eLearning blog

Personal impression
I started this course with strong preconceptions. I had them not about the course but about elearning. I do understand that elearning is here to stay, but I still prefer face-to-face learning. Since elearning is so young then perhaps we have not found the right way how to do it: theoretical concepts are arising and practical experiences as well. After 5 years the world (concepts) of elearning are bit different.
I also do realise that the facilitator/professor is no longer the only source of the truth, but I still miss classroom discussions (IRL), somehow it seems to me that synergy is better there. You can argue and you hear answers straight away. In elearning everything takes place in some time period. If not msn/or skype (but skype is not so easy to use yet, the quality of connection is not
stable) then there is always some time between arguments. Sometimes it is good (if arguments are angry), but to me it kills the synergy.
It seems to me that to have an excellent online project together is a huge challenge. This kind of projects will be more successful when participants have met each other or are the same level (possess similar knowledge). If not, then there will be some frustration among participants.

What else did I learn?

First some practical note: communication between representatives of different cultures can be problematic. Not everything is understood the way you think. This is for sure. After one episode I tried to be more careful while writing my posts. The result of that was perhaps my statements were not so strong as they should have been. But in this i am not sure.

The patterns of behaviours are different. It was interesting to see how different people behave. As learning in formal educational system to me always has something to do with the power, it was interesting to see how representatives of different cultures deal with it. It would be interesting to analyse these patterns.

How hard it is to come out with common understand about something. For example: I proposed several times to use in our course design term “football” and not soccer and did put also some links what did support my proposal (to me FIFA is a strong argument). Still we had no common understanding and used football and soccer at the same time. Create common understand before you act? Or act anyway? In my opinion common understanding is very important and this can be created only with cooperation (this was the reason why I tried to comment other work in our wikispaces as much as I could).

It is hard to motivate somebody if you can’t have a personal contact: emails are easy to miss. (so have telephone number and an address!). About motivation I did write several times. To me intrinsic motivation is very thin and it depends on several other aspects than just a will of humans. It does not mean that it does not exist, but during learning process intrinsic motivation is easy to die. If learner will have the feeling of failing then intrinsic motivation gets damaged and does not drive anymore.

Don’t cover the facts. I think that the students of this course should have known before that some students will join later. It would have helped to avoid the feeling of loneliness in the group.

If some members of the project-group do know each other and live/work together - it is easier for them to cooperate with each other than with members of the group with whom they have not met. If one school has several students participating in this course the learning outcome might be better because they have a chance to discuss things/subjects with each other.

In online course always accommodate students with good channels for discussion. Even if some students don’t understand the subject it is possible for them to observe the discussion and still have a better understanding about the subject. I’m not sure if everybody did get what is course design all about.

If you want to have an excellent project and communication - first you must have some plan and structure. Otherwise you will loose a lot of time while scratching and gain nothing.

What else? I thought a lot about self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation. The problem with them is that even though I like the concepts I have never seen this working out in formal course at university level. My presumption is that the preconditions for self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation are not preformed.

I did learn something about football :). The idea that football could be the subject of our course was great (so we have to thank Oleg) and now it seems to me that everything can be taught in online / elearning way. Wow, this is something! So there is a huge plus to elearning / online courses side 

As learning process is a development process then learners want frequent feedback (especially if they are not having weekly classroom meeting): am I considering every (most) aspects of this phenomena? Is my argumentation logical? In formal educational system were there are some home assignments: how are my assignments done?

Taking responsibility for your own learning.

Well …
I think I did take the responsibility for my own learning. In my opinion learning materials were great and they raised several new ideas. I tried to reflect the practise (incl this course) and the feelings/thoughts/ideas I had during this learning process. Actually this was a first experience to me to formalise (write down) my thoughts and comments. This gives a good overview when and what I learned.
At one point I thought about self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation as how far these concepts are from real life. Now I think that perhaps the preconditions of these things are misunderstood.
If we are taking a look to our students in this course, it can not be that only some 20% of students take a full responsibility of their learning. (Around 25% did finally the tasks required to complete this course). To me there is a conflict between theory and practise.

About feedback - If I would have to decide now again whether to join this course, then I would think hard and probably would not join.
I wrote into several posts my feedback: materials great, course too intensive, more feedback and support from the facilitators is needed, next time try to use the forum also and discuss there interesting subjects (not formal information about the course) and add some pictures or jokes about elearning (have some fun); clarify your target group, be in dialogue with students (and make sure that the learning takes place - that people learn ‘right’ things). Elearning is more demanding and that includes facilitators also. If you want students to take the responsibility of their learning than you must take it (responsibility) also. Analyse this course: what worked out and what did not. I don’t know whether there are some quality measures, but to me it seems that if from the group of 8 only 3 graduates, then this is not a success story. Sry. Try to get some information (data) when and why people decided to leave this course. Read reflections and try to understand why do people have negative feelings about this course (last reflections of participants describe having negative feelings about this course and I share their feelings, the conflict I had/described several weeks ago is still there). If necessery collect data about it. Analyse your pedagogical approach: I’m not sure that everything was ok there. Give students more freedom: some elective material, alternative assignments (wikis, more than 1 possible headings for essay per week). Have plan B for the course.

So, this was the last post. Dear reader, have a wonderful summer and take care!

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
You can improve something all the time, but it is important to understand that there is a time to draw the line. I’m kind of perfectionist sometimes and I can see the mistakes and want to improve them. We can’t do it for ever

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
We finished our course design and this was interesting. Unfortunally only 2 of us had the strength to carry out all the course more-or-less on time, but I’m glad that Robert joined us eventually.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
This time no

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How to improve our course. What are the weaknesses right now and what should we do.
but well: we don’t do with our course anything anymore I’m glad this is over

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools
MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflection, Wikispaces - to reorganise our space. Skype also.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
Jasna to discuss/synchronise our activities.
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Feedback for group1

I have observed your work from the beginning and first I would like to congratulate you: nice work!

So just few comments what you might consider:
It would be great if you could specify what can students expect from facilitators? What kind of activities or feedback and when.

Your structure of course web page is good, but seems a little statical/boring. Just something ‘extra’ - a picture or joke could do the job. One recommendation: just look at the pages through eyes of the students and try to make it more student-friendly.

About schedule: 10 weeks seems a long time (for every iteration 2 weeks). I just wonder whether students will remain motivated. Maybe you don’t need 10 weeks for this subject?

And a little about evaluation: there was one question I did not understand: “Evaluate the quality of the overall concrete arraingements of the course”. Perhaps you can specify that? This was the reason why I did not answer to this question.
The second thing is that I did not understand were you want me to put my free feedback? As in evaluation-page says ” post free comments on the discussion area of this page for evaluating our groups course prototype” I tried to do that (leave free comments on the discussion area), but failed many times.

Self-reflection:
Did i achieve my objectives? Use the criteria what you developed to assess how well did you work. Reflect, what worked and what did not?

Basically yes.
First category of questions was about educational science and I have deeper understand about them. I have gone deeper into theory, I tried to observe the environment around me and I tried to make sense about my previous experience, to analyse how learning takes place; how to understand self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation. Non of those questions is black or white question with only one correct answer - so there is a lot of discover in the future as well. But: with this (theoretical) part and with my thinking about it I am actually extremely satisfied.
Second goal was: to have some knowledge (just facts) about different technological possibilities how to implement good elearning course. Well: I did have some knowledge about it. Some of them while reading course materials, going through different environments and writing/reading stuff about good/bad criteria.

With my criterias I am not very satisfied because they are not fully supporting my goals :). Some feedback about this would have been useful. But still:

1. Know how to use different technological tools while implementing good elearning course.
I know how and why to use different social technologies.

2. Reading and learning reflections are done.
They are done.

3. Reflections and/ or comments and/or contributions to the group-work consists argumentation about self-directed learning, intrinsic motivation and different approaches to the learning.
Here I have not formulated my criteria correctly (one reason is my developing skill writing in English). Reflections and comments to the reading material do consist argumentation. My contribution to the group-work does not. But I’m not sure whether it would have been helpful to write there thoughts like I have about these subjects. Still: the contribution to our group-work has not been small and during discussions I tried to add ideas and support them with some argumentation.

What worked and what did not….

I wrote quite many comments on that what did not work
I still think that course needs to be redesigned. Sry for that :(. The load of the first weeks was extremely high and left no room for groups to start communicate. The communication part (why I have to write so many reflections about learning and reading if nobody reads them and we have no discussion about them???) did not work. I think that forum might help here and writing comments to each others blogs as one weekly assignment, but surely facilitators comments are the one’s everybody is waiting.

Students of this course had too different backgrounds: from undergraduate to doctoral studies. It is clear that those people do have different needs, but the course did not consider that. Plus we had different backgrounds (some IT, some education). Again: forum might have helped to find people with common knowledge or background. I think it would have big help to me. The idea about people sharing their knowledge with each other works better for people with similar backgrounds. Otherwise some don’t understand and some are not motivated because there is nothing in it for them.

Materials were good. Most of them I liked very much and they helped me to achieve my goals and they made me think. One suggestion: have some material as compulsory and some as elective. This gives you also possibility to support self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation.

This different cultures thing … it’s a bit problematic. One possibility is to set up some common rules how to communicate. And it is very important for facilitators to know and understand different cultures. I discussed this with my husband (who has lived in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania) and he said that these all are quite different cultures: although people are the same everywhere the attitudes about them selves and about the power (!) is still quite different.

One of my criteria was satisfaction with me. Well, I am satisfied. First: because I did not quit this course and endured. There were many thoughts about leaving this course. I was not so enthusiastic as I might be, but all assignments are done and I don’t think that my contribution to the group-work has been small. So: I’m satisfied.

Well… we have a different kind of course  Our course is about football which is rather practical thing (requires practical skills) therefore our course environment has to be different as well. We can not have only electronic learning environment: practises have to take place with real football. When science gives us haptic-tools (or something like this) then it would be interesting to have only electronic environment, but I’m not sure whether it would be wise considering our goals, tasks and practical character of this course.
But of course: learning environment has to support deeper learning, motivation of students.
I strongly believe that it must allow discussions (dialogue and argumentation). As humans are social beings and learning is social activity - discussion (forum) in electronic environment (our environment is divided: practical environment and electronic environment) is extremely important (in practices discussions and communication takes place anyway).
It is important to support curiosity of learners. Curiosity supports intrinsic motivation.
Of course it would help students if the material would not be statical (just articles to read). Some videos and pictures might do the job here. At the same time you must be careful because to much of videos, sounds, (moving) pictures might disturb the learning.
Learning environment must support achievement of goals and it is very important whether this environment supports assignments we have for our students.
For reflections and tasks we might use blogs. Although I don’t like using blogs in learning too much: first - academic writing disappears and in the universities this is not a mark of quality. Blogging is like writing a diary (very personal) and there is a certain group of people who like to do that. But not most of us. I know that blogging is becoming very popular and it helps to reflect, but still: reflection does not have to be visible to everybody.
But as we have rather practical subject then academic part is not a problem and blogs are easer to follow. So blogs it is.

Some other thoughts:

About the role of facilitator: domain novices don’t have strong domain-specific cognitive schema and therefore they cannot determine which information might help them. Here again the power-questions rises to me. And at the same time it seems to me that self-directed learning can not take place in this stadium (novice) of learning because all the preconditions of self-directed learning are not met.

Organising your own learning - personal learning environment - this was interesting idea. I have never thought about it in systematic way: how to organise my own learning.

Pedagogically neutral software - somehow this troubles me. At one point I think this is not a real problem (different tasks need different approach - Ertmer and Newby’s idea of taxonomy of learning - so there is no problem with neutrality of software. But then again the question of self-directed learning and democracy rises.

For conclusion:
For every task there are professionals in the world. I can brainstorm with them, but environment is not my ‘thing’.

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Well … technology can not be trusted. First I had a difficult week because our internet connection failed. It required several days form us to make it work again. The second problem was with our wikispaces: the system somehow did get craze. But I do hope that everything will be ok this week.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Reading feedback to our course was interesting, to see what happens with our wikispaces was interesting and unpleasant at the same time. Boring: it seems that only Robert; Jasna and I are worried about our group-work. This makes evaluation of the group-mates difficult. There is nothing interesting going on in their personal blogs as well….

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
What happen with wikispaces and my internet connection

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How we should move on with our course design? Are there only Jasna and Robert left?

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools
MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post this reflection, Wikispaces - to reorganise our space and left there few comments, Skype - to have an emergency meeting with Jasna and Robert.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
Jasna and Robert to discuss/synchronise our activities.

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
I was in Paris for few days in this week and I learned how wonderful world can be. How good the food can be and that it is possible to paint like Monet’ did. I saw water lilies and I would now I know that it is possible to fall in love with … paintings.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Reading material offered again good ideas how to improve our course design. I do hope that my group-mates will contribute to do that.
Evaluation form I found very useful. It would have been good idea to introduce this earlier so that students would get more information about what is required. It certainly helped me - we are not so capable that we could think about everything.
Boring: I had no discussion about evaluation form with others. It seems that our group activated for one week only.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
I guess not …
I’m not sure in evaluation criteria of this course. If some of members of group don’t contribute and even local facilitators can’t help to make it happen, then what can other members of the group do?
I’m not sure how I will evaluate the outcome of others. As this is experimental course and everything is not gone as planned earlier I don’t think it is fair to be very hard on my course-mates. But at the same time: few of us are working quite hard and I don’t want to be unfair to them as well.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How to evaluate my group-mates….
And one other remark: even group 1 did not finished their evaluation form on time ….

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools
MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflections, Moodle - for materials, Wikispaces - to write my part of course design and comment the work of others, e-mail - to clarify with Teje who should be our evaluators

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I posted few comments into our wikispaces area.

All assignments beginning with the word “how” somehow bring into my mind some “10 steps to hapiness” handbook. And I want to begin my answer with the words first take some ….. after this …. I’m not sure whether I should come up with some handbook or not.
In the reading material page 16 there is a cycle how to do it. It just needs some supplementary components like create evaluation form according to the objective what you expect to reach. Then collect data, analyse it and of course make some conclusions and improve your course.
It is possible to use electronic advises for this, but it is also possible to do it without them (let students write an essay).
Answering in this way seems a bit … meaningless to me. Sorry.
So I just write my thought about the reading material of this week.
About first- and second-hand learning. I’m not familiar with this concept and it seems a bit strange to me. The example about computers raised a question: is online course/ university really a place for first-hand learning (taking a part and rebuilding a computer)? Don’t we have vocational schools for that? Is it a degradation of universities? I know that there are different schools about ‘pure knowledge’ and ‘learning’, but I’m kind of ‘pure knowledge’ girl. I expect universities and e-learning/online courses to share/create with students knowledge (and meta-knowledge) and not so much of practical skills.
This week reading materials had a lot of suggestions what we could take into consideration in our course:
1. to have flexible course with a basic level of content to be mastered and as well some supplementary material for those who are more capable of interested.
2. we should think about how to encourage engagement in our course and how to provide two-way communication between student-facilitator, but also student-student
3. we need to provide students plenty of motivation and written feedback for students
4. virtual office hours where students could log on to the chat area and ask questions
5. satisfaction survey in the end of the course.
6. weekly e-mails and weekly assignments would be a way to keep students engaged
7. criteria for online discussions/reflections/analysis

About constructivism: knowledge is constructed rather then transmitted… Well, I agree, but before we can construct something we still need to transmit/gain some knowledge. It is not possible to construct from nothing, we still need something: facts, experience, ….
So I rather see it like a cycle or spiral: first transmission and then construction. (Before we can create online course or develop design we need to know what it is; or before we will integrate something into our mind/beliefs, preconceptions, world of thinking) and they are both equal parts of learning.

About results: i think that for the students who participated in this course the online part was very exciting because for them it was a variation from their everyday work or learning. Some variation is usually more interesting then routine.

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Learning is social activity. I read just today Terjes question why our group did not communicate and discuss like this earlier. Well, we did not have a forum before and now we have a common goal to work together.
If we are talking about new generation (generation 2.0) then we must take into consideration that not only they are using different tools, but their way of thinking and contributing is also different. Forum enables quick discussion for many people, but the contributions are usually short. To communicate with many people blog is not flexible enough.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Interesting was how do different people think and work in forum. This was great. I really liked Olegs contribution (he knows a lot about football), but not only. I liked very much Olegs willingness to work further with the material and openness to have a dialogue.
What was interesting to me also was how do different people interpret the same information (vision in our case) and work with it.
It was nice that we did not have any reading materials for this week. I’m getting tired of this course as this is intensive.
What annoys me is that I can’t find enough time to write answers to my comments. I find these comments usually very interesting and I see them as part of discussion about elearning, but as we have always something new to do I put my priorities there. But I think that these comments are more useful to me to understand better the elearning world. So it makes me unhappy that I can not find enough time for this.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
No.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
What are goals and sub-goals in course design?
And one remark also – during last week when it was clear to everybody what to do and how to do it, everything went well. Now we as a group are a bit stuck again and it seems that members of our group do not know what to do next.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype – group meeting to clarify our plans and activities. MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflections, Moodle - for materials, Wikispaces - to write my part of course design and comment the work of others, e-mail - to clarify what Teje meant by sub-goals and to communicate friends/colleagues.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
With our group and Terje.

Objectives
Why I wish to learn/do something, what is meaningful for me/for my group as part of the assignment I am responsible of?

As we have just divided roles this part of contract might perhaps have some supplementary lines later

The question why is quite difficult. I want to want to have an understanding about:
1. theoretical basis of elearning (education science)
a. self-directed learning
b. intrinsic motivation
c. different approaches to the learning

I want to have some knowledge (just facts) about:
2. different technological possibilities how to implement good elearning course.

So that I could understand the (e)learning better and have some knowledge how to create a successful elearning course.

What resources will i need:
What software tools and resources i am going to use? Resources can be people, different artifacts, materials.
People
• Members of my group (incl facilitator), discussion with them.
• Other members of this course as source of information

Materials
• Communication:
o Blogs: Reflection and personal communication (how to
o Wikispaces: collaboration between group-members
o Skype: communication between group members
o Email & feeds in blogs
o Doodle: for polls
o Moodle: assignments and learning materials
• Documents
o MS Word: reading course materials and writing my own contributions.

How will i do it:
What is my strategy to achieve my objectives? What is the order of my actions? How will i use different resources in my actions?
Go through the weekly materials as a basis for the decisions made for the course design by the end of the course. Follow the weekly assignments to gain better understanding about the subject and also test this in practice by evolving our own course what is under development. Deepen and broaden my knowledge and views through writing reflections and comments to my group-mates.

Evaluation criteria:
How do I know that i was successful? Develop measurable criteria to evaluate your activities in respect of your objectives.
1. Know how to use different technological tools while implementing good elearning course.
2. Reading and learning reflections are done.
3. Reflections and/ or comments and/or contributions to the group-work consists argumentation about self-directed learning, intrinsic motivation and different approaches to the learning.

As I am rather critical then satisfaction with myself is a good criteria?

Self-reflection:
Did i achieve my objectives? Use the criteria what you developed to assess how well did you work. Reflect, what worked and what did not?

Hmm…
Reading material was interesting (as usually), but the reflection theme of this week is not perhaps the best. Maybe it is just me, but i did not find an answer to the question. I can list here what are the possibilities to find the social networks:
1. through people - you know somebody who is a member of some community or you just know some names and you will start looking for them. And then you see who is connected with whom and so you can go on.
2. through material - i read something what is interesting to you and you choose some keywords and start looking for them
3. through web - web pages of different associations, social bookmarking tools, Blogs, links, tags, ….

But: important is the ability to understand the content and assess the quality of the network (or regular web-page).

Could this week assignment be about communities of practice and learning networks? How to build it up (model) or describe a successful community of practice or learning network? Or how learning networks support learners?