E-Learning Workshops - Oxford Brookes

e-Learning courses on demand

This year the workshops on e-learning topics will be run on demand when there is sufficient interest. Workshops will normally be run by Rhona Sharpe or Greg Benfield.

These workshops are designed for all those using e-learning in education and training including teachers, lecturers, trainers, part-time tutors, learning technologists and learner support staff.

• If you would like to attend a workshop between January and April 2005, please register your interest by 10 December 2004
• If you would like to attend a workshop between May and July 2005, please register your interest by 25 March 2005

Please register your interest in these workshops and express your preference for timing and location with our online interest registration form.

You will be contacted shortly after these cut off dates to make the final arrangements

• Understanding e-learning and e-learners
• Designing engaging online activities
• Promoting discussions in online groups
• Online assessment, feedback and tracking
• Supporting e-learners at a distance
• Evaluating e-learning innovations

Understanding e-learning and e-learners

This workshop is not just an introduction to e-learning, but also an opportunity to revisit our personal and shared understandings of what e-learning is and what it means to tutors and learners. The workshop will encourage you to articulate your aims and claims for using technologies in your teaching. Using examples from across the globe, we’ll consider how online learning challenges our design of courses and our assumptions about how best to teach them. We’ll draw on the experiences of learners and tutors to discuss how technologies can be used to enable different types of learning, how e-learning changes the roles of tutors and students and best practice in preparing learners for online courses.

Designing engaging online activities

The key to enhancing teaching and learning online is making use of the enormous potential for interactivity and engagement, whether that’s with the material, the tutor or peers. This workshop considers how best to exploit this potential through well-designed e-learning activities. This is likely to include discussions of how going online influences the design of learning activities and how skills in running face-to-face learning activities transfer to the online course. Online activities do need to be carefully structured and explicit about what is expected and there will be opportunity to consider a variety of activities designed to support various learning tasks such as critical dialogue, collaboration, creative writing, and reflection. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss, explore and design a range of different learning activities to meet specified learning outcomes.

Promoting discussions in online groups

One of the most-cited reasons for using online learning is to promote group interactions, but the experience is too often one of poor participation and low level discussion. This workshop will seek to improve the planning and tutoring of structured online learning activities, through a better understanding of the nature of online interactions. The session will apply recent theoretical developments to promote online communication and collaboration as well as providing practical solutions to practical problems. This is likely to include discussions of software tools to promote group learning, using dialogue to build learning communities, tutor skills for knowledge construction, and assessment of online work.

Online assessment, feedback and tracking

Objective tests are often regarded as inferior to other forms of assessment. They are also, rightly, regarded as difficult to write well. Lately, however, the ready availability of online testing tools in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) has prompted many lecturers to ask how they can use objective tests to improve student learning. This workshop will look at the benefits and disadvantages of objective testing. Using case studies we will try to identify sound educational purposes for this type of assessment. It will pose and attempt to answer the question, ‘can you test higher order thinking skills using multiple choice questoins?’ Finally, the session will explore some very practical issues:

• How to write objective test items
• How to design and embed feedback into objective test items to support student learning
• How to score them.

We will also look at two important and often overlooked aspects of multiple choice question design: ways of analysing and improving test items, and issues in constructing whole assessments (as opposed to the individual items within them).

Supporting e-learners at a distance

This workshop is designed for lecturers and tutors whose responsibilities now include supporting students who are learning at a distance. The challenge for distance tutors is to create supportive learning environments without the rich verbal and visual cues we usually use in face-to-face teaching. We’ll start by considering how the introduction of distance changes the learning experience for students and tutors and clarify the roles and responsibilities of distance learning tutors. Then we will explore what skills distance tutors and students need to succeed in their roles. The session should give you an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with other distance learning tutors and develop strategies for dealing with issues specific to distance learning.

Evaluating e-learning innovations

Although the uptake of e-learning and particularly of VLEs has been rapid within education, there are still many questions about how learners interact with them, what the student experience is like and fundamentally – what works? Although this workshop won’t attempt to answer the latter question, it will provide participants with a toolkit of evaluation approaches and techniques which they can use to evaluate their own e-learning innovations. Participants will consider the functions and purposes of their evaluations, be encouraged to specify clear research questions, choose from a variety of approaches to evaluation and consider the appropriateness of a range of data collection methods. Participants should leave with a plan for evaluating their innovations which is valid, rigorous, locally appropriate and achievable.

Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes University
Wheatley Campus, Wheatley, Oxford, OX33 1HX
Tel: +44 1865 485910 Fax: +44 1865 485937 Email: ocsld@brookes.ac.uk

© Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development.
This page maintained by Elizabeth Smith and last modified Mon 9 February, 2004 10:57