Not to bore you too much with my studies, but since I am working on them, I thought I would have a themed entry to the blog today for all my e-learning colleagues who might be reading this and be interested in how the online experience is working for me.
It is very interesting to be experiencing it as a learner for a change and not as a practitioner or someone advising how to develop such a platform. I have enquired with the College, as to which platform is being used and apparently it is a bespoke one developed specially for RBK. Nevertheless, it is simple and seems to work well, from a learner perspective.
The learner engages with video lectures, downloads corresponding powerpoint slides, which form the lecture notes. There are reading lists in Word format and then discussion forums which follow the units in each module. We are required to engage in the forums as part of the assessment, although it is not clear how this is monitored. It is possible to see how many posts each students has made, and if you are following the thread on a particular forum, you know who is contributing and who is not. As ever, there are certain students who are the most frequent contributors and the most verbose.
Finally, we have to submit a mid-term draft assignment and then the final assignment, both of which are uploaded in either Word or pdf format to the system. All fairly straightforward. So far, the only hitch has been library access and having to read the books only via that access. Luckily a kind soul has been able to download many of the essential texts in pdf format and put them in Dropbox for us. This has made life a lot easier because they can now be read on the iPad or Kindle.
Hope you find this interesting.
It is very interesting to be experiencing it as a learner for a change and not as a practitioner or someone advising how to develop such a platform. I have enquired with the College, as to which platform is being used and apparently it is a bespoke one developed specially for RBK. Nevertheless, it is simple and seems to work well, from a learner perspective.
The learner engages with video lectures, downloads corresponding powerpoint slides, which form the lecture notes. There are reading lists in Word format and then discussion forums which follow the units in each module. We are required to engage in the forums as part of the assessment, although it is not clear how this is monitored. It is possible to see how many posts each students has made, and if you are following the thread on a particular forum, you know who is contributing and who is not. As ever, there are certain students who are the most frequent contributors and the most verbose.
Finally, we have to submit a mid-term draft assignment and then the final assignment, both of which are uploaded in either Word or pdf format to the system. All fairly straightforward. So far, the only hitch has been library access and having to read the books only via that access. Luckily a kind soul has been able to download many of the essential texts in pdf format and put them in Dropbox for us. This has made life a lot easier because they can now be read on the iPad or Kindle.
Hope you find this interesting.
Clever girl Patsy.
ReplyDeleteVery comprehensive description of the course - sounds good. are the PDF texts licensed for multiple use? (or should I not ask!) One problem with E books that emerged at a NIACE seminar this spring was that the rules on sharing e-books can be more restrictive than the rules on sharing paper publications!
ReplyDeleteGood luck with the course.
I should hope so since they College is allowing us to access them via the Library. Most of the books we have on the online account are avilable to anyone who cares to browse for them. It just happens that someone has taken on the job for us. I had already managed to find most of them. I'm pretty sure this is not an issue since the College is aware of the site. It is mentioned in the open forums and they would be clamping down if not.
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