Home Posts filed under online learning
‏إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات online learning. إظهار كافة الرسائل
‏إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات online learning. إظهار كافة الرسائل

Why do so many Moodle courses suck?

Comment
Moodle is a magnificent free product and has the potential to enable schools and teachers to build wonderfully unique interactive online learning courses in which learner interaction can be tracked, measured and responded to. Despite this the vast majority of Moodle courses I see are a long list of Word and PDF documents with at best a few forums that enable a minimum of human social interaction.

Given the state of many of these courses, it’s no wonder that drop out rates for online learning are so high. And of course Moodle isn’t the only culprit. Many of the other commercially available LMS (learning management systems) and VLE (virtual learning environment) platforms aren’t doing any better.

Moodle has been around now since 2002 and research carried out in 2013 showed that more than 7.3 million students had studied in more than 83 thousand registered sites.


Image from ELTPics: https://flic.kr/p/jBXAwK

So why is it that so little progress has been made in developing innovative courses that really generate interaction with media rich content?

The problem surely isn’t Moodle, because the platform is capable of delivering all of the above.

The reality is that there are a number of causes:
  • I think it’s fair to say that Moodle isn’t the most intuitive of platforms to work with. A lot of progress and improvements have been made, but it’s inevitable that a product with multiple modules constructed by different people is likely to result in some inconsistencies of look and feel.
  • The fact that Moodle is seen as a ‘free’ platform and so a ‘cheap’ way to get learning online is another factor. Schools start using the platform with the impression that it won’t require much financial backing and that once they have provided the platform teachers will just be able to get their classes online.
  • This brings me to the next point and that is lack of training. Most teachers I have met who use Moodle do so with only the most minimal and basic training and again this comes back to the perception that Moodle is a cheap solution. Many school managers seem to think that a few hours of training is enough to get their teachers designing great online courses. It’s not! Training to use Moodle effectively takes considerable time and needs to be constantly reinforced and renewed.
  • A second element of training which is often overlooked is instructional design. A teacher may well be marvellous at developing and delivering their own materials in the classroom, but when it comes to converting those materials into effective online learning units there is a new level of skill and understanding that they need. Understanding the instructional design potential of an online platform and how to structure materials so that students progress through an online environment requires training and experience.
  • Another factor in this mix is that the Moodle platform is often seen as the ‘property’ and responsibility of the IT department and as such they make the platform as secure as possible. Often this means that teachers’ access to many of the different features and potential that Moodle can deliver are hidden from the teacher and they don’t have the opportunity to experiment with the platform and learn for themselves.

So given all of these problems is it worth using Moodle or any other platform to develop online and blended learning for your students? 

The answer is of course a resounding yes. To ignore the potential that online learning and new technology has to offer is to be like King Canute trying to order back the sea.

But to use technology effectively education establishments have to approach online learning with their eyes open.
  • It isn’t a cheap solution.
  • It will require a significant investment in training for teachers
  • Teachers won’t just construct wonderful online courses in their free time. Developing good online materials takes time. More time than it takes to develop paper-based face to face materials, so they will need to be paid for this time.
  • Teachers need to be trained at all levels of the platform including the admin level, not just at teacher level.
How about ready made courses?
Knowing all of this schools may be tempted to by an ‘off the shelf’ solution with all the content ready made, but I would be wary of this type of ‘one size fits all’ content. In many cases the content has just been adapted from a course book with a copious amounts of drag and drop and gap-filling activity mixed with a little multimedia and very little student - teacher or peer to peer interaction built in and no sign of any authentic materials or personalisation. These courses are often dull beyond belief and fail to engage the students.

The best online courses, just like the best face-to-face courses, are usually designed by teachers who have developed an understanding of the needs and interests of their students and can choose content which they will enjoy and find engaging.

So, if platforms like Moodle are really to be used to develop effective and engaging learning which realises the potential of online and blended learning modes of delivery, then we must have managers who are willing to invest in developing the skills of their teachers and teachers who are willing to meet the challenges of new technology head on  and accept their changing and more diverse roles as teachers, mentors and instructional designers.

For teachers who would like to try to develop their own Moodle skills.
You can register for a free Moodle platform at: http://www.mdl2.com/ It takes a few moments to register and then you have your own Moodle platform to use as a sandpit.

Here are a few quick video tutorials that can help get you started.
I hope you find these videos useful and enjoy making a start at using Moodle to create more engaging materials.

Best

Nik Peachey

Create online learning with 123ContactForm

Comment
123ContactForm may not sound like the kind of tool that would be of interest to educators, but as I discovered when they asked me to review their online form creation tool, they offer quite a range of features that can solve many of the problems we have as 21st century teachers.

We can use it to:
  • Create surveys to do research and action research
  • We can create interactive materials based around multimedia objects
  • We can eve use it to sell our materials or services online and take payments

The tool itself is browser based and so doesn't require any downloading or installation and that in itself can save a lot of hassle if you work in an institution that has very restrictive practices regarding the installation of software.

To get started you just need to go to the site and register at: http://www.123contactform.com/education-forms.htm

Once you have registered you get access to the dashboard and this is where you can start creating your forms. You just need to click on 'Create New Form'.


You will then get a choice of different types of form to create. It's a good idea to click on 'Other Forms' this takes you to the online educator forms.   If you have a look at some of the templates and educator forms that have already been created it will give you some idea of what the platform can do. There is an Education section with some ready made templates in.

When you are ready to create your own educator forms, you could start by clicking on 'Blank Form'. Call your form 'My first activity' and then save it and look at the different types of interactions you can create.

You will see the basic interactions you can add to the page. Clicking on them will add the interaction type to the page.

Then when you click on the interaction type you can edit its features.

Some of the advanced interaction types are particularly interesting, especially the html feature which enables you to embed interactive media objects such as videos or digital books into your forms and then build interactive activities around them.

You can also add social buttons to enable users to share your activities through social media channels. 123ContactForm does also have a Facebook app so once your activities are complete you can post them directly into Facebook pages or groups for users to do from there.

This video shows you how to use all the main features of the forms.


Once you have created your activities they are saved in the 'My Forms' section of the site and you can go there to edit them. Here you can get the code to publish your educator forms into your bog website or CMS, or get a link to email out to students.

You can also check to see who has submitted answers to the questions and see the record of what answers have been given in the 'Reports' section. This is one of the best features of the site as it turns it into a form of LMS (learning management system) where you can collect and analyse students responses and generate graphs of the results.

The site also allow users to add and customise the theme of the forms, so if you want them to blend into your site or blog, then customising the look and feel of the forms is quite easy and you can even add your own logo.

This video shows you how to customise your form.


So how can we use this with EFL / ESL students?
  • We can create action research forms and get detailed and anonymous feedback on our teaching
  • We can create multimedia materials for learning or assessment and track our students responses. This is particularly useful if we a creating homework assignments and we need to assess these and know that our students have done them.
  • We can create learning objects to embed into online courses that track and assess students' performance.
  • We can make fun engaging quizzes based around images.
As ELT professionals
  • We can use the forms to create surveys for research.
  • We can start selling materials, self published books, or private online classes and collect payment in a safe and secure way.
What I like about 123ContactForm
  • It's a very versatile platform and really does enable a lot more than the name suggests. In fact it's a pretty sound way to create online learning materials with a built in LMS.
  • It's a great tool for freelancers who want to start making money online by selling their own products and services in a user friendly way.
  • It runs in the browser and is pretty simple to use.
  • It's easy to produce something that looks very professional.
  • I've said it already, but the tracking capabilities are great.
  • The company runs on a freemium model, so although it is a free service, there is also a business model there to support the site so it's less likely to suddenly disappear or fold.
What I'm not so sure about
  • As I said the company runs on a freemium model, so many of the best features are the ones they charge for.
  • On the free subscription you can create 5 forms and collect up to 100 students' responses each month which is probably enough for the individual teacher to use it with a class, but it would be nice to have a few more of the premium features available to the Free subscriber, such as the html embed to enable the use of video and multimedia in the activities.
  • You have to be on the Platinum account to be able to enable payments and that costs $29.95 per month, which for a company or school is not much, but for a teacher / freelancer who wants to test the waters with selling their own products or services, it might seem like quite a big risk when they are just getting started, but you can cancel your subscription if things don't go well and 123ContactForm does offer a 30day money back guarantee. It's also worth mentioning that if you are a teacher or teacher trainer and you get in contact with the company, they are offering a 35% educational discount, so that can help to reduce the risk and the cost.

On the whole I think this is a really good product, particularly for a small school that wants to venture into online teaching or blended learning, then a platinum account at $29.95 per month is quite a small risk. For a teacher thinking of going freelance it might be a good option if you are confident that you can make enough through online sales to justify the monthly outlay. As a teacher working in class, then it's a nice way to get started with creating some online learning with a degree of interactivity, but it would be much more attractive if the html embed functionality came as part of the free subscription.

123ContactForm has plenty of potential for the online educator or anyone wanting to create blended learning, so it's well worth checking out, and when I get my book finished I may well be using it myself. I hope you find it useful too.

Related links:
Best
Nik Peachey

Online Teacher Development Works Best - 15 Reasons Why

Comment
I've started this article with quite a bold statement, but it's a conclusion that I have been coming too over the course of quite a few years now. I should really put this into context though, as most of the teacher training I do deals with pedagogical training for the use of technology and is most often delivered during intensive face to face sessions, usually with groups of teachers working in a computer lab. Though, having said that, I do still believe that many of the reasons I have listed below do also apply to other kinds of more 'mainstream' teacher development too, especially intensive courses.


So, here are my 15 reasons why I think developing your teaching online can be more effective.

Learn while you teach - This gives you the opportunity to try things out with your own classes working in your own environment with your own students. Often when we take a face to face intensive course we leave our familiar teaching environment and come back with lots of new ideas only to find that in our everyday reality many of them don’t work or create unforeseen problems that we don’t know how to deal with. Studying while we teach can give us the time to try out new ideas in our own work place, discover the obstacles and try to adapt them to our own context.

Non competitive - Face to face courses can often become quite competitive and tend to favour people who are more confident and extrovert and who like to shine. This can often lead to the quieter more reflective types being overshadowed and not having the opportunity to contribute what may well be valuable comment or ask the questions for which they need answers. The text based and asynchronous nature of online training makes it much easier for everyone to have their say and can lead to a much richer and more collaborative learning experience.

Work at your own computer - This sounds like a very strange advantage, but training with technology on your own computer can be a huge advantage. Contrary to popular belief, computers do tend to be unique. The way one computer is set up and how it responds and the kinds of problems you encounter can be very different from one computer to another. Nothing is ore frustrating than going on a course with a computer that is set up to make things easy for you and then returning to your own computer and finding that there are a whole different set of problems that you don’t know how to solve. Training to use technology with your students needs to include training to trouble shoot the problems that you may have with your computer and learning how to overcome these and set your own computer up to run effectively in your own working environment.

Experiential learning - The best way to learn about technology and online learning is to experience it for yourself. Being part of an online course gives you first hand experience of being an online learner and helps you to understand some of the challenges and obstacles your students will face when they use technology to study online.

Develop digital literacies - Even if you aren’t doing an online course which is technology specific, you should still be able to pick up a few new techniques and develop some of your digital literacies by studying online. Again, a good online course will have some element of digital literacy and study skills development built in. This should go some way towards helping you understand how your students are learning in the real world and the kinds of study skills they need to develop.

Digital networking literacies - This really falls within digital literacies, but it is worth highlighting as I feel that developing your digital networking skills has real significance for your continuing development. If you can learn how to build supportive relationships with the other trainees on your course so that you can retain these contacts as a network after you finish the course then you can put these networking skills to good use within the various open online communities and networks that exist within various social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Having an online learning network and knowing how best to work within that network can help to ensure that you can guide your own continuing development after the course you are training on has finished.


Build international contacts - Online training often provides a much more international learning environment than the classroom and so this can help to broaden the learning experience as there is a much wider range of experience to share. Finding out about how things are done in different countries and very different contexts to your own can be very refreshing and enlightening and can really enhance the learning experience and the network building potential of the course.

Differentiated learning - As a trainer when you encounter a group of teachers face to face, it takes time and effort to see them as individuals with individual needs and interests. As an online trainer this experience is reversed, you are constantly dealing and communicating with each member of the group as an individual and this enables you to more rapidly assess their needs as individuals and adapt the learning to suit them.

One to one time - Following on from the previous point, almost all tutor - student time in online courses is one to one rather than whole group, so again it is easier to ensure that as a trainee you get the attention you need from your tutor.

Personality types - For shyer less confident students online leaning can work to their advantage because contributing in text can be much less threatening than doing it orally. You also have more time to consider your contributions to the group and can edit and re-edit them to be sure that you express yourself clearly.

Longer period of study - Learning something well really takes time. Online training can often take place over a much longer period of time than most face to face courses can. This keeps you supported and engaged in the learning process for a greater period and so allows more time for development.

Your learning journey - Because the interactions within an online course are digital, they are recorded and captured so you have the opportunity to go back and retrace and review your entire learning journey. This greatly increases the chances of a deeper learning experience and greater retention of what you have learned.

Time for reflection - Online training allows more time for reflection and good online learning structures in this reflection, so that you not only reflect on your learning process but have time to discuss and share your reflections and share in the reflections of other teachers

Flexibility - You can study at times that are convenient for you and for time periods that suit your learning concentration span. A lot of classroom training time often turns into dead time, because the length of lessons are dictated by administrative convenience rather than pedagogical advantage and trainers and trainees are often left pushing their way through materials long after their optimum concentration period has been exceeded. When you study online you can have a break whenever and however often you feel like. This gives you time to ponder what you have learned or move on to new materials at your own pace and use your time more efficiently.

Lower cost - The costs, not only of courses but also of travel, accommodation and time off work are often vastly reduced when you take an online course rather than a face to face course.

So those are my 15 reasons. Feel free to add any of your own in the comments section.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

3 More Tasks to Teach Yourself to Teach with Technology

Comment
At the end of 2010 I published the first 5 tasks in a series to help teacher learn how to use technology with their students. Now I would like to add 3 more tasks to that collection. The first few tasks are all quite simple to lay the ground work and get teachers started. As the series progresses I hope to get on to more adventurous tasks. Please feel free to use these tasks yourself or to share or use them for teacher training.

Task 6: Creating a video review activity
In this task you’ll learn how to create a film trailer review activity using film trailers from YouTube and an online notice board called Wallwisher. Here’s an example to look at before you start: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/nikstrailers

Wallwisher is a really useful tool for giving students a semi restricted choice of online videos or links to other resources from around the Internet.


Task 7: Creating screenshots using Jing
Jing is a really useful free tool that allows you to create and annotate images grabbed from the screen of your computer.
This can be really useful for creating instruction sheets like the ones used in this series and helps you to grab images to add into websites or other documents.

Task 8: Create your own YouTube channel
Video has become one of the most useful resources on the Internet for language teachers. There are a great many video sharing websites on the Internet, but YouTube is by far the biggest.
In this task you will create your own YouTube channel. It’s very useful to have your own channel even if you never create your own videos. It enable you to subscribe to other channels, share videos with groups of your students and even annotate and add subtitles to videos. We’ll be doing all those things in future tasks, but in this task you will create your channel and subscribe to some other useful channels.
I hope you find these tasks useful and I hope that you'll soon find some more here.

Related links:
Best

Nik Peachey

Using Online Sticky Noticeboards

Comment
For the last few days I've been playing with WallWisher a handy tool for creating online noticeboards that you can add sticky notes to.
It's very easy to create your own noticeboard, just click where it says 'Build a Wall' and you'll see a new wall with some options on it that you need to complete. Basically these are:
  • Uploading an image
  • Choosing colours
  • Adding title and subtitle
  • Creating your password
  • Deciding who can see and add to your wall
Once you have done this you just click the big 'Done' button and you are almost ready to start adding content to your wall. Before you start to add content you'll need to check your email account where you should find your password. Then you just log in to your wall and double click on the wall to start adding the sticky notes.

The sticky notes are quite simple, you just add some text and you can either link to an image, a video or a web page.

The nice thing about this is that when users click on the link it opens in a pop up browser over the wall. This means that you can use your wall to focus students access to sites like flickr or Youtube and stop them drifting into other content. It also means that you can use the wall to set up specific activities and get your students to post their responses on the wall (as long as you have selected 'Everyone' to allow others to post to the wall)

So how do we use this with students?
  • We can create video tasks and get students to post responses to the wall by leaving it open for everyone to contribute. Here's a wall that I created about Ramadan. This wall has been left open for anyone to contribute to.
  • We could use the wall to collect different links to various resources around the web for students to explore, a little like a web quest or treasure hunt.
  • We could give students a theme and get them to create their own walls based around that theme.
  • We could get students to create fan walls based around a favourite band or celebrity.
  • You can use the wall to collect and share resources like this one on IELTS
  • You could use the wall to set up video or image based activities. Here's a video activity that I have set up for teachers based around a Mr Bean Video. Feel free to contribute.
  • This activity uses an image to get students to practice using present continuous.
  • You can use the wall to create debates. You can do this either by posting your own contentious opinions or using videos from sites like BigThink.com and get students to respond. This could be a way of dealing with sensitive issues and enabling students to be able to express opinions that they might not feel comfortable doing in the classroom. Here's an example
  • We can even create grammar walls and get students to post what they know and examples of different verb tenses or grammar points.
  • We could even get students to post their wishes on it using third conditional.
  • Or last but not least we could use it to notify our students or parents of homework assignments and keep them up to date with what's happening in class.

What I like about WallWisher.
  • It's free and easy to use and requires a minimum of registration info
  • I like the way the links open in a pop up over the page
  • You can embed the wall into a blog or website
  • Your wall produces an RSS feed which can make it easy to keep track of what is being added
  • Students can get involved and post brief comments or create their won walls
  • It can be used collaboratively
  • Great way to create easy online learning tasks
  • It looks nice

Things I'm not so sure about
  • It would be nice to have a few more controls about who posts to the wall. At present it's either only the creator or everyone! Would be nice to be able to invite people to post to it.
  • I'd also like to be able to add / embed more than one link into a sticky note so that you can include an image or video and a link to a site, but you could get round this by adding more than one sticky.
  • Would be nice to have a bit more control over how the embedded wall appears in a web page. Here's what mine looks like.


Well I hope you like WallWisher and find it useful. If you have other ideas for how to use it please do post comments and links.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Microsoft's free Learning Content Development System

Comment
When Microsoft start giving stuff away for free, it always makes me curious, and when I spotted this free LCDS (Learning Content Development System) a while back I decided to download it and give it a try.

If like me you've never had the patience (or the time and money) to really master a tool like Flash, but like the idea of creating interactive materials that can run online (SCORM compliant to run in an LMS), then this could be a handy tool for you. I spent the best part of a day working out how to use it and creating some materials with it for a teacher training session and by the end of the day I had two 'modules' each of 4 -5 different activity types combining images, audio, video and swf animation. Considering that I hadn't used this before and I had to actually write all the materials to put into it, I think that's pretty good for just one day, and having put the time into learning the program, I'm pretty sure that my next efforts will be much quicker.

What I liked about it
  • It wasn't difficult to learn how to use. The interface is quite intuitive and I didn't need to consult the help or any support documentation.
  • It's all point and click, no programming languages to learn.
  • The results look quite professional
  • It's SCORM compliant
  • It has some nice task types. These are a few of my favourites:

This one is grouping type activity played against a timer. Users have to click the correct bucket to drop each item into.

This is one of my favourites, it's called 'Adventure' but I know it as a reading maze. User are shown a situation and given some options, They then see the outcome of the option they choose and have to make another choice and so on until they find the 'correct' way to resolve th problem. These can be really complex to write and arrange, but this one was quite easy to do and to review and make changes. I was also able to add different images to each page.


Another task type I liked was this tile flip activity. It's a novel variation on pelmanism, but it combines the matching pairs with a kind of true false activity. Basically each tile has a true statement on one side and a false one on the other, and the user has to line up rows of true statements. They also have a limited amount of cards they can turn to get it right and if they exceed the number of turns they have to start all over again.


Lastly, I liked that you can also set up tasks using either video or swf files. This is one I created using a Flash tutorial and the built in Note taking part of the interface.


What I wasn't so sure about
  • It only seems to support swf and wmv files for video, which is a bit annoying, especially for MAC users.
  • When I came to 'publish' / upload the materials to run online, it turned out that they wouldn't work without being uploaded to an LMS (with its own viewer)
  • You need IE 7 with Silverlight installed to view the files (though there does seem to be a way to configure the files to run in Flash instead, which I'm assuming would allow you to view them in Firefox too).
Despite all of this, Microsoft's LCDS does seem to have huge potential for people like me who struggle with coding, but want to produce something that looks good and works well.

If you work in an institution that has its own LMS and you want to digitise some course materials to run online, then it could well be worth looking at as a cheap (free) solution.

If you'd like to try out the materials I created for training teachers in the use of IT and evaluating different task types, you can download the zip file of the whole session (9.4Mb) from here.

As I said above though, you'll need to have MS's Silverlight installed, then go to the file named 'wrapper.htm' and open it to begin working through the materials.

If you want to download the free LCDS and have a play yourself, then go here: https://www.microsoft.com/learning/tools/lcds/default.mspx

I'd be really interested to hear from anyone else who's tried this, especially if they've managed to get some working examples up online, so do drop me a line and share your experiences.

Best

Nik Peachy

Skype Part 2 Online Workspace

Comment
Anyone who uses their whiteboard for ELT / EFL classes will know what a really useful teaching aid it can be, so how about using one with your distance learners?

In Part 1 of this series on Skype plugins, I looked at how and where to find and install plugins for Skype and I also looked at how to use Pamela to record audio materials and interviews with Skype.

In this posting I'd like to have a look at an online collaboration tool called Yugma which allows you to share files, share your desktop, make live presentations and have a shared online whiteboard all running along side your Skype application.

This quick tutorial takes you through some of the basic features.



You can download a version for your computer in Quick Time here.
Or
Open the tutorial in a new window here.

How to use this with ELT / EFL students
Well I think this is definitely a distance learning support tool rather than some thing to use in the classroom / multi media lab with students. It could be ideal for teacher who wants to teach online 1 to 1 especially if you are doing this independently and don't have the support of a company to provide you with specialist software. I think it's also a pretty useful tool for teacher training and development if you have groups of teachers spread around the country or the world even.
  • You can show students how to use specific software for their course and talk them through the various processes.
  • You can show students around websites and use them as the basis for online discussion
  • You can share documents with your students and get them to work on them collaboratively
  • Students can share projects they have been working on with other group members
  • You can play games online such as Pictionary (a game where one player draws a picture and the others have to guess the word it represents)
  • You can share notes as you deliver presentations
  • You can record presentations and reuse them
  • You can set up a whole programme of different online business simulations such as
    • Presenting information about a company
    • Presenting a sales report of the results of survey findings
    • Students try to sell a fictional product to investors (your other students would be the investors)
    • Carrying out online interviews, with students presenting and talking about their CVs
  • The ability to record these presentations would make it much easier for your students to review them and for you to offer feedback on their work.
What I like about Yugma
  • As tools like this become a more widely used and accepted part of international business, developing the ability to use such tools is going to become a valuable 'real life' skill.
  • It's free (at least some parts are) and quite easy and quick to install and use.
  • I really like that you can record your meetings to watch later etc.
  • Great that this integrates with Skype
  • It seems to offer a pretty comprehensive package of functions

What I wasn't so sure about
  • Some of the functionality is limited after the first 15 days, unless you choose to pay for an account.
  • You have to be sure that your firewall / anti-virus doesn't block it, so if you have any problems getting it started, then that's the first thing to check.
  • You'll also need to get your students to download and install it.
Well I hope you find this tool useful. As I said, this is really one for the distance / online tutor and I'd love to hear from anyone who has tried it out with their students.

Best

Nik Peachey
الاشتراك في: الرسائل (Atom)

Total Pageviews

Popular Posts

‏إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات online learning. إظهار كافة الرسائل
‏إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات online learning. إظهار كافة الرسائل

الخميس، 31 يوليو 2014

Why do so many Moodle courses suck?

Moodle is a magnificent free product and has the potential to enable schools and teachers to build wonderfully unique interactive online learning courses in which learner interaction can be tracked, measured and responded to. Despite this the vast majority of Moodle courses I see are a long list of Word and PDF documents with at best a few forums that enable a minimum of human social interaction.

Given the state of many of these courses, it’s no wonder that drop out rates for online learning are so high. And of course Moodle isn’t the only culprit. Many of the other commercially available LMS (learning management systems) and VLE (virtual learning environment) platforms aren’t doing any better.

Moodle has been around now since 2002 and research carried out in 2013 showed that more than 7.3 million students had studied in more than 83 thousand registered sites.


Image from ELTPics: https://flic.kr/p/jBXAwK

So why is it that so little progress has been made in developing innovative courses that really generate interaction with media rich content?

The problem surely isn’t Moodle, because the platform is capable of delivering all of the above.

The reality is that there are a number of causes:
  • I think it’s fair to say that Moodle isn’t the most intuitive of platforms to work with. A lot of progress and improvements have been made, but it’s inevitable that a product with multiple modules constructed by different people is likely to result in some inconsistencies of look and feel.
  • The fact that Moodle is seen as a ‘free’ platform and so a ‘cheap’ way to get learning online is another factor. Schools start using the platform with the impression that it won’t require much financial backing and that once they have provided the platform teachers will just be able to get their classes online.
  • This brings me to the next point and that is lack of training. Most teachers I have met who use Moodle do so with only the most minimal and basic training and again this comes back to the perception that Moodle is a cheap solution. Many school managers seem to think that a few hours of training is enough to get their teachers designing great online courses. It’s not! Training to use Moodle effectively takes considerable time and needs to be constantly reinforced and renewed.
  • A second element of training which is often overlooked is instructional design. A teacher may well be marvellous at developing and delivering their own materials in the classroom, but when it comes to converting those materials into effective online learning units there is a new level of skill and understanding that they need. Understanding the instructional design potential of an online platform and how to structure materials so that students progress through an online environment requires training and experience.
  • Another factor in this mix is that the Moodle platform is often seen as the ‘property’ and responsibility of the IT department and as such they make the platform as secure as possible. Often this means that teachers’ access to many of the different features and potential that Moodle can deliver are hidden from the teacher and they don’t have the opportunity to experiment with the platform and learn for themselves.

So given all of these problems is it worth using Moodle or any other platform to develop online and blended learning for your students? 

The answer is of course a resounding yes. To ignore the potential that online learning and new technology has to offer is to be like King Canute trying to order back the sea.

But to use technology effectively education establishments have to approach online learning with their eyes open.
  • It isn’t a cheap solution.
  • It will require a significant investment in training for teachers
  • Teachers won’t just construct wonderful online courses in their free time. Developing good online materials takes time. More time than it takes to develop paper-based face to face materials, so they will need to be paid for this time.
  • Teachers need to be trained at all levels of the platform including the admin level, not just at teacher level.
How about ready made courses?
Knowing all of this schools may be tempted to by an ‘off the shelf’ solution with all the content ready made, but I would be wary of this type of ‘one size fits all’ content. In many cases the content has just been adapted from a course book with a copious amounts of drag and drop and gap-filling activity mixed with a little multimedia and very little student - teacher or peer to peer interaction built in and no sign of any authentic materials or personalisation. These courses are often dull beyond belief and fail to engage the students.

The best online courses, just like the best face-to-face courses, are usually designed by teachers who have developed an understanding of the needs and interests of their students and can choose content which they will enjoy and find engaging.

So, if platforms like Moodle are really to be used to develop effective and engaging learning which realises the potential of online and blended learning modes of delivery, then we must have managers who are willing to invest in developing the skills of their teachers and teachers who are willing to meet the challenges of new technology head on  and accept their changing and more diverse roles as teachers, mentors and instructional designers.

For teachers who would like to try to develop their own Moodle skills.
You can register for a free Moodle platform at: http://www.mdl2.com/ It takes a few moments to register and then you have your own Moodle platform to use as a sandpit.

Here are a few quick video tutorials that can help get you started.
I hope you find these videos useful and enjoy making a start at using Moodle to create more engaging materials.

Best

Nik Peachey

مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , , ,

الجمعة، 17 مايو 2013

Create online learning with 123ContactForm

123ContactForm may not sound like the kind of tool that would be of interest to educators, but as I discovered when they asked me to review their online form creation tool, they offer quite a range of features that can solve many of the problems we have as 21st century teachers.

We can use it to:
  • Create surveys to do research and action research
  • We can create interactive materials based around multimedia objects
  • We can eve use it to sell our materials or services online and take payments

The tool itself is browser based and so doesn't require any downloading or installation and that in itself can save a lot of hassle if you work in an institution that has very restrictive practices regarding the installation of software.

To get started you just need to go to the site and register at: http://www.123contactform.com/education-forms.htm

Once you have registered you get access to the dashboard and this is where you can start creating your forms. You just need to click on 'Create New Form'.


You will then get a choice of different types of form to create. It's a good idea to click on 'Other Forms' this takes you to the online educator forms.   If you have a look at some of the templates and educator forms that have already been created it will give you some idea of what the platform can do. There is an Education section with some ready made templates in.

When you are ready to create your own educator forms, you could start by clicking on 'Blank Form'. Call your form 'My first activity' and then save it and look at the different types of interactions you can create.

You will see the basic interactions you can add to the page. Clicking on them will add the interaction type to the page.

Then when you click on the interaction type you can edit its features.

Some of the advanced interaction types are particularly interesting, especially the html feature which enables you to embed interactive media objects such as videos or digital books into your forms and then build interactive activities around them.

You can also add social buttons to enable users to share your activities through social media channels. 123ContactForm does also have a Facebook app so once your activities are complete you can post them directly into Facebook pages or groups for users to do from there.

This video shows you how to use all the main features of the forms.


Once you have created your activities they are saved in the 'My Forms' section of the site and you can go there to edit them. Here you can get the code to publish your educator forms into your bog website or CMS, or get a link to email out to students.

You can also check to see who has submitted answers to the questions and see the record of what answers have been given in the 'Reports' section. This is one of the best features of the site as it turns it into a form of LMS (learning management system) where you can collect and analyse students responses and generate graphs of the results.

The site also allow users to add and customise the theme of the forms, so if you want them to blend into your site or blog, then customising the look and feel of the forms is quite easy and you can even add your own logo.

This video shows you how to customise your form.


So how can we use this with EFL / ESL students?
  • We can create action research forms and get detailed and anonymous feedback on our teaching
  • We can create multimedia materials for learning or assessment and track our students responses. This is particularly useful if we a creating homework assignments and we need to assess these and know that our students have done them.
  • We can create learning objects to embed into online courses that track and assess students' performance.
  • We can make fun engaging quizzes based around images.
As ELT professionals
  • We can use the forms to create surveys for research.
  • We can start selling materials, self published books, or private online classes and collect payment in a safe and secure way.
What I like about 123ContactForm
  • It's a very versatile platform and really does enable a lot more than the name suggests. In fact it's a pretty sound way to create online learning materials with a built in LMS.
  • It's a great tool for freelancers who want to start making money online by selling their own products and services in a user friendly way.
  • It runs in the browser and is pretty simple to use.
  • It's easy to produce something that looks very professional.
  • I've said it already, but the tracking capabilities are great.
  • The company runs on a freemium model, so although it is a free service, there is also a business model there to support the site so it's less likely to suddenly disappear or fold.
What I'm not so sure about
  • As I said the company runs on a freemium model, so many of the best features are the ones they charge for.
  • On the free subscription you can create 5 forms and collect up to 100 students' responses each month which is probably enough for the individual teacher to use it with a class, but it would be nice to have a few more of the premium features available to the Free subscriber, such as the html embed to enable the use of video and multimedia in the activities.
  • You have to be on the Platinum account to be able to enable payments and that costs $29.95 per month, which for a company or school is not much, but for a teacher / freelancer who wants to test the waters with selling their own products or services, it might seem like quite a big risk when they are just getting started, but you can cancel your subscription if things don't go well and 123ContactForm does offer a 30day money back guarantee. It's also worth mentioning that if you are a teacher or teacher trainer and you get in contact with the company, they are offering a 35% educational discount, so that can help to reduce the risk and the cost.

On the whole I think this is a really good product, particularly for a small school that wants to venture into online teaching or blended learning, then a platinum account at $29.95 per month is quite a small risk. For a teacher thinking of going freelance it might be a good option if you are confident that you can make enough through online sales to justify the monthly outlay. As a teacher working in class, then it's a nice way to get started with creating some online learning with a degree of interactivity, but it would be much more attractive if the html embed functionality came as part of the free subscription.

123ContactForm has plenty of potential for the online educator or anyone wanting to create blended learning, so it's well worth checking out, and when I get my book finished I may well be using it myself. I hope you find it useful too.

Related links:
Best
Nik Peachey
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , , , , ,

الأربعاء، 5 سبتمبر 2012

Online Teacher Development Works Best - 15 Reasons Why

I've started this article with quite a bold statement, but it's a conclusion that I have been coming too over the course of quite a few years now. I should really put this into context though, as most of the teacher training I do deals with pedagogical training for the use of technology and is most often delivered during intensive face to face sessions, usually with groups of teachers working in a computer lab. Though, having said that, I do still believe that many of the reasons I have listed below do also apply to other kinds of more 'mainstream' teacher development too, especially intensive courses.


So, here are my 15 reasons why I think developing your teaching online can be more effective.

Learn while you teach - This gives you the opportunity to try things out with your own classes working in your own environment with your own students. Often when we take a face to face intensive course we leave our familiar teaching environment and come back with lots of new ideas only to find that in our everyday reality many of them don’t work or create unforeseen problems that we don’t know how to deal with. Studying while we teach can give us the time to try out new ideas in our own work place, discover the obstacles and try to adapt them to our own context.

Non competitive - Face to face courses can often become quite competitive and tend to favour people who are more confident and extrovert and who like to shine. This can often lead to the quieter more reflective types being overshadowed and not having the opportunity to contribute what may well be valuable comment or ask the questions for which they need answers. The text based and asynchronous nature of online training makes it much easier for everyone to have their say and can lead to a much richer and more collaborative learning experience.

Work at your own computer - This sounds like a very strange advantage, but training with technology on your own computer can be a huge advantage. Contrary to popular belief, computers do tend to be unique. The way one computer is set up and how it responds and the kinds of problems you encounter can be very different from one computer to another. Nothing is ore frustrating than going on a course with a computer that is set up to make things easy for you and then returning to your own computer and finding that there are a whole different set of problems that you don’t know how to solve. Training to use technology with your students needs to include training to trouble shoot the problems that you may have with your computer and learning how to overcome these and set your own computer up to run effectively in your own working environment.

Experiential learning - The best way to learn about technology and online learning is to experience it for yourself. Being part of an online course gives you first hand experience of being an online learner and helps you to understand some of the challenges and obstacles your students will face when they use technology to study online.

Develop digital literacies - Even if you aren’t doing an online course which is technology specific, you should still be able to pick up a few new techniques and develop some of your digital literacies by studying online. Again, a good online course will have some element of digital literacy and study skills development built in. This should go some way towards helping you understand how your students are learning in the real world and the kinds of study skills they need to develop.

Digital networking literacies - This really falls within digital literacies, but it is worth highlighting as I feel that developing your digital networking skills has real significance for your continuing development. If you can learn how to build supportive relationships with the other trainees on your course so that you can retain these contacts as a network after you finish the course then you can put these networking skills to good use within the various open online communities and networks that exist within various social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Having an online learning network and knowing how best to work within that network can help to ensure that you can guide your own continuing development after the course you are training on has finished.


Build international contacts - Online training often provides a much more international learning environment than the classroom and so this can help to broaden the learning experience as there is a much wider range of experience to share. Finding out about how things are done in different countries and very different contexts to your own can be very refreshing and enlightening and can really enhance the learning experience and the network building potential of the course.

Differentiated learning - As a trainer when you encounter a group of teachers face to face, it takes time and effort to see them as individuals with individual needs and interests. As an online trainer this experience is reversed, you are constantly dealing and communicating with each member of the group as an individual and this enables you to more rapidly assess their needs as individuals and adapt the learning to suit them.

One to one time - Following on from the previous point, almost all tutor - student time in online courses is one to one rather than whole group, so again it is easier to ensure that as a trainee you get the attention you need from your tutor.

Personality types - For shyer less confident students online leaning can work to their advantage because contributing in text can be much less threatening than doing it orally. You also have more time to consider your contributions to the group and can edit and re-edit them to be sure that you express yourself clearly.

Longer period of study - Learning something well really takes time. Online training can often take place over a much longer period of time than most face to face courses can. This keeps you supported and engaged in the learning process for a greater period and so allows more time for development.

Your learning journey - Because the interactions within an online course are digital, they are recorded and captured so you have the opportunity to go back and retrace and review your entire learning journey. This greatly increases the chances of a deeper learning experience and greater retention of what you have learned.

Time for reflection - Online training allows more time for reflection and good online learning structures in this reflection, so that you not only reflect on your learning process but have time to discuss and share your reflections and share in the reflections of other teachers

Flexibility - You can study at times that are convenient for you and for time periods that suit your learning concentration span. A lot of classroom training time often turns into dead time, because the length of lessons are dictated by administrative convenience rather than pedagogical advantage and trainers and trainees are often left pushing their way through materials long after their optimum concentration period has been exceeded. When you study online you can have a break whenever and however often you feel like. This gives you time to ponder what you have learned or move on to new materials at your own pace and use your time more efficiently.

Lower cost - The costs, not only of courses but also of travel, accommodation and time off work are often vastly reduced when you take an online course rather than a face to face course.

So those are my 15 reasons. Feel free to add any of your own in the comments section.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , ,

الخميس، 20 يناير 2011

3 More Tasks to Teach Yourself to Teach with Technology

At the end of 2010 I published the first 5 tasks in a series to help teacher learn how to use technology with their students. Now I would like to add 3 more tasks to that collection. The first few tasks are all quite simple to lay the ground work and get teachers started. As the series progresses I hope to get on to more adventurous tasks. Please feel free to use these tasks yourself or to share or use them for teacher training.

Task 6: Creating a video review activity
In this task you’ll learn how to create a film trailer review activity using film trailers from YouTube and an online notice board called Wallwisher. Here’s an example to look at before you start: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/nikstrailers

Wallwisher is a really useful tool for giving students a semi restricted choice of online videos or links to other resources from around the Internet.


Task 7: Creating screenshots using Jing
Jing is a really useful free tool that allows you to create and annotate images grabbed from the screen of your computer.
This can be really useful for creating instruction sheets like the ones used in this series and helps you to grab images to add into websites or other documents.

Task 8: Create your own YouTube channel
Video has become one of the most useful resources on the Internet for language teachers. There are a great many video sharing websites on the Internet, but YouTube is by far the biggest.
In this task you will create your own YouTube channel. It’s very useful to have your own channel even if you never create your own videos. It enable you to subscribe to other channels, share videos with groups of your students and even annotate and add subtitles to videos. We’ll be doing all those things in future tasks, but in this task you will create your channel and subscribe to some other useful channels.
I hope you find these tasks useful and I hope that you'll soon find some more here.

Related links:
Best

Nik Peachey
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , ,

الاثنين، 13 أبريل 2009

Using Online Sticky Noticeboards

For the last few days I've been playing with WallWisher a handy tool for creating online noticeboards that you can add sticky notes to.
It's very easy to create your own noticeboard, just click where it says 'Build a Wall' and you'll see a new wall with some options on it that you need to complete. Basically these are:
  • Uploading an image
  • Choosing colours
  • Adding title and subtitle
  • Creating your password
  • Deciding who can see and add to your wall
Once you have done this you just click the big 'Done' button and you are almost ready to start adding content to your wall. Before you start to add content you'll need to check your email account where you should find your password. Then you just log in to your wall and double click on the wall to start adding the sticky notes.

The sticky notes are quite simple, you just add some text and you can either link to an image, a video or a web page.

The nice thing about this is that when users click on the link it opens in a pop up browser over the wall. This means that you can use your wall to focus students access to sites like flickr or Youtube and stop them drifting into other content. It also means that you can use the wall to set up specific activities and get your students to post their responses on the wall (as long as you have selected 'Everyone' to allow others to post to the wall)

So how do we use this with students?
  • We can create video tasks and get students to post responses to the wall by leaving it open for everyone to contribute. Here's a wall that I created about Ramadan. This wall has been left open for anyone to contribute to.
  • We could use the wall to collect different links to various resources around the web for students to explore, a little like a web quest or treasure hunt.
  • We could give students a theme and get them to create their own walls based around that theme.
  • We could get students to create fan walls based around a favourite band or celebrity.
  • You can use the wall to collect and share resources like this one on IELTS
  • You could use the wall to set up video or image based activities. Here's a video activity that I have set up for teachers based around a Mr Bean Video. Feel free to contribute.
  • This activity uses an image to get students to practice using present continuous.
  • You can use the wall to create debates. You can do this either by posting your own contentious opinions or using videos from sites like BigThink.com and get students to respond. This could be a way of dealing with sensitive issues and enabling students to be able to express opinions that they might not feel comfortable doing in the classroom. Here's an example
  • We can even create grammar walls and get students to post what they know and examples of different verb tenses or grammar points.
  • We could even get students to post their wishes on it using third conditional.
  • Or last but not least we could use it to notify our students or parents of homework assignments and keep them up to date with what's happening in class.

What I like about WallWisher.
  • It's free and easy to use and requires a minimum of registration info
  • I like the way the links open in a pop up over the page
  • You can embed the wall into a blog or website
  • Your wall produces an RSS feed which can make it easy to keep track of what is being added
  • Students can get involved and post brief comments or create their won walls
  • It can be used collaboratively
  • Great way to create easy online learning tasks
  • It looks nice

Things I'm not so sure about
  • It would be nice to have a few more controls about who posts to the wall. At present it's either only the creator or everyone! Would be nice to be able to invite people to post to it.
  • I'd also like to be able to add / embed more than one link into a sticky note so that you can include an image or video and a link to a site, but you could get round this by adding more than one sticky.
  • Would be nice to have a bit more control over how the embedded wall appears in a web page. Here's what mine looks like.


Well I hope you like WallWisher and find it useful. If you have other ideas for how to use it please do post comments and links.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , ,

الأربعاء، 18 يونيو 2008

Microsoft's free Learning Content Development System

When Microsoft start giving stuff away for free, it always makes me curious, and when I spotted this free LCDS (Learning Content Development System) a while back I decided to download it and give it a try.

If like me you've never had the patience (or the time and money) to really master a tool like Flash, but like the idea of creating interactive materials that can run online (SCORM compliant to run in an LMS), then this could be a handy tool for you. I spent the best part of a day working out how to use it and creating some materials with it for a teacher training session and by the end of the day I had two 'modules' each of 4 -5 different activity types combining images, audio, video and swf animation. Considering that I hadn't used this before and I had to actually write all the materials to put into it, I think that's pretty good for just one day, and having put the time into learning the program, I'm pretty sure that my next efforts will be much quicker.

What I liked about it
  • It wasn't difficult to learn how to use. The interface is quite intuitive and I didn't need to consult the help or any support documentation.
  • It's all point and click, no programming languages to learn.
  • The results look quite professional
  • It's SCORM compliant
  • It has some nice task types. These are a few of my favourites:

This one is grouping type activity played against a timer. Users have to click the correct bucket to drop each item into.

This is one of my favourites, it's called 'Adventure' but I know it as a reading maze. User are shown a situation and given some options, They then see the outcome of the option they choose and have to make another choice and so on until they find the 'correct' way to resolve th problem. These can be really complex to write and arrange, but this one was quite easy to do and to review and make changes. I was also able to add different images to each page.


Another task type I liked was this tile flip activity. It's a novel variation on pelmanism, but it combines the matching pairs with a kind of true false activity. Basically each tile has a true statement on one side and a false one on the other, and the user has to line up rows of true statements. They also have a limited amount of cards they can turn to get it right and if they exceed the number of turns they have to start all over again.


Lastly, I liked that you can also set up tasks using either video or swf files. This is one I created using a Flash tutorial and the built in Note taking part of the interface.


What I wasn't so sure about
  • It only seems to support swf and wmv files for video, which is a bit annoying, especially for MAC users.
  • When I came to 'publish' / upload the materials to run online, it turned out that they wouldn't work without being uploaded to an LMS (with its own viewer)
  • You need IE 7 with Silverlight installed to view the files (though there does seem to be a way to configure the files to run in Flash instead, which I'm assuming would allow you to view them in Firefox too).
Despite all of this, Microsoft's LCDS does seem to have huge potential for people like me who struggle with coding, but want to produce something that looks good and works well.

If you work in an institution that has its own LMS and you want to digitise some course materials to run online, then it could well be worth looking at as a cheap (free) solution.

If you'd like to try out the materials I created for training teachers in the use of IT and evaluating different task types, you can download the zip file of the whole session (9.4Mb) from here.

As I said above though, you'll need to have MS's Silverlight installed, then go to the file named 'wrapper.htm' and open it to begin working through the materials.

If you want to download the free LCDS and have a play yourself, then go here: https://www.microsoft.com/learning/tools/lcds/default.mspx

I'd be really interested to hear from anyone else who's tried this, especially if they've managed to get some working examples up online, so do drop me a line and share your experiences.

Best

Nik Peachy
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , , ,

الأربعاء، 11 يونيو 2008

Skype Part 2 Online Workspace

Anyone who uses their whiteboard for ELT / EFL classes will know what a really useful teaching aid it can be, so how about using one with your distance learners?

In Part 1 of this series on Skype plugins, I looked at how and where to find and install plugins for Skype and I also looked at how to use Pamela to record audio materials and interviews with Skype.

In this posting I'd like to have a look at an online collaboration tool called Yugma which allows you to share files, share your desktop, make live presentations and have a shared online whiteboard all running along side your Skype application.

This quick tutorial takes you through some of the basic features.



You can download a version for your computer in Quick Time here.
Or
Open the tutorial in a new window here.

How to use this with ELT / EFL students
Well I think this is definitely a distance learning support tool rather than some thing to use in the classroom / multi media lab with students. It could be ideal for teacher who wants to teach online 1 to 1 especially if you are doing this independently and don't have the support of a company to provide you with specialist software. I think it's also a pretty useful tool for teacher training and development if you have groups of teachers spread around the country or the world even.
  • You can show students how to use specific software for their course and talk them through the various processes.
  • You can show students around websites and use them as the basis for online discussion
  • You can share documents with your students and get them to work on them collaboratively
  • Students can share projects they have been working on with other group members
  • You can play games online such as Pictionary (a game where one player draws a picture and the others have to guess the word it represents)
  • You can share notes as you deliver presentations
  • You can record presentations and reuse them
  • You can set up a whole programme of different online business simulations such as
    • Presenting information about a company
    • Presenting a sales report of the results of survey findings
    • Students try to sell a fictional product to investors (your other students would be the investors)
    • Carrying out online interviews, with students presenting and talking about their CVs
  • The ability to record these presentations would make it much easier for your students to review them and for you to offer feedback on their work.
What I like about Yugma
  • As tools like this become a more widely used and accepted part of international business, developing the ability to use such tools is going to become a valuable 'real life' skill.
  • It's free (at least some parts are) and quite easy and quick to install and use.
  • I really like that you can record your meetings to watch later etc.
  • Great that this integrates with Skype
  • It seems to offer a pretty comprehensive package of functions

What I wasn't so sure about
  • Some of the functionality is limited after the first 15 days, unless you choose to pay for an account.
  • You have to be sure that your firewall / anti-virus doesn't block it, so if you have any problems getting it started, then that's the first thing to check.
  • You'll also need to get your students to download and install it.
Well I hope you find this tool useful. As I said, this is really one for the distance / online tutor and I'd love to hear from anyone who has tried it out with their students.

Best

Nik Peachey
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , , , ,
الاشتراك في: الرسائل (Atom)