Personal Blogs

One of the themes considered so far is the idea of an elearning professional and the competencies that might be required.  A study of the posts available in the elearning category reveals a huge diversity of roles and titles. There seemed to be two main types of role, one more technical and the other more pedagogic, embedding technology into teaching and learning and supporting staff in ways to do this.  Few of the roles here were teaching roles, though some had an element of training.  In contrast the studies of competencies by Hiller (2002) and Goodyear relate to teaching and teaching online.  It's far from clear, therefore, exactly what an elearning professional is.  My own role includes both forms, a distance tutor using a range of technologies to support learners and as a Learning Technologist, involved in developing online courses and resources for others and promoting education technology to teaching staff.  Supplementary activity 3.2 was an interesting discussion around developing a list of technologies for elearning and the underlying competencies required of an elearning professional. I contributed to a wiki, adding to the technologies.  To try an tease out the underlying competencies I added a section on 'issues', designed to explore the different issues that an elearning technologist needed to understand.

Goodyear, P., Salmon G.,  Spector, J.M., Steeples, C.,Tickner, S. , (2001) Competences for Online Teaching: A Special Report in  Education Technology Research and Development Vol. 49. No.1

Hillier, Y. (2002) 'The quest for competence, good practice and excellence' (online), The Higher Education Academy. Available from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/id494_quest_for_competence