I’ve just arrived back from a really interesting workshop on voice coaching which brought up a few new considerations for me when creating elearning materials.

One of the most important aspects of the voice coaching workshop centred around warming up your voice in order to attain the full vocal range. Picture a room full of seemingly insane people - heads lolling about in circles, mouths making buzzing and, bluntly, farting noises. No, you haven’t walked into an lunatic asylum - this is the kind of thing you have to get used to doing if you want to use your voice to it’s full effect. The end purpose of this is to push your voice out of the sometimes monotone quality it can have if you launch into a speech unprepared. The warm-up will make your voice more ‘flexible’ and lead to a more easy and varied tone, which is known to increase engagement in listeners.

Now, I thought, that makes sense, and is certainly something I can use for workshops in my day-to-day work. But what about the other type of lecturing I do, ie. ’speaking’ to learners online? Is it possible to introduce a varied tone in your writing, and if so, how? What takes a particularly monotonous, ‘monotone’ piece of text and makes it interesting, engaging and varied in tone?

Tutors and trainers, whether in education or business, are often thrown into teaching with the expectation that they will succeed simply due to their expert status. The old problem was that of lecturers, experts in their area, simply not being able to engage their students due to their lack of presentation and public speaking skills. The new problem is that trainers and tutors now have to write thousands of words of training materials while not necessarily having any great writing skills.

Naturally, those that land a job in this area will be hugely knowledgeable in their field, and will no doubt have an excellent standard of written english. But as I discovered in the voice coaching workshop earlier today, there’s a big difference between being able to speak correctly and being able to speak in an interesting and engaging manner.

Writing well is a highly skilled process - car manufacturers wouldn’t dream of trying to write advertising copy themselves for examples, they will have professional writers and marketers for such a task. The same is becoming true of the video games industry, going through somewhat of an upheaval at the moment, as they realise that they simply can’t write plots and stories themselves any more. To compete with films and TV they need professional writers delivering professional writing.

Thousands and thousands of pages of training materials are being produced day-in day-out, but are they effective? The content may be good, but will it engage the learner and actually make a difference? Perhaps we need to do more work on training staff in writing techniques, or having systems to alter works to make it more engaging. Imagine a team of proffessional writers taking in raw learning content from academics and producing an endless supply of stimulating, engagement learning resources. There’s no question that the current university model would struggle to support this financially, but given doubly engaged students and reduced drop-out and fail rates would it be worth it.

Of course this is all conjecture, it may not have that much of an effect, but let’s think about the number of academic books out there at the moment. Lecturers and students will recommend texts based on how accessible and stimulating they found them. Therefore, discounting the most obscure of subjects, noone has to suffer through a dull, dull account or their area when a better written alternative is available. Course notes, however, have no such alternative, and students will struggle through with no help in sight.

I still remember many painful hours as an undergraduate reading through papers and books written by experts in the field with no idea how to spice up a subject bar a quick sprinkling of some exotic and obscure language. Is it time to acknowledge that being an academic doesn’t automatically infer a talent for writing? I would say yes… but then I might tomorrow be handed a copy of, ‘Maximum Likelihood Cointegration Rank Test Statistics,’ and asked, “Spice this up a little bit would you?”

Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking at Induction processes here at Napier University - most specifically those introducing students to WebCT, Napier’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) of choice. Some of my discoveries have been quite interesting and back up in reality a lot of the theory that we’ve already discussed regarding the support of on-line learners.

One example comes in the form of a induction process devised by the social science department of the university, a pilot of which was run on an MSc course last semester. The format of this process was a 2 week course of daily activities, all very short - sub 30mins. Each activity would introduce the student to a different part of WebCT and show how it would be used on the course, including such things as discussion forums, chat rooms and multimedia libraries. An activity would be released each day over the two week period and the students were expected to work on them that day, collaborating with each other as required, as is the case on discussion tasks in particular. This higlights the second purpose of the induction process - to build a sense of community among the students despite working at distance. There were plenty of opportunities for discussion among the two weeks and it was hoped that they would participate in these at the correct time, thus creating asynchronous but quick-response conversations.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the students didn’t use the induction materials at all in the way intended…

I talked to the program leader about the whole process and the main learning point that arose was the fact that students, even well qualified and high acheiving students such as study on the course in question, will not follow a strict schedule, especially measured on a scale of days. The course leaders observed the students throughout the two weeks and noticed a trend of irregular visits, every few days at most, and on these visits the student would complete all available tasks at once. Rarely did a student complete the allocated task on it’s given day, probably due to the fact that they discovered the brevity of each activity at the beginning and realised that they were never going to fall behind. This led, naturally, to a lack of communication among the class as they were never on the same task simultaneously, and so the sense of community was never fostered among the group.

The second trend observed by the course leader was that while every student looked in on every task, some did not complete a large percentage of their tasks. Having talked to these students afterwards in feedback sessions she discovered that a they had decided that there was no point in completeting the tests and tasks at this early stage. They decided that they’d have a look now, take note of what resources were available, and then come back when the information was required, ie. when the problem or activity actually cropped up in coursework.

I feel that both of the above trends show that too much structure was given to the student. As we’ve seen and discussed in earlier sections of BOE, one of the main strengths of on-line learning is it’s flexibility. The on-demand, anytime learning offered by this medium is often quoted as it’s most desirable quality, so by giving the student tasks which require participation each and every day the process was setting itself up to fail. The fact that every student did complete every task shows that they were well designed and useful, but the delivery mechanism seemed to be flawed. Perhaps making communication and discussion tasks run over a week on the next run of the process and making completion deadlines for other tasks more flexible would improve the community building aspect, and allow students to work more in the way they desire.

This approach would also tie in with the second point of interest, which is the fact that some of the students themselves seemed to brand the induction activities as a resource to be referred back to as and when required. By branding the activities with a specific time and date, it encourages a ‘complete and forget’ mentality where the students consider the entire induction resource redundant after the induction period. If this idea was relaxed, and the students were encouraged to work through the tasks as and when needed, as suggested above and including throughout the course, then they would be more likely to refer back to the introductory help when required, and thus overcome problems more easily.

Overall, the induction materials were a success in that students found them useful, and problems with the VLE were cut, but I feel, along with the course leader, that a change in delivery method would make them even more useful. Looking at it more generally, students will always be strategic learners and attempt to complete their work via the path of least resistance. Accounting for this though and offering the resources in a manner that allows this more easily will make always them more well received, and thus more well used. Also, making sure that students realise that induction resources are not just useful at the start of a course but can be dipped into as and when needed will ensure that they are well supported throughout the program.

As most people reading this will know, the group work project began nearly two weeks ago now and the learning contracts were due in at the end of last week. Well, ours has only just been finished and hard work it was too! Not hard work in the academic sense, but hard work in terms of simply being able to discuss the contents and decide on an approach!

One of the greatest advantages of online collaboration, you would imagine, is the flexibility it affords. People being able to collaborate from remote locations - any time, any place. But we’ve discovered that it’s just as difficult, perhaps even more so, to arrange meetings between geographically remote participants. And then, tie in the difficulties of unreliable connections, broken microphones and unwieldy software and the difficulties only multiply.

I’m beginning to feel that synchronous collaboration is perhaps the weaker sibling to its asynchronous brother. Asynchronous collaboration allows the true flexibility that I mentioned above, allowing remote participants to communicate truly any time, any place. Obviously we pay for that flexibility in the form of a far higher time lag but I’ve found that due to the evolving nature of our work the lag is getting shorter and shorter. Most academics and students these days will spend a large part of their day on or near a computer, giving us the constant ability to check bulletin boards, email, wikis and blogs. Therefore, asynchronous communication can and sometimes does proceed at a reasonably fast pace. There will always be some that spend less time on and are less enthused towards their computer but that’s certainly becoming rarer.

You would imagine that synchronous communication would always have it’s place though. In a seminar for example, how would you offer a presentation from a speaker and after-discussion in an asynchronous form? Well, JISC have done just that (JISC, 2007a), running not just a seminar but a fully online conference for the last two years on the subject of Innovating Online Learning. Keynote presentations are delivered via the web including written speeches, powerpoint slides and more, and attendees can view the presentations over the period of a couple of days and discuss the ideas via discussion boards. Evaluations run after both events showed that they were very well received with 87% voting the presentations and papers as very good or excellent and 81% voting the discussions as very good or excellent (JISC, 2007b).

Reflecting on how the group work has gone so far, and how we’ve generally communicated on the MSc as a whole, I have to admit I’ve always preferred asynchronous. I’m on the computer for the majority of every working day and I’ve got used to checking the boards a few times a day, so I can generally respond quickly. It also means that on the occasions when I’m out doing workshops and attending meetings I’m never missing vital synchronous meetings. I do admit synchronous communication has some advantages, but the extra stress and hassle of arranging and running meetings does, to me, negate these advantages.

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JISC (2007a) Innovating Elearning Online Conference 2007. Available from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_pedagogy/elp_conference07.aspx [Accessed: 07/03/08]JISC (2007b) Evaluation Report Highlights, Innovating e-Learning 2007 Online Conference. Available from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/evaljisc2007highlights.doc [Accessed: 07/03/08]

Martin and myself have just finished putting our student run seminar on-line and before the activity even begins I feel that I’ve learned a fair bit about creating online e-tivities.

During my time studying both Introduction to Blended and Online Education and Supporting the Blended and Online Student Experience I’ve felt that the discussions have been one of the most effective learning tools on the course. I benefit from the process of articulating my thoughts and committing them to (e-)paper. That said, when we first started thinking about the type of activity we wished to run, I was keen to try to move away from the standard offer up a question and begin the discussion approach.

I’ve always been an avid games player in any form, from hours spent playing computer games in my youth to livening up a quiet evening in the pub with a game of 21, so any form of competition or play present in my learning tends to engage me more than normal. As a consequence I wanted to try out some type of game in our seminar to see if it grabbed people, and drew them in. The simulation and role-play areas were suggested in the assignment spec and so it was towards those we gravitated when thinking up our task.

Martin raised the idea of a debate on widening access to education quite early on and it seemed a good subject to bring out a lot of different opinions. How to turn it into a game though? I was getting a little extravagant with my ideas, thinking of things such as giving each participant a character and making them role-play the entire debate, or simulating the widening of access of a university over a 20 year period by giving each participant one variable to research and control. In the end though, having thought it through, I decided we just didn’t have enough time in 2 weeks to do something quite so complicated. In the end, we decided that turning the debate into a simple 2-side role-play might be enough, and that’s what we did. To bring the main characters to life we decided to record their speeches (sound effects and all, thanks Martin!) and give the whole thing a setting. I’m unsure whether it’s enough of a change from normal to raise the engagement for the participants but I’m quite excited to see how people take to it.

What I’ve already learned from this process is that creating something a little more innovative and different from the norm takes far longer. I think we could have run a normal debate on the subject and it would have taken all of 30 minutes to set up, but because of the requirements to think up a setting, two quite extreme opinions and deliver them in an engaging manner (the audio files with SFX) it took more like a couple of days. Of course this could be used over and over again though so it could be worth the initial investment.

Aside from all that though, I quite enjoyed making up the setting and the characters and writing the little accompanying introduction so it didn’t feel like it took much longer. And we’ll soon see if it makes a difference. Updates to come after Drs Johnson and Helmsley face off across the podium!

Hi, welcome to the first (and slightly late!) post of my SBOSE reflective blog.

I thought it’d be worth spending a wee while going through the reasons why I chose to do a blog for this part of the coursework as it reflects a few of the experiences I’ve had of online learning so far. It also gives a bit more background about me and, so I’m told, apparently that’s a prerequiste for a sucessful blog!

So, to the reasons:

1. Personal Learning Style: I know this is true of probably most people, but I feel it’s particularly true of me - I’m terrible at learning by rote. I need to think about things, process them and reorganise them in my head in order to remember anything. I studied Astrophysics as an undergrad and I found it easier to work out how to derive forumlae that to remember them by heart. At least the process of deriving made sense in my head, rather than just being a collection of random letters.I’m finding this is true also of doing lots of readings as is required on this course. I’ve read a fair bit of the recommended readings, and felt that I took it in at the time, but a week later I can’t recall most of the detail. If, however, I’ve made a discussion posting on the subject in the day or two after reading it which requires a bit of processing then I recall it for far far longer. It’s classic contructivist learning I think, having to connect the dots, tie it in with previous knowledge and re-present the information (Kearsley, 2008) and I think it works very well for me. It also brings home to me how important using these tools is for student support, as I feel that a lot of people are in a similar ‘learning boat’ with me. If it’s not present already, then attempting to force a little reflection can only be a good thing for supporting a student’s learning. Therefore, blogging it is for this course - hopefully this will force me to reflect on my readings more often and therefore retain a lot more information!
2. It forces me out of my strategic learner mindset: I will hold my hands up and proclaim, I am very much a strategic learner when I don’t make the effort not to be. I will look at the assessment criteria and carefully craft my submissions aimed straight at the centre. I will attempt to keep my work to a minimum while still attaining a good grade. For example, when choosing whether to do a blog or a development project, I could visualise a number of things on which I am working just now which would fit the bill. I could complete them, as is requried for my work in any case, and no doubt pass the assessment with little extra work on my part. But, the purpose of taking this course is to learn of course! I’m not really doing it for the qualification, I’ve already got my masters after all, and so I took the conscious decision to do a blog based on the fact that it would force me to read more and reflect more, hopefully learning more.How this changes my view of student support I’m not sure. I do like the thought of offering students a choice in how they’re assessed, thus bringing them into the decision making process as is recommended in Knowles’ Theory of Andragogy. But will they always take this responsibility seriously, or will they simply expend vast amounts of time and energy (far more than they do on the coursework) finding the path of least resistance? Either way, I’ve decided to take what I think is, for me, the path of most resistance, and hope to reap the rewards. But will no doubt simply face the consequences!

Anyway, sorry for the slightly long post, but hopefully they’ll be shorter from now on. I’m going to attempt to live up to point number 1 above and reflect on things as I’m reading them. Let’s see how it goes…

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Kearsley, G (2008). Constructivist Theory. Available from: http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html [Accessed: 26/02/08].

Knowles, M. (1984). The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species (3rd Ed.). Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing.