What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?
First of all, this was in the course materials:
".. but we do need theory to help us envision how education can best take advantage of the enhanced communication, information retrieval, and management capability provided by the Net. It is all too easy to consider new innovations in a “horseless carriage” manner, and to attempt to develop new actions based on old adaptations to obsolete contexts."
This is SO true. Nowadays it´s always a hurry towards something. Then you get blinded by the new technology and just dive in. You forget to think thoroughly through the essence and idea of the technology, what are it´s strengths and weaknesses, how to harness it to your purposes and most of all: how to make a whole which actually works and gives something valuable to learners.
Web 2.0 seems to be "the thing" nowadays. It´s been in everybody´s lips for a couple of years but lately it has got more and more attention. So also with e-learning. Web 2.0 underlines collaborative and social issues, blogs, wikis and so on. Openness is the idea and it´s going to change also e-learning, no more closed and institutionalized systems. Personalization is the other thing, it will restructure the educational processes.
We will have more flexibility and freedom of choosing: tools and services when creating learning spaces. And the movement is from tutor-defined and well controlled spaces towards user-selected variability.
First of all, this was in the course materials:
".. but we do need theory to help us envision how education can best take advantage of the enhanced communication, information retrieval, and management capability provided by the Net. It is all too easy to consider new innovations in a “horseless carriage” manner, and to attempt to develop new actions based on old adaptations to obsolete contexts."
This is SO true. Nowadays it´s always a hurry towards something. Then you get blinded by the new technology and just dive in. You forget to think thoroughly through the essence and idea of the technology, what are it´s strengths and weaknesses, how to harness it to your purposes and most of all: how to make a whole which actually works and gives something valuable to learners.
Web 2.0 seems to be "the thing" nowadays. It´s been in everybody´s lips for a couple of years but lately it has got more and more attention. So also with e-learning. Web 2.0 underlines collaborative and social issues, blogs, wikis and so on. Openness is the idea and it´s going to change also e-learning, no more closed and institutionalized systems. Personalization is the other thing, it will restructure the educational processes.
We will have more flexibility and freedom of choosing: tools and services when creating learning spaces. And the movement is from tutor-defined and well controlled spaces towards user-selected variability.
3 comments:
Two of the things you mention are where you already have some experience:
1. Choice of tools in this course is quite free, however you can see how the learner-centered choice of tools will start influencing how people make up a group, how they need to negotiate, how they need to develop a new way for communications. This is not easy and it is challenging. But such situations emerge in real life and thus we need to learn how to come such.
Another issue you mention is openness: you have been using blog as a study tool at different courses. What are your experiences? How many outside traffic you receive from people who don't come from the course? Has any given you a valuable suggestion? Have any facilitators from another course tried to comment what you do in weblog for the different course. I think such issues arise if we use same tools for personal learning expetiences in life-long learning.
I just add few lines, because i wish the comments came also to my email.
snowowl: I didn´t find your e-mail?
About openness: blogs are good tools, I´ve been very pleased with them. It´s great to have a portfolio where to guide e.g. teachers.
Actually I got only one comment from an "outsider". It was about the forum I wrote the essay "Hevostalli.net´ Seniors and the Use of Power", he thought that I was getting too serious, it´s just a forum ;) So it wasn´t that valuable, just a kind of joke what he wrote.
Teachers haven´t comment any postings from different courses, at least not yet.
~Sonja
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