Distance education: Creating learning materials

1. Distance education:Creating learning materials Caroline Williams Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies (LUCAS)

2. Overview • My aim: • to demonstrate how to create learning materials • My objectives: • supply a brief background to learning • give you a task to do • Your learning outcomes: • demonstrate what makes learning effective • test success of the materials you created

3. Effective planning Resources Institutional support Who are the learners? Learning materials Communication Evaluation Measuring performance Quality assurance Materials in context

4. Learning materials • Delivery options • print • voice, video, cd-rom, audio • computer applications • e-mail and bulletin boards • web-based teaching • home-page facilities

5. Which is best? before selecting a delivery system • focus on instructional outcomes, not technology of delivery • needs of learners • requirements of content • constraints faced by teacher • typically you will end up with a mix of media each serving a specific purpose

6. Adapting existing materials • By adding • user-friendly objectives and outcomes • responses to questions/tasks/activities • self assessment tasks • written study skills help • assessment criteria • summaries/reviews/checklists • feedback questionnaires/evaluation

7. Learner centred materials design Successful learning programmes allow for: • wanting • doing • feedback • digesting

8. Creating the ‘want’: motivation • By first attracting, then stimulating to start and continue, and encouraging to persist by: • attractive title • good design • aims, objectives and outcomes they want to achieve • address them personally: you will be able... • a compelling introduction (written last) • demonstrating they can already do it

9. Enabling learning by doing • learning by having a go • as soon as possible • and getting it right (and wrong) • by being well briefed for the task • tasks should involve more than just recalling • students can decide, prioritise, attack, summarize, defend, propose, analyse, evaluate etc • self assessment activities, test your learning with answers or other feedback

10. Learning from feedback • which makes them feel good • whether right or wrong • more than mere answers • your responses are the most important part of your open learning materials • integral not last minute

11. Digesting • making sense of the learning experience • sorting out what is important from what has been learned • putting things into perspective • taking ownership • designers must factor these four in

12. Workshop • Aim: to create three or four pages of material which enable the undergraduate learner to define the attributes of a record. • You are supplied with: • definitions of a record from ICA, AS4390, ISO 15489 • UK PRO and ICA definitions of context, context and structure • a doctor’s prescription, medicine packaging • sample of existing material

13. Tasks • Create an ‘interesting’ title • Define your aim • Define student’s learning outcomes • A compelling introduction • Include three or four activities. The task and its response should be clearly indicated on the page • Provide responses which will lead on • Test it out on another group

14. Remember to facilitate • Wanting • Doing • Feedback • Digesting

15. Useful sites • www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_archives (lists delivery sites) • www.uidaho.edu/evo/distglan (how to) • World bank(delivery site) http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/archives/learning.nsf/HomePage/1?OpenDocument • http://www-icdl.open.ac.uk/ International Centre for dl • Educating Society through its records http://john.curtin.edu.au/society/