Short Online Taster Courses

Last week I participated in a Learning Tree ITL online taster course "Preparing for an ITIL v3 Implementation". I participated in this for two reasons the first was to see if there were any aspects of the ITL methodology that I could implement in our team's work, the second was to experience the online delivery. With respect to the implementation of ITL because there are correlations with the project management approach that we already apply which is a very simplified Prince 2 and the fact that we are currently trying articulate what services we provide, the course succeeded in reassuring me that we had already or are attempting to, integrated some of the ITL processes and considerations such as:

• providing clarity with respect to what are planning to deliver
• defining the service we are providing 
• asking the question whether we are doing what we said we were going to do
• providing milestones
• episodically reassessing our objectives and where we want to be 
• establishing metrics for measuring our service
• getting feedback on what we do

With respect to the eLearning participant experience. Firstly, as this was a taster I had managed my expectations with respect to what could be achieved in a couple of hours. The course was delivered using Adobe Connect, which I had used before and the interface and the set-up wizards are straight forward to use. Glitches with sound aka feedback were cleared up pretty quickly sound well done on that side. On my netbook I could control the presentation of the slides to taking over the full window but not the whole presentation interface was very small and there did not appear to be a facility to stretch or take over the full screen, so the participants pane was small and the chat box etc. With respect to hearing me, when I experienced a problem and used my microphone there did not appear to be any problems with audio on their side.. 

On the negative side I think there should have been more questions posed at points through out the presentation like JISC do, this made the taster a little transmissional. Putting this point to one side it is quite nice to have the opportunity to experience something before you decide to sign-up, and after attending some recent JISC webinars I think the webinar format is something that we could consider integrating into the range of services we offer. 

  

Research Methods Activity Design

This post relates to the previous one. As a result of running an activity workshop it has also led me to think that it would be useful to have a set of generic activity designs within our kit that we could refer to. This observation, also, aligns with our findings with respect activity design in research methods that I referred to a couple of months. Our team investigations found that we did not need to do a specific research methods version of an activity design workshop, that it would be useful to have a list of links for research methods resources (- maybe a Diigo group?) and refer colleagues to the generic activity designs that we develop, we could possibly put these in our learning repository. 

Activity Design

Within our team we have developed a workshop to help colleagues with designing online activities.  The approach that we take is that colleagues choose a face-to-face activity and create a plan for it noting

• Learning outcomes 
• Student tasks
• Tutor task
• Resources and tools

Then they consider how they would do this online using a plan with the same variables as above. And that is the workshop. We have very few slides it is mainly facilitated groupwork. However, we have found that the best way to facilitate this is to have somebody from my team sitting with the group providing advice on various aspects and to situate the workshop in programme or module planning to ensure authenticity, which really as a service that we offer.

Although it is early days we have found that activities can be generic and the subject content, resources, learning outcomes are the discipline specific components, the generic aspects means that we can introduce an open approach to activity design which influences the facilitation of the workshop. Facilitation involves getting academic colleagues to talk through what would be feasible taking into account student engagement, tool use (not too many, inducting students into use) and issues of parity with f2f not equivalence.