities. | Read student blogs and provide feedback. |
H800 EMA on Learning Schedule (OU MAODE) E-tivity Flowchart
PHASE ONE
TECHNICAL | LEARNING | SUPPORT |
Learning Management System: Google Classroom Web Design Solid, accessible, intuitive, familiar, up to date | Soft touch Immediately test | AI or Human intervention where required |
Support components FAQs | ||
Learning components: Videos, Reading, Quizzes, Assignments |
We should be contributing to this conversation.
EdTech > My head is being blown apart by the depth, quality and insight of the speakers at the EdTech Schools and Academy Show. The vMix platform for delivering this online conference to many thousands of people is also impressive.
Listening to Daniel Susskind had me reaching to Amazon so I have his book and will be reading it in any break I get today.
Everyone needs to know how to 'get into the flow'.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tells us how:
To watch > Flow by Csikszentmihalyi
Csikszentmihalyi, M (2020) The 8 Characteristics of Flow. [accessed 17/11/2020]
Changing behaviours takes time and involves others. Educating young competitive swimmers on the benefits of eating a nutritious meal three times a day - with suitability healthy snacks too - is one thing, getting them to change their behaviour is quite another.
Pushing it to the post-grad level here is some further reading:
During the first lockdown the family quiz became the thing. Six location, six family hubs, my sister with her hubby, my wife and I, her kids from California and Newcastle, my own kids from London, and nephew also from London.
Eight months on and at the same time, on the same night I've got two organisations pushing a global quiz, the above from my old school (I attended unwillingly for three years and go out after O' Levels) while the Western Front Association has gone from branch, to national to an international Zoom offering too. Here we have tested the water with webinars first too New Zealand and Australia, and most recently from New Zealand and coming soon from Canada.
What has the world come to? Not so much the Global Village, as the Global Sofa - or wherever the shared space might be.
I'm attending a face to face PGCE class so won't be able to to this. Had I been at home I may well have had to screens open and followed the class while answering the quiz - like a simultaneous exhibition of chess.
Assessment and Feedback
Learning as a journey or skill acquisition to be the best that you can be, either like interrailing between London and Rome via Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna, and Madrid, or running a swimming club for disability swimmers.
A disability a person may have can be physical or mental, or a combination of both and will present itself along a spectrum.
Accessibility set up
On/ off
Chair, position of screen and keyboard
Touch screen - voice activated
What is being assessed? Know what they can do, believe what they could do.
Find content
Differentiate between true and false, safe and dangerous
Profile and passwords
Employability
What 10 Digital Skills do Employers most want ?
The ability to understand and utilize social media effectively.
Search engine marketing
Analytics
Content marketing
Mobile
Strategy & Planning
Social Selling
Pay per click
Video
From NESTA
Animation
Multimedia production
Design in engineering
Building and maintaining IT systems and networks
Research and quantitative data analysis
Suggestions
Respond to and send email
Complete an online form (application)
Create a profile and then a CV
Safeguarding yourself and others
Take part in an online discussion
Do an interactive quiz
Find your way to x
Purchase a ticket
Decide if something is true or false
Activity 1
Simple computer related tasks
Book something
Answer a question
Communicate
Organise: a trip to the beach, to see a film...
Activity 2
What was your grade?
Grade yourself
Grade others
Activity 3
Feedback to students based on their needs.
Complete a workbook
Yes/no answers
Add an image
Tell me your learning story
Outcome
Explain what is meant by accessibility (who it applies to and who benefits)
Explain what feedback is.
Explain how the above differ in the digital domain
List some strategies for implementing digital assessment and feedback methods for a variety of students with accessibility needs.
Create a working example of both digital assessment and digital feedback in practice
My students for 'Sports Nutrition' could vary between GPs and nutritionists to the young swimmer new to competitive swimming. I expect to split the class between swimmers and parents/guardians, and by age and by default, within reason, educational attainment. Talking to primary school swimmers will be different to college and secondary school students - especially those with a science A level.
Simply offering further reading is one approach. I also have papers on 'compliance' and the vital role of the parent/guardian to changing behaviours so that they are aligned with what a competitive club would expect.
I'm onto something using hand shape from swimming to relate to portion sizes of carbohydrates, protein and fat in swimming nutrition.
This can start with the hand on the face to create the cupped hand for the 'catch', and the cupped hand for grains, pastas, and bread. And then use the flat hand shown here for a portion of protein, such as fish, chicken, an egg or nuts.
Before moving onto the clenched fist for fruit & veggies and a thumb for fat.
All part of a sports nutrition course I am developing for my swimming club.
When you're on a roll you have to take more on. There is method here. By filling up my day with education I don't leave space for other distractions. I always have something on my mind, something else to start, from other social media projects, to applying to be a Governor, to saying yes to standing in a local election (again), to needing to learn the Adobe Creative Products I now have a licence for ... to reading the 27 books I have stacked up to review ... event to purchasing rights to a book to turn it into a TV series. There aren't enough hours in the day, which rather suggests I need to delegate, or tema-up, even start a business again.
I do all the course, so I need to do this one. Something else I need to give 3 hours a week.
Along with:
Gabriel Byrne Saturday Live BBC Radio 4 9:37am
Gabriel Byrne was on (via Zoom to Maine) to talk about his autobiography, which took hm from Ireland to Hollywood. At one point he said "When you listen to someone fully it's like a prayer.".
Can a teacher do that? Like Robin Williams in 'Dead Poet's Society' - where the students hang on your every word? It requires a bit of the religious. It takes story telling.
This is wonderful from
Five Reasons from the wonderful Xina Gooding Broderick
You didn’t set aside sufficient time to complete your course so create a timetable. Build in compassion. Build in flexibility and re-schedule. Adjust for it. And move in. We’re going for progress, not perfection.
You didn’t realise it would be as challenging as it is. See Barbara Oakley on ‘Learning How To Learn’. The physiology of procrastination and defeat. Do study skills. Know your learning style. Get plenty of rest. Find a way to embed that learning. Podcasts. Take them on a walk.
You didn’t ask for help when you needed it. Speak to your tutor or teacher. Keep asking until you understand. You need to understand this.
No accountability. When left to your own devices.
You downgraded your requirement for completing it. What are your pros and cons. Every component to decide if this is correct for you in the first place.
Could I use this?
John Carroll
Given the student profile, do I end up giving some of them or all of them the opportunity to learn in the time available? Knowing the potential group would it be better to split the group, rather than trying to cater for everyone all in one go? Self-paced learning can overcome this by signalling the choices a visitor to web content might take: fonts, graphics and image choices indicate the age range and for two extremes, kids with a brightly promoted online colouring book can be differentiated from parents in the know who are offered academic papers in the form of a link to a PDF to read.
There can only be ONE thread in a live classroom. In self-paced learning you can branch it, so letting a student find the way that is best suited to their knowledge, understanding and desired pace.
In 15 minutes there is little need for perseverance.
Achievement is the witness of the 'before' plate from the 'after' plate.
There are six elements to Carroll's model: (1)
Academic Achievement: the outcome
Aptitude: The "the amount of time a student needs to learn a given task, unit of instruction, or curriculum to an acceptable criterion of mastery under optimal conditions of instruction and student motivation" (Carroll, 1989: 26). "High aptitude is indicated when a student needs a relatively small amount of time to learn, low aptitude is indicated when a student needs much more than average time to learn" (Carrol: 1989: 26).
Opportunity to Learn: i.e. the amount of time available for learning (classwork, homework and private study). Carroll (1998:26) notes that "frequently, opportunity to learn is less than required in view of the students aptitude". Slow down. Take your time. Pace it. Provide opportunities for questions, feedback and going over something multiple times. (Where digital resources come into their own).
Ability to Understand Instruction: This relates to learning skills, information needed to understand, and language comprehension. Know your students before. Get to know them during.
Quality of Instruction: Plan the lesson with your students in mind. Follow Gagne's nine general steps of instruction for learning (2).
Perseverance: Amount of time a student is willing to spend on a given task or unit of instruction. This is an operational and measurable definition for motivation for learning.
REFERENCEWhat does the literature tell us:
Van Gundy
Engetrom - learning communities. Put it online with Meet and Breakout rooms.
Ritchey (20070 - 'Wicked Problems' are not 'true or false' but 'better or worse'. Social problems are complex and wicked. So called 'Tame Problems', even as complex as chess, have a scientific or mathematical solution so are not 'wicked' or 'messy'.
Some time ago I abandoned folders for any files feeling that I could find anything with a search, I have learnt that if content is to be shared with colleagues folders matter, but my own stuff is like autumn leaves in a gentle breeze. It's all 'there' and has been going up for nearly 20 years.
It applied to floppy discs, CD-roms and external memory block thingys - which is why I moved to a blog in 1999 as a deposit for everything. That was on Diaryland. Several years of posting every day to that and I skipped through LiveJournal and Tumblr and then settled on WordPress in 2007 where I have been since.
And here I am on my OU Personal Blog - long may it last. A repository that is as likely to be a note or cut and paste job to me (private), OU module work (OU logged in) or the the world.
Anyway, I use tags copiously and need to have my virtual brain picked for ideas and found this >
According to Selwood and Twining (2005), ‘Action research is vitally important with respect to the use of ICT in education’ (p. 7). They suggest that, because action research has the aim of improving practice rather than necessarily contributing to a body of theoretical knowledge, action research is more likely than ‘conventional’ research to generate recommendations that can be implemented easily in practice. They argue that encouraging practitioners to engage in action research can promote wider and better uses of ICT in education.
This matters to planned research alongside developing ideas with creative students.
These are notes from H809 on using RefWorks
Selwood and Twining also note that action research is often confused with other kinds of activities. For example, does Reading 5 count as action research because it has the aim of improving practice? Or is it ‘conventional research’ because it uses a quasi-experimental comparison between groups rather than a progressive action-then-review cycle?
More problematically, without an experimental research design, is it possible to tell whether a given technological innovation is responsible for identified improvements in practice?
Conversely, could it be that action research projects might identify improvements in teaching and learning that then fail to be picked up by traditional student testing? So just how can the impact of technology on education be determined?
Selwood, I. and Twining, P. (2005) Action Research [online], Coventry, Becta, http://archive.teachfind.com/ becta/ research.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/ downloads/ page_documents/ research/ practitioner_research_paper.pdf (Last accessed 11 January 2013).I'm reminded of the character who invited me to sit in on a rehearsal for a conference or lecture you wish to give recruitment or referrals as a form of recruitment.
And it was that practice exercise with eight, nine or ten family and friends that he used to hone what spawned into lecture series and then a book.
It must therefore be the case that practice or rehearsal, like any performance, is required before the main event - unless of course treated like stand-up comedy and you learn on the job on the other hand maybe that is what teaching is about that it is.
What I consider not so great is that one's first endeavors should be the ones that are graded when you had no opportunity to practice for five minutes, in front of a group or 10 minutes in front group, let alone 15 minutes.
On the other hand as a trainee teacher I would have been expected to have been in the class for many hours a week teaching in any case; that would have afforded me plenty of practice, simply overcoming nerves at the beginning.
I start to reflect on my preference for the end of year exam. You spend the year rehearsing responses in practice essays and tutorials. By the time you get to the examination room you will have refined, improved and concentrated your thoughts on a subject. What is the point of grading someone within a few months of starting a new course?
You'd think that I would have remembered this earlier than today. Sometimes the thing under your nose is not the thing you recognise. As a trainee teacher I can surely draw on her home schooling me through my 4th A Level in Art. I never saw her teaching though.
I have to wonder if a girl I had a crush on telling me she would never go out with the son of a teacher embarrassed me so much that I put it to the back of my mind.
Tell me about it? Is the line she so often used to have us open up to talk about our marks on the page.
She taught us art from as soon as we could hold a pencil in our fingers. We each had our area of interest:
Many decades on I took up life drawing with a vengeance, I've been attending sessions in Brighton and at Charleston for the last four years.
When I draw I hear my mother's tips in my ear.
When I visit a gallery, I hear my mother walk me around.
Two minutes into my micro-teach I realised that I was trying to cram 45 minutes to an hour into 15 minutes. I really like the first speaker who was relaxed, set a simple task, got feed back and fed us some knowledge and had moments to spare.
I rattle through some of the slides.
Something I would never have done professionally when I have written scripts: 2 to 3 minutes per slides would have meant 5 slides not 26 !!!
I thought that I could have addressed one element of nutrition, say carbohydrates. Actually I could have taken out the opener, driven it with the hand actions related to swim coaching.
This is what I am talking about > PGCE MSM Optimal Nutrition
I have full notes from the feedback part of the session and three written reports too.
Over three decades ago I sat in an edit suite at Molinare on Great Marlborough Street to edit 'Which Firm of Solicitors?' a video and book we were sending out to law undergraduates. To create the title sequence we hired a freelance designer in who created the sequence by getting six one inch tape machines to coordinate their output. I can do this with an EFX in iMovies or Adobe Premier.
Captions required a person a desk alongside the sound engineer and editor.
Captions were keyed in and as meticulously placed as blocks of letter in a printing press. I do these off the keyboard in any App or platform that supports video.
I am the one man band I was in my teens and early twenties - the one man band I was glad to escape from - yet here I am once more. My trajectory has taken a few turns, life moments and decisions that took me away from the action rather than towards it.
I wasn't so mentally suited to the brutal competition of the 'media'. A jobbing director is in an even worse position than a jobbing actor.
So creating video is now more akin to painting by numbers?
There's some methodology and science behind this edit. I'm not beholden to putting captions in a set place. I can change the size, font and positioning. Some research says put the caption where the eyes are taken - place them close to the action. Our field of attention is that small, don't be shy and leave captions to the fringes along the bottom. If you have to pause to read them you have failed.
And remember, the viewer can as easily pull up subtitles if this is what they want. When it comes to learning it is my prefered approach because then you see how a word is spelt as well as hear how it is pronounced and thus you have a greater chance of recalling it.
Contrary to their PR blurb Duke University, Michigan were not the first in the world to aim to put, or to put all their HE courses online: the Open University got there 16 years earlier. We too often forget this in the UK as universities such as Coventry (with OU staff running the team) doing the same.
And now everyone doing it.
Taking up a course with the OU in early 2001, the MA in Open and Distance Learning (MAODL) I got a cardboard box containing some text books and DVDs. We went online for a threaded noticeboard thingey.
Picking up the MA in Open and Distance Education (MAODE) a decade later and going on to graduate in 2013 everything was online: a variation (not much changed) of this blog cum noticeboard platform, Cloudworks, a version of Meet or Zoom technically a decade ahead of its time, though sometimes like dragging yourself through brambles in a Guernsey jumper.
We had Cloudworks, others no offer Padlet, Jamboard and Trello.
Having an idea for something is never good enough; having the resources, team skills and even power or energy to make it happens is what counts.
And then which platform comes to rule over them all?
Gilly Salmon's five stages of e-tivities still applies, perhaps more so. Students (and colleagues) need quite a bit of 'onboarding' to feel confident enough with and familiar enough with a new platform in order to be able to contribute. Some get left behind, some run with it to the point of taking over.
The trick is to return to the platform over and over again. Help people use it, master it and enjoy it. Leave no one behind.
For me a new platform needs a mentor or coach, a voice I can trust to talk me through step by step showing me how this new platform applies to me. I then need to go over this repeatedly, take baby steps, make mistakes, take constructive feedback, and then make my contribution a weekly, if not a daily habit.
Another platform is never the answer. Having colleagues and students each wishing to show off and use the latest 'thing' they have found does not work either. There has to be common ground.
I feel a platform as simple as this OU blog is common ground. It does what is required. Even though I have WordPress blogs, I far prefer to post here. It is simple. It is immediate. I don't need to be pushing it on social media. I can be private to me, limited to those logged-in or shared to the world.
As my 15 minute micro-teach takes shape the idea of having students draw a plate of food to show what they had for breakfast is turning problematic when I give it a go in practice.
My 24 year old daughter things its childish (I don't. I think wax crayons and felt-tip pens are comforting and fun reminders of nursery school).
The issue in practice is the time I give to people within the 15 minutes.
This is not the test of their ability to do a drawing of a piece of bacon (fairly easy) or baked beans (a little more tricky) or porridge (advanced to impossible).
It is simply to create a talking point. The solution therefore is that they use a black felt-tip pen only to draw and outline and then write what it is.
I can say they'd have a chance to colour it in after the class, or for homework
It might be 10 years since I ran something like this; that was a 'creativity, innovation and change' workshop. I had what amounted to a swim coach's lesson plan with strict timings of when we should be moving through the tasks.
With only 15 minutes I'll be doing the same on Thursday.
I will even script it and record a video (we may not be able to go into an evening session at college).
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