E-Learning Week 4 - Tasks and Reflection

Tasks:

Find at least one good and one bad example case of course design and reflect your opinions of these courses in your personal Weblog. Visit the blogs of your groupmates, read their reflections of course designs and add your opinions as comments about these courses.

I can easily draw a comparison between four e-courses, which I have participated in or am currently participating in:

1. Ethics and Law in New Media
2. E-Learning
3. Avatud õppematerjalide koostamine ja kasutamine
4. Value Chains and New Media

All of these courses are designed in such a way that there is input from the facilitator as well as from the student. The first three courses would be good examples and the fourth would be the bad example, although the example is still not the worst kind.

The first course is very orderly. First it gives the backbone of the course and in the backbone there is a possibility to move on to the course topics. In each topic you have the hometask as well as extra materials. In addition the lecturer provided us with a forum and a weekly skype discussion opportunity (to gain points and to get feedback on different topics). He also invited guests to our skype sessions. These weekly sessions were good for communication between different people, and also groupwork was pretty good among our participants. Each group member had to contribute to the paper we made and thus noone could miss their part. We created the course work environment in a wiki as well. What was missing from the course was the introduction to the topic (as in "today we are going to learn... etc.), but that was really a minor error. Individually we read papers and filled in our blogs.

The second course are very well designed with tasks given in correct order, topics and extra materials under the introduction, leading to separate pages. As I got used to the backbone of the previous course, the index before the topics seems a good solution, but after the index there is scrollable content (too much scrollable content is not good). This course seems not too "scrollable", satisfactory in that sense. The facilitator introduces the topics and provides with good reading materials which give additional academic knowledge to the initial knowledge base, which is great. Students have to reflect on different tasks (given on Wikiversity page) in their blogs and groupwork has to be done on a separate page. A good thing is that the facilitator gives feedback on the course in each participant's blog, and also provides us with a web conferencing option. The facilitator also keeps the students updated through her blog.

The third course is divided into two environments, having the backbone with a similar index as the second course has, and the Wikiversity page is more used as the introduction to weekly topics and tasks. Tasks are given in a separate blog, which may be a bit confusing to the first-time users, but this is well-adaptable to a technology-prone person. The facilitator uses an extra pageflakes page to collect all students' blog links into one blogroll visible to all participants at once, which is a good idea to have a look at the others' blogs as well. The blog option is used for weekly materials.
I found this kind of learning more amusing, but also more confusing. The learners in that course were intrinsically motivated and quite communicative, thus making the course more enjoyable. Sadly I had to leave because of lack of time (enormous workload).

The three previous examples were examples of good e-learning course designs, but the last one should be a bit worse example. 
The fourth Wikiversity-based course's layout is quite stretched, so you have to scroll it down, and the table of contents (what I previously called "index") appeared only recently. This is a very inconvenient way to navigate on the page. The facilitator provides with the introduction of each page, but when you start looking closer at the topics, the content seems pretty much copy-paste from the original sources (which does not seem very academic). There is a separate closed environment (iCampus) for participation and you have to upload your documents there. She provides the students with sources and topics on iCampus, but she has not defined the marking scale, nor the criteria for passing the course. This course seems a bit disturbing, because I feel more like blogging instead of scribbling documents and uploading them. Also I do not like scrolling and would prefer clicking on the topic and moving on to a separate page.

As a group define what are the criteria for a good online course and reflect it in your group space (whatever you choose this to be), but make this group space visible to other groups by posting a link on E-learning/Participants page under your group.

The page created is tallinnuniversityprojects.pbworks.com, and our group task is here.


Reading and reflection

1. Make a selection of reading material for the fourth week
2. Reflect on your learning experiences in your personal Weblog following the reflection template:

1. Explain, what are the components of course design.

1. Structure - in which order and how to place content. What kind of information to provide, what kind of links, etc.
2. Material - presented in a structured format, so that the learner can understand the topics. Chosen material does not differ from classroom material.
3. Motivation and feedback - Due to effective feedback provided by the facilitator, the learner feels motivated.
4. Interaction - a) programs that enable activity, b)open questions, games, tools and calculators stimulate good activity, c) engage the mind!
5. Involvement - Learner-controlled involvement through several activities.

2. What was the most important thing you learned this week? What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

The most important thing that I learned this week was that group collaboration needs strong peer support and encouragement, as well as changes in chosen web-based applications. It may turn out that in fact the chosen solution may not be the best for this particular group.

3. What is your evaluation of this week's groupwork? (What went well and what did not? How did groupwork influence fulfilling your personal learning contract?)

 I was very pleased with this week's groupwork in terms of collaboration and input. After reminding ourselves that PbWorks does not allow multiple changes for one page, we agreed on using a Google Document in order to collaborate on a draft version of our task 1, and this also went quite well, everybody started participating right away. Alice had to make an account in Google and she managed to fix her thoughts in the document as well.

I expected our wiki-collaboration to make more progress. I certainly expect the group members to add or change my posts in our wiki as well. 

I think I had good feedback on my questions and I hope I could support my team members as well as I could as well. I hope to get feedback on our groupwork from the facilitator as well, since this was the first task ever done by our group in such way. I felt we could have done more there, but maybe I am just overthinking.
Overall, my management skills proved to be excellent in getting the group together as well as allowing them all to collaborate in their own pace. I am satisfied with myself, thus I should make a green tick somewhere in order to mark my coping with the task in the contract.

4. Describe what has changed in your personal learning environment and in group environment?

What changed in our group learning environment was that a separate document for online and simultaneous collaboration was needed. Creating a Google Document was  not a difficult job. I think our group is going to use this kind of collaboration more, and maybe new means of collaboration will arise as well. Final results that our group got, were still put in PbWiki space.