Calling all e-learning folks who work in higher education

Hello everyone.

I am a newly employed (2 weeks) e-learning ninja at the University of Oslo, Faculty of Medicine. There are alot of things going on here and e-learning fits like a glove for many of the projects. Good topic this. I am going to subscribe to follow it.

Keep up the good work   

Welcome to the forum Morten.  We are happy to have you join our discussions.

Thanks for sharing!

Is anyone going to the AMEE conference in Lyon this year?

http://www.amee.org/index.asp?pg=250

Not me, I'm kinda burned out with conferences! 

I'd love to go but distance and $$ are against me. If anyone does go any reports will be much appreciated.

I am new to the academic world. I have spent the last 19 years working in healthcare as an elearning developer, etc. I worked with Nita on the healthcare forum for a short while.

I have only been working in my current IDS job for about 6 weeks and am quickly becoming acclimated to Blackboard. I am noticing that many use Blackboard and all of its tools as the one-stop-shop/end-all. I have done a lot of higher-end work in Articulate and I don't want to lose those skills. That would be tragic. I remain hopeful that I can start developing interactive pieces with Articulate and Storyline to augment the other media used in the blend.

I don't want to just organize course content...I want to design an experience that leaves the learner wanting more.

Hi Doug!

Depending on the culture in your organization you may or may not design experiences that leave learners to want more.

1. You need faculty to buy-in on collaborating to develop those experiences. Instructors review textbook publisher's course content and it tends to be easier for them to use the content provided with the textbook. This may not be the case in all educational institutions, but it can be a common denominator.

2. Propose little bits of in-house content development, run a blog or email "spot-line" notes with demos of elearning content created. Is there an elearning committee in your institution? This is the place where you can "show and spread" the word of other elearning alternatives of content that can be imported to the LMS.

I am currently the LMS administrator, but I also collaborate with instructors developing "pieces" of interactive content. It is not easy as it not like if you had to develop a whole elearning course, but somehow, helps to add content that goes beyond the "page flipping"

Do any of you Higher Education folks design/deliver e-learning for Staff? I'm not involved in the student space, but would love to connect with other folks who are targeting staff. It's a very diverse group and often challenging in design.

Hi Lisa,

I used to design/deliver e-learning for staff in my previous job. What is the subject matter you are needing to deliver and what are the results you are needing to achieve with the effort?

Doug

I do training/workshops for staff and faculty at UNC currently. You are right it can be challenging, but I have had fairly good success so far. I use electronic evaluations after each workshop to find out if I am meeting their needs or not. These have been very helpful. I start off with the basics of whatever software/technology I am teaching and then add features/uses based on the feedback that I get. 

Hey Lisa

I deliver e-Learning content to Staff/Faculty/Administrators. Its very challenging. My grammar and spelling is judged on a regular basis. lol. I'm having a challenging time now, because our college has baby boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials. So, the technology levels vary.

This is a great list.  I would like to see a group of us work out Articulate processes that work to deliver each of these options.

It is easy to make Articulate do easy things, but I am not yet convinced of its usefulness to achieve higher ed or vocational ed learning outcomes.  

Articulate has put out some gorgeous samples of making Articulate do fancy things, but it would make my life easier if I could put together a library of Articulate "coding" to achieve the various types of learning activity suggested in appendix 3 of the recommended text above or something similar - I am talking a tagging taxonomy here.

I am looking at how to develop vocational ed courses for on-line delivery.  In Australia these courses are centrally designed and come with not only specified performance criteria but also specified skills.  It can be difficult to keep both cross sections of a total course in mind while designing and developing the course.  Performance criteria are relatively easy to teach to and to demonstrate that the competency has been achieved. However, qualitative skills outcomes are much more difficult to demonstrate.  This is an example of the skills outcomes for a level 4 course I am looking at.

• communication skills to provide effective support and motivation to a team and overcome communication barriers
• literacy skills to:
• ◦ read and interpret a wide range of operational workplace information
• ◦ write clear and articulate team plans
• planning and organising skills to ensure activities and initiatives important to team development are integrated into own work planning
• problem-solving skills to identify skill deficiencies and provide opportunities for individual development
• self-management skills to take responsibility for team outcomes
• teamwork skills to represent team interests in the wider organisation environment.

One simple way to manage both cross sections (performance criteria and skills) is to cover content according to performance criteria and then include activities that are pitched to the appropriate skill level.

To manage course development on a large scale we need to be able to library anything slick we develop, for future re-use, so we would tag "objects" in groups that demonstrate performance criteria but also as single activities tagged according to the skill demonstrated by the activity.  That list of activities above is a good start towards achieving a taxonomy for tagging and re-usability, although the one we work with in the Australian VET sector is more complex.

From an IDs point of view it would be so nice to be able to say, oh, I should do a "something or other" activity, and then just pick up a slick really well designed set of slides already sitting in the library that have done just that for another course, and re-use them.  

So has anyone tagged all those examples of really slick "coding" put out by Articulate according to a stated taxonomy so that we can search for and find relevant examples.  At the moment I find myself cruising through examples and seeing how I can show off by using them, rather than finding what I need to solve a given problem - it's fun but it is not going to "sell" Articulate as a serious course development tool.

Christine -- Great response.  Nice detail.  Interesting and practical observations.  

What I hear you describe, to me, is the concept of "learning objects" (or Reusable Learning Objects; RLOs).  Learning objects would be cataloged in your "library" concept or a content management system, technically.  The use of learning objects promote flexibility in content creation, ease of content reuse (and version control) for meeting the needs of your learners and instructors.  

As you're envisioning, a series of learning objects can be "pulled" from a store and assembled into a learning objective (A).  Some of the very same objects could be re-used in a different objective (B), and a smaller sub-set for object (C).

From your course rubrics, I believe you could associate learning object IDs (once assembled) to each of the rubric's criteria.  The IDs would included skill level information, as well, so that course-skill alignment is achieved.  Students who successfully complete the learning objects, as identified in the rubric, meet the criteria for completing the learning objective and credit is issued accordingly. 

In the meantime, I've dug through some papers I have on the subject and pulled some web addresses and citations you might be interested in. 

Learning objects:

Center for Teaching and Learning in Reusable Learning Objects: Interactive On-line Learning Objects

Merlot: Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and On-line Teaching Objects  

Articles:

Down the track, that is what I am talking about, but for now it is enough that I find out if Articulate can do what I need it to be able to do.  I am not so much concerned about the logistics of storing objects in a document management system.  That can be solved later.

Currently I am dashing my way through building some trial courses with written material we already have, just to test out what Articulate can and cannot do. Like many, we are looking at putting a lot of material online so I am trying to convert quite sophisticated learning and assessment processes for relatively high level courses, into Articulate.  I am not worrying about look and feel or anything else at the moment, just functionality - can I make it work for sophisticated case studies, problem solving and the like.

 I can go through all the functions and make them work, but it takes a lot more to make them work cleverly.

I guess I may have to spend a few days going through lots of sample coding from the Articulate website and see if I can "tag" the pieces according to skills utilized by the learner (rather than knowledge gained by the learner) - to see if I can in any way short cut this process - if no-one else has been there before me, and already done it, that is.

Hey folks,

Storyline does allow you to include some of that data.

Hi Mike

Not sure I understood your reply.  If I switch to Storyline so that I can solicit free-form student entry that I can rig to display as a grid - can Storyline send this free from written information to an LMS for assessment?  (In other words can it be made to work like an essay response in Quizmaker?)

Christine,

Sorry, I was replying in regards to the meta data train of thought.  

As for the question of sending to an LMS for assessment, I do believe there is a way to send variable data to the LMS.  http://www.articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=st1&id=7la24ugs1lcn

Not sure if this is what you're looking to do or not, but it's a cool technique that David shares.

Mike

Hi,

Would surely be interested, we are an organization working towards higher education content development such as Civil Engineering, MBA and some financial courses.

Vineet

Hi all,

Thanks for everyone's comments here, this has been a helpful and enlightening forum.

I am currently Teaching and Managing sections in both Vocational and Higher Education.  I am also the administrator of our LMS for our campus.  I have recently joined our partner's eLearning team to help develop online courses to take us into the digital age, and am completing my Masters in Education with an emphasis in eLearning.  I believe this is the direction of education in the future and am steering my educational career in this direction.  My LMS and eLearning work is done as a consultant so am interested in how people manage that side of it as well.

I am trialling both Captivate and Storyline and so far Storyline is way ahead.

As others have mentioned, many of the examples are geared towards corporate training, and I have also seen much developed for the K-12 market.  Not a whole lot is out there in regards to Higher Ed, so this I will be following this forum intently.

It seems to be tricky to create online interactions that are pitched to this level of education.  I have many ideas and am currently trialling them in an online class I am developing.  I will definitely report back on how it goes.  So far I have added the basic PowerPoints with voiceovers, but want to get much more interactive.  We have added formative and summative quizzing and just added online journaling to develop reflective practice.  Will add more interactive learning objects as time permits.

One question that I would like other's opinions on is how do you measure the teaching hours that go into delivering and developing the online content.  We are coming up against the fact that teachers are paid teaching rate only with synchronous time spent with students.  Recording a lecture (or voice over) is considered development and pays substantially less than face to face or live online lecturing if you are a sessional lecturer, hence many teacher's hesitation to create.  How do others deal with this dilemma?

Thanks again for everyone's input.