Thread:ELearning Guidelines - in my workplace ... (2)

Hi there,

These are my thoughts on some of the eLearning guidelines. Look forward to reading what everyone else thinks.

Cheers

Lesley

SD1: Are students able to agree some or all of their learning goals in negotiation with teaching staff?' We currently have time limits in place for all of our training modules, however I do recognise that some degree of flexibility is important. Our courses are to be done over and above each learner’s work and therefore it is important that each of us involved in the process, including the learner, understands and factors in some negotiation of goals, and their timeliness. This is something I definitely need to improve on within our structure as some of our trainers can be quite inflexible and some of our trainees, if given too much flexibility, would never complete their modules. ST10: Does the teacher provide advice to students on netiquette: how to communicate effectively and ethically for online discussions and email? Believe it or not, we currently do not encourage our learners to communicate with each other via email or online discussion. We have had problems with abuse of emails in the past and have actively sought to avoid repeating that. However, I am looking at hosting our modules online via moodle or the like and where there would be a supervised chat room which would be closely monitored and learners would be provided with strict guidelines in order to avoid any abuse of the system. I feel this can be a really useful support tools for distance learning and would like to be able to confidently implement it.

SD8: Is there a mechanism in place to assess how students perceive the value of the course? We have an evaluation sheet that we send out at the end of each training module. This is a very traditional form asking for a rating between 1-5 for each training module, a rating for the feedback and marking comments and asking for suggestions for improvement. These sheets are to be emailed back to me, however I find that if learners have had any frustrations during the module they will have resolved them by the end and are so pleased to have completed it they don’t give feedback on it. There is also the fact that it is not anonymous and they don’t want to seem too critical. I definitely need to look at alternative methods of course assessment.

MT2: Are assessment and examination systems in place to ensure student identity, time limits and security? We currently use a very ad-hoc system which is open to human error (mainly mine!). Our trainers tend to do everything by email – learners are emailed their training exercises, completed exercises are returned to trainer by email, marked copies are returned with feedback, then the pass/fail result is emailed to me to update my spreadsheet. As I have said before I am currently investigating using moodle which would hopefully ensure better systems and also increased security. Currently, we do not ask learners to confirm their identity, other than an initial affidavit when they first start working for us. This is something which we do need to work on, particularly given that we are looking to obtain NZQA accreditation this year.