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Construction and Collaboration

Construction and Collaboration. building a community for online students David White, Co-manager, Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning, Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. Continuing Education at Oxford. Started in 19 th century

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Construction and Collaboration

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  1. Construction and Collaboration building a community for online students David White, Co-manager, Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning, Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford

  2. Continuing Education at Oxford • Started in 19th century • Opened opportunity to groups who could not come to Oxford –women, working class men • In late 1990’s offered some of the earliest fully online programmes in the UK • Undergraduate Diploma in Computing • Undergraduate Advanced Diploma in Local History • Immunology (Professional Development)

  3. TALL • Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning • Founded 1996 • 10 full time specialists • Focussed on online learning for lifelong learners at HE level • Attempt to replicate the best of the Oxford experience online • Undertake elearning related research

  4. Community centred elearning • Initial development focussed on content development • Gave students a place to talk almost as an after thought • Worked for local history • Not for computing • Learning through experimentation (and some failure)

  5. Current subject areas Mixture of traditional academic subjects and continuing professional development programmes • Archaeology • Art history • Bioremediation • Biosciences • Computing • Electronics • Economics • English literature • Ethics • Local history • Health sciences • Law • Nanotechnology • Philosophy • Statistics • Study skills

  6. Why is feeling part of a community important for online distance students? • ‘Negotiation of Meaning’ Wenger • Students value interaction with a tutor - but also with each other • Students more likely to complete the course and go on to further study if they feel real people are invested in their success • ‘Cultural Capital’ is generated and communicated

  7. What can you useto build a learning community? • Your learning environment • Expectation setting • Your learning design • Your tutors

  8. The learning environment • Must be student centred • You want students to learn your subject not the environment • Key tools • Profile (who am I, who is everyone else) • Forums • Personal space (journal/blog) • Useful tools • Chat • IM • Who is online • Tracking • Wiki

  9. Expectation setting • Don’t miss sell your courses (not everyone wants to participate) • What do you expect students to do each day/week • What can (and can’t) students expect from their tutor • How does the course assessment work? • Introductions up front, the tutor sets the tone

  10. Tutoring • Most visible component of a course • Can make or break the experience – regardless of the quality of the rest of the offering • Must provide training for online tutors • Must provide guidance for tutoring the course

  11. Learning design • Design activities that students can see the point of • Activity-driven learning processes - encourage active participation with the learning • Include explicit statements of assumed pre-knowledge (if any) for each unit • Design the learning so that students feel that they are part of a community of learners and teachers with all the support that this offers • Consider how your activity fits into the assessment of the course as a whole. Will it contribute to summative or formative assessment, and in either case how will the requirement for feedback be handled?

  12. Good activity checklist • Is the activity: • Aligned with the objectives and assessment of the course as a whole? • Complete within itself - does it make sense? • Achievable in the time allotted for it? • At the right level? Who will find it too hard or too easy? • Is the motivation for undertaking the activity integral, and clear to the student? • Where collaboration is part of an activity does it actually require students to work together? If so, how do you expect this to happen? • What tutoring will this activity require to be successful, is it feasible? • How will students get feedback on what they do?

  13. Under consideration • User-owned technology • Persistence • Connectivism • Collaborative authoring

  14. Online courses: http://onlinecourses.conted.ox.ac.uk/ TALL site: http://www.tall.ox.ac.uk/ TALL blog: http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/ david.white@conted.ox.ac.uk

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