When creating or setting up an e-learning tool there are a few ways to go. You can go down the expensive road, cheap road, creative road, or the limited creation road. Depending on one’s experience with technology and ability to create items on the internet will help decide which road one will probably take. There are programs for purchase that allow you to pick and choose templates to help set up your e-learning platform. There are also programs, such as HTMLs, that require the user to enter codes to create a platform.
Learning transactions are extremely important in education. Exposing the student to new information and seeing how he or she stores and uses the new information is key for the educator to assess if the student has master what has been presented. The teacher tells, shows, and asks the student in regards to the information presented. The student’s only job is to respond. This seems as though the teacher is doing all of the work and not allowing the student adequate practice with the information or terminology. Laurillard’s “Conversational framework” has the teacher and the student sharing equally the responsibilities of learning. Both are to reflect, interact, and discuss equally the new information. This model is not ideal for e-learning. For e-learning the classes should be tailored to the student and the student should be given the information and then a chance to process and respond to the information such as in the learning transaction model (Gilbert, & Gale, 2008).
A great thing about an e-learning tool such as Moodle is that the teacher is still able to assess a student’s progress and/or learning. Moodle Outcomes are much like a rubric. It looks at the student’s work and assigns an outcome statement to the student’s work. The educator is able to set up the Outcomes or Goals for the e-learning experience in order to assess the student as one would in a traditional classroom (Moodle, 2008).
References:
Development: Outcomes. (2008). Retrieved July 14, 2010 from
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Outcomes
Gilbert, L., & Gale, V. (2008). Principles of e-learning systems engineering. Oxford:
Chandos Publishing.
I have worked with those HTML codes and boy are they hard to follow. Even just making a myspace profile you need to be able to access HTML codes. Thats confusion isn't for me. I would choose another product that doesn't have all that confusion.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the point that you made about teachers and students equally sharing the responsibility of learning. Student interaction with each other is important too. We can all learn from each other. One reason I love this EMDT masters program is because it allows us to use what we are learning and create a product with what we learned, then share it with others. Our projects reflects how much we have learned. There are many instances where I learn something just from looking at a classmate's project they have created. The traditional multiple choice or short answer test should be banished, in my perspective. Wishful thinking.
As for Moodle, have you used it before? What are your thoughts?
Hi Kate,
ReplyDeleteI just happened to email Joe Bustillos about the Moodle Outcomes article. It is a perfect response to your post! Here’s an excerpt from that email:
I found it interesting that the example given for a scale was never, rarely, sometimes, usually, and always. To me that's so "old school" when it comes to assessment. Being a special education teacher and working with regular education teachers, our district, as well as others, are turning more towards data collection to show progress for a student… Using a scale like the one above is subjective to the learning objective, whoever is grading the student, and who is reading the grading report. Different people could have different interpretations of what each level on the scale in isolation means. Unfortunately, on the side of behavior evaluations completed by school psychologists these types of scales are commonly used to determine special education placement.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use rubrics for projects and writing pieces, but I feel they should have some point values attached to each criterion so that the data collection piece is included. This way when someone says, “give me proof” to show a child’s achievement, it’s more objective and there is less room for interpretation.
Great post Kate!