Christopher Pappas is one of the e-learning superstars- he founded the largest online community of e-learning professionals, the eLearning Industry– which makes him one of my very important teachers. Recently, he published a short article on talentlms.com “7 Tips to create a self-paced eLearning course”. Nothing groundbreaking, but a neat way to remember what nowadays e-learning really is (or should be) about.
- Personalized Learning Plans: In traditional classrooms, all the students face the same content, independent of their previous knowledge, their preferences, and their learning speed. Virtual teaching allows students to pick or get delivered the content they need and work through it at their own pace.
- Social Collaboration Activities: Learning from and with each other greatly enhances the learning experience and motivation. Virtual teaching allows for many different forms of collaborative work- asynchronous, spatially apart, and with online resources.
- Microcontent: Presenting the content in small pieces supports not only ubiquitous learning, but also consolidation and reinforcement of the material learned. Virtual teaching allows to learn bitesize, whenever, wherever.
- Regular Assessment: Especially when learning at your own pace, it is important to get regular and qualitative sound feedback. Online teaching includes an array of assessment options- self-directed online tests, online communication with the teacher, and peer-review as an important social collaboration activity. Virtual teaching allows to mix different ways of feedback, giving the learner an array of opinions on his mastery and progress.
But Virtual Teaching also asks for things:
- Easy access: It is crucial that students can easily access and find their lectures and content.
- Supportive Online Community: A supportive online community has to be build up in order to help students socialise, get feedback and help and be motivated.
- Variety: Nowadays students ask for more than an online book. Only courses that take out most of the available virtual resources and offer a variety of material fulfilling students various preferences will be satisfying. Otherwise one could stick with the good old textbook.
Picture credit: http://gavs-maria.blogspot.ch/2015_03_01_archive.html