Assignment One: Section One - Online Resources

The first experience that will be explored here is related to designing, creating and distributing online resources. The examples of online resources that will be explored are screencast videos, which are designed to guide students through learning to use certain pieces of computer software. These screencasts are videos showing what would be seen on a computer monitor alongside an audio commentary.

Screencast: Using Course Genie 2.0

These resources were considered necessary because students and staff at Edge Hill are required to have certain levels of IT skills to do tasks related to teaching and learning that are expected of them. There are also situations where the technology will enable them to do useful things to improve what they are doing or to save them time. Because our team's role is to develop the use of technology at the institution further, our activities can add to the amount of skills and knowledge the staff and students require, and over the last few years we have tried to respond to the amount of training required through face-to-face sessions and we will discuss examples of these later. It was noticed that our team could not meet all the increasing demand from staff and students through face-to-face sessions, and some sort of help online that people could access whenever they needed it was required.

The first experience to explore will be the ‘Using Course Genie 2.0’ course which is made up of 25 lessons and lasts about 70 minutes (Appendix A). The ‘Using Course Genie 2.0’ course was designed for Edge Hill staff that are developing resources for use on our Virtual Learning Environment, and its purpose is to allow then to develop online resources using the ‘Course Genie’ software, while using mainly the skills they need to know to use Microsoft Word. Firstly the sections required to train the member of staff to develop resources were listed, and important things to include in each session were noted. The training was recorded 'live' with the recording of actions on the computer and voice being done at the same time. An intention with the creation of the training was that the staff would be able to work alongside the training to create an example piece of work. When the training was completed it was made available online and people who might want to use it were informed. My feeling when watching the complete training was that the training was complete enough to help the staff become reasonably independent with as we hoped.

When deciding if the teaching went well or not, we notice a major difference between this type of teaching and face-to-face types, the fact that we cannot see a user's reaction to the training. This training was made accessible via a ‘weblog’ web page, meaning people could put comments about the training on the website, but up until now no-one has. Because I have had no feedback yet, analysis of the success of and possibilities for future development of will rely on looking at how what I created relates to learning theory, my philosophy of teaching, user needs such as accessibility and the literature about teaching methods.

The training intends to enable the user to learn in different ways. I am going to use Doolittle’s eight core design principles that are valid whatever type of constructivist approach you subscribe to (Doolittle, 1999) as these will help me to analyse my teaching by comparing it with a model.

These eight principles are:
1. Learning should take place in authentic and real-world environments.
2. Learning should involve social negotiation and mediation.
3. Content and skills should be made relevant to the learner.
4. Content and skills should be understood within the framework of the learner's prior knowledge.
5. Students should be assessed formatively, serving to inform future learning experiences.
6. Students should be encouraged to become self-regulatory, self-mediated, and self-aware.
7. Teachers serve primarily as guides and facilitators of learning, not instructors.
8. Teachers should provide for and encourage multiple perspectives and representations of content.

Firstly Doolittle argues that experience needs to be in real world environments. I would argue that screencasting training lends itself to this because you are recording what is happening. This training was going through a project step by step to help the user relate it to a real world situation more easily.

The second principle involves social negotiation. Doolittle notes that online education is ideal for the promotion of this, but the one way nature of screencasting in itself prevents this if it is not included in a wider range of tools. In this situation email addresses are supplied in case the user needs help or wants to know more. A link to an online discussion board, visited by the teacher would perhaps encourage further interaction and discussion. It might also be a source of feedback on the course that could feed into future versions. As well as this, the teacher could talk about their thought processes and reasons for what they are doing during the training. While again this is one way communication, it allows the user to see a little more how others see things.

Regarding the third principle, while the training videos are designed in a linear format, the user can choose from the titles to decide which episodes might be useful for them to watch. These screencast courses are also designed to be included in a larger library of courses, allowing the user much more choice of what training might help them. To better show the users how these Course Genie learning materials are relevant to them, each episode could have been started by stating openly what the user is intended to learn from it. This would mean that users watching some rather than all of the episodes would have the aims of the training made explicit to them, which also fits in with what I noted that I thought important in my philosophy of teaching section earlier in this piece.

Doolittle notes when talking about the fourth principle, that this is difficult to do in online education, because it requires some sort of discussion between the teacher and the learner. Screencast learning objects themselves have no facility to allow this discussion, however the way that they are distributed and presented to the user online can allow this to an extent. In the case of this project the various movies are available to watch independently so that the user can read the titles and decide which they need to watch, and which their prior knowledge means that they do not need to watch. When accessing the resources, users could be required to go through a set of questions about current knowledge and experience. The outcome of this ‘skills audit’ could be a list of links that is useful to them.

The current teaching has little that meets the demands of the fifth principle, because the users watch it without the teacher even knowing that they have. Because much of the teaching aims to show the user how to do certain things the user will to an extent have to assess them selves, that is if they cannot do what the video aimed to help them learn they have not learned it and might benefit from watching the video again. However this does not inform the teacher so that future learning resources can be developed and improved. Users could have been given a self assessment quiz at the end, or could be given some sort of quiz or essay that is assessed by a teacher. This would allow the learner to be given formative assessment and the teacher to look at developing the learning materials.

Regarding the sixth principle, the self-motivation required to start a learning experience such as this course points to the fact that the users of this and similar courses are already responsible for their own learning. The course however is not asking the user to develop these qualities in any explicit way, and therefore should have included this as a learning aim, and embedded this into the learning materials.

Regarding the seventh principle in these learning materials, I would have to say the teacher is at times acting as an instructor, especially when the learning aim is for the user to learn to do something using the software. At other times the teacher will be guiding the user towards perhaps thinking how a certain function of the software might enable them to do something that they want to. While I think that teaching this subject requires a certain amount of direct instruction, especially to get those with few skills and little experience of using computers started, the amount of guidance and asking the user to do things on their own could have been greater.

The eighth principle is partly about designing learning materials for a variety of students. Screencasting innately does this to a certain extent, because you are presenting audio and visual learning materials at the same time. Doolittle summarises the work of Mayer et al (cited in Doolittle, 2001) on the subject of using multiple media in learning, noting that when images and audio are working together learning is improved over just one or the other being used. This course also aims to enable to user to do what has been talked about, meaning that learning can also be active. As for accessibility for students with disabilities, the course is not fully accessible to users who are Deaf or hard of hearing. These users would need the course to contain captions to be able to fully make use of the training. As for blind and partially sighted students, the training intends to be useable with the user just listening, but this has not been tested yet.