Online Teaching FAQs

Online Teaching: FAQs
Many trainers find that making the transition from strictly traditional classroom into hybrid or blended courses confusing. The following FAQs are meant to serve as a guide for those instructors who are about to take this plunge.

What are some of the pre-planning strategies I need to consider before converting to hybrid courses?

The trainer certainly needs to assess his/her students’ technological ability to access both the online training modules and the documents stored on a server.  While many office employees are familiar with servers, there will still be some minor training involved prior to beginning the courses. 

What aspects of his original training program could be enhanced in the distance learning format?

Building asynchronous discussion opportunities into the trainer’s course could certainly improve classroom communication.  Shy and reticent students often feel more comfortable sharing with peers in an online setting. By adding more voices to the conversation, the trainer may find the increased dialogue he was originally searching for. 

How will my role, as trainer, change in a distance learning environment?

In a distance learning environment the trainer may have to learn how to take a back seat.  Some traditional face-to-face instructors build courses that are teacher-centered, where the students are observers and recorders of the teacher’s knowledge. Distance learning, on the other hand, is student-centered.  The trainer will act as coach, guide, and counselor but it will be the student that creates (not records) the knowledge.

What steps should I take to encourage my trainees to communicate online?

Online communication can be encouraged through positive reinforcement by bringing the online communication into the classroom discussions.  Online communication can also be encouraged by building it into the syllabus and assessing the quality of the contributions, like we do in our Walden courses.

OpenCourses

Exploring OpenCourses at UC Berkeley
This week we were asked to investigate OpenCourses for their instructional design techniques.  I took a course in something I never heard of before: UC Berkeley professor Greg Niemeyer’s Art 23 lecture on “Onomastics: Names as Media.” (You can access this course by clicking here.)

My Experience
The course does have an outline, which Professor Niemeyer refers to around 1:15 of Lecture 1. However, it is very clear that he is talking about an overview which is written on the syllabus; a syllabus that the distance learners are not given access to. While the course appears to be full of interesting and new information, it is very clear that the distance learner was not considered in the design of this course. UC Berkeley must have decided to record their lectures and place them online for free as “OpenCourses.”
I love learning and think that OpenCourses are great ideas in principle. But the type of courses that UC Berkeley is labeling as “distance education” is like a case study in “what not to do.” The lectures are painful to listen to, provide no visualization of the professor and absolutely no interactivity. We even have to sit through technical difficulties like audio clips not playing (Lecture 1 at 04:00). 
I remember taking courses like this in college, and I loved them. But I loved them because there was something about the ambiance of being in the lecture hall, of seeing the professor’s physical expressions, of raising your hand and asking a question.  Watching a digital recording of the projector screen takes all the activity out of the learning experience.

Summary
I will not be returning to UC Berkeley’s OpenCourses. Not unless I need help falling asleep.

Distance Learning Technologies

Selecting Distance Learning Technologies
Scenario 1: Collaborative Training Environment
"A new automated staff information system was recently purchased by a major corporation and needs to be implemented in six regional offices. Unfortunately, the staff is located throughout all the different offices and cannot meet at the same time or in the same location. As an instructional designer for the corporation, you have been charged with implementing a training workshop for these offices. As part of the training, you were advised how imperative it is that the staff members share information, in the form of screen captures and documents, and participate in ongoing collaboration."
Analysis
The basic elements required by this scenario are:

• asynchronous delivery of instructional materials
• asynchronous collaboration
• document sharing

While any one of the online technologies listed in this week's Multimedia Program, ""The Technology of Distance Education" would not suffice on its own, when combined together a number of these technologies can solve the problem.
The trick of tackling this problem is to realize that the scenario isn't really a problem at all. We simply can't approach this scenario by thinking about how we can convert our typical face-to-face materials into online format. Instead, we have to design a course that contains the following technologies:
Technologies
The three most helpful Technologies, which can all be hosted on the same CMS, are:

• Discussion Technologies
• Media Sharing
• Blogs

I would tackle this scenario much in the same way that Walden teaches its courses. These students can use an online discussion forum to post ideas and respond to topics. They can also share their images and documents using media sharing technology. Finally, students can complete projects in the form of their own blogs, that other students will visit and comment on.

Distance Learning - Week 1

Distance Learning

What Is Distance Learning?

My definition of distance learning involves the combination of an asynchronous environment and a formal curriculum that is actively monitored by an instructor.For more details, refer to the mind map below.

Before This Week....

I thought that distance learning was a much broader concept. I used to think that it encompassed any form of online or non-traditional learning (i.e., anything outside of a classroom).  This included self-paced solo-courses, unevaluated information sessions, and online degrees.

After This Week...

After watching Dr. Simonson's especially helpful video in this week's resources, I realized that true distance learning must share the same rigors and standards or a traditional course.  The curriculum must be held to the same high standards and the students must perform at the same level. In order for the education to have any credibility, the students must be held to the same standards and must pass the same rigorous assessments as traditional students.  As Moller et. al argue, distance learning (or e-learning) must focus on quality of instruction (2008, p. 71)

The Future of Distance Learning...

The future of distance learning must first begin with imposing rigorous standards on what we choose to call distance learning.  Part of my own confusion stems for the ambiguity of the name. "Distance learning" would seem to imply any learning done from a distance.  I would suggest a more accurate term be used to refer to rigorous academic distance learning. Perhaps "distance education" would impart the professionalism and respect that distance learning deserves; people do seem to bestow the term "education" with more scientific credibility than "learning." Finally, Moller et. al. focus the summation of their article on the customization properties of distance learning.  Learners, they argue, "will come to demand greater customization of the learning process to cater to their individual interaction needs" (2008, p.75).  They realize that as distance learning progresses, it will behoove instructional designers and distance learning educators to embrace the rapidly evolving technological developments and implement these new technologies into their courseware.

Distance Learning Mind Map