I don’t know about others but I feel very un-facilitated! Doing this paper has been one of the strangest learning experiences I’ve ever had…. There doesn’t appear to be any concern if students are disappearing, or even if they are doing any work or taking part in discussions. Where is the usual lecturer follow-up of recalcitrant students? I think I’ve had one email asking where I was at and that’s about it.
Some of the resources have been most interesting, in particular I found the lecture given by Schwartz (can’t remember his first name) on choice to be really good – and something I had recently experienced when buying a car. Filtering the options down was the only way I could come to a decision – a process of eliminating options that didn’t meet my requirements until I came to one that did.
Other resources have been nothing more than discussions and of little real value, a get together so people can have a chat. Its easy to get into a discussion with others of a similar ilk that just meanders around. I found many of the 10 minute lectures to be like that, a little frustrating really. I was expecting to gain much more learning from the guest speakers.
The constant stream of online options to explore that were thrust at us was excessive to say the least. I think it would have been better to have had a source that listed these options with a descriptor of them that gave us an idea of what they were about so that an evaluation of their usefulness (or interest) could be made prior to exploration would be a better way of handling that. One of the key skills for any teacher is to get down to the level of the students and view the way they do so that the teaching/instruction can be targeted in a way that it reaches the students and they feel comfortable with it and learn from it. Going by the dropout rate for this paper it would appear that its not the case here.
5 comments:
"Other resources have been nothing more than discussions and of little real value"..
Hmm, interesting comment. Is a discussion not what you make of it? Or has your engagement with this course been more along the lines of consumer. Contrast your experience with what you might imagine the experience has been for those who have been more engaged in the discussions... has their learning evolved along the lines of socially constructed?
Though, I admit, that our facilitation of the course has been lacking in areas that you point out. Sorry for that.
Hi Garry
A lot of what you've written rings true and I can admit to still feeling more 'lost' than I've ever felt on any course... but I'm still learning. Just in a different way to how I normally approach learning! I think 'strange' probably is the word that resonates!!
I'm doing another paper along side this one (on technical appreciation of elearning tools) and in discussions there I often refer to stuff I've learned in this one. So, I just go with the flow and try to take on board what seems to work and what doesn't - and think (as you have) how this relates to the students I might teach.
Cheers
Yvonne
To a point Leigh, discussions are what you make of them and it is 'nice' to have chats in areas of interest. My impression of what the 10 minute lectures would be is just that, 10 minute lectures, not just general discussions although as pointed out earlier, some of them have been very informative.
Of course my engagement in this course has been as that of a consumer/participant, it can't really be anything else can it, and as to others experience of it, I would never deem to guess what the experience has been for them. Only they would know the answer to that.
I guess part of it for me is that I have a high level of IT knowledge already and perhaps had higher expectations than I should of what to expect on this course.
One thing I must keep in mind if we run this course again is to somehow inspire participants to write at length their expectations at the beginning of the course. I'm not entirely sure how to get that without coercion, but preferably people would write them up in their blog so we have an easy reference point later on.. I can't recall whether or not you did just that for yourself, let me check... nope, though I can see in mid September that you discovered RSS, or feeds, and some thoughts about the amount of technology we had to become familiar with. It is good to have something to look back through.
For a long time there, we were waiting for people to start and report a blog, and then to set up an RSS reader. We had already spent some time trying to come to terms with an email forum, and were keen to progress into web conferencing and wikis. Without a doubt there has been a lot of 'new' technology to come to terms with, and on reflection - I think we need more time for this to settle down so that we could all critique the existence or not of online learning communities, and brainstorm ideas of how to facilitate learning in such contexts.
To my mind at the very least we have succeeded in appreciating that there is more to 'online' than meets the eye, and that behind the scenes there is a range of technology and literacy involved that to a large extent may define the existence of online communities. So we should be able to recognise through our limited experience that an online community that communicates primarily through an email forum, is inherently different from one that communicates through individual blogs, or one that is attempting to collaborate around a wiki project, or a Second Life build, or one that meets weekly to listen to a 10 minute lecture and participate in discussion. Hopefully we can recognise the different contexts and needs in those communities and start to consider facilitation roles in those contexts.
Perhaps, if this course has begun something new for some people, the bigger inquiry will remain a question to pursue from now on.. that would be nice. For others, this initial taste may have been enough to confirm what is of immediate use to their teaching contexts here and now, facilitation of online learning communities aside.
Garry
It is good to know that you have gleaned some goodness out of the smorgasboard on offer. I guess we could have stuck to the directed activities on Blackboard, however right from the start, people started bucking the system and wanting more.
The reality of a diverse group like this is the difficultly of bringing people together in an "artificial community", and facilitating their development as a community.
I am not sure about the drop out rate you refer to - only one person formally left. One contributed actively until she had to go to another country and one never engaged at all. The rest engaged at varying degrees due to busy schedules and there is nothing any facilitator could do to avoid that. As you may well find out in the future, in an online community there are always lurkers, and lurking does not mean drop out, it means they just preferred to interact on another level.
Bron
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