Thread:Last week's meeting in Helen's office (1)

Here are some notes from the meeting where we discussed support resources for distant and online students:

Meeting notes:

1. 8 people met on Friday 12 October to discuss support needs and viable service developments for online learners. 2. People from Midwifery, Massage Therapy, Certificate in Health, Vet nursing, Educational Development. 3. Helen Lindsey from the Learning Centre is keen to keep a dialogue going on what supports her unit can offer students engaging in online and distance learning. 4. Some time was spent describing the different features, environments, and expectations of the different courses using distance and online features. 5. Some discussion about under grad and post grad students. Identified that some post grad students have not been in education for some time and may not have online experience at all. This illustrated that support is needed right across the student profiles. 6. Students currently have access to the help desk at Otago Poly - but limited access and types of support; their teaching staff (may create extra workloads on staff); printable Bb help file handouts. 7. These students are accustomed to face to face learning and the social aspect of that, and struggle to find such levels of connection online. 8. Community Learning Centres could offer support both technically and socially. CLC are in Wanaka, Queenstown, Alexandra, Cromwell, Balclutha, Mosgiel, South Dunedin, Dunedin. 9. Vet nursing students like screen recordings and Elluminate is being used successfully. Comment: be prepared to work at nights 10. Orientation package for new enrolments involve multimedia resources that are used in face to face sessions, by distant and online learners, as well as contracted tutors in regional areas.. aka wiki tutorials... 11. Flexible Learning Development Funded projects (through EDC) budgets have to be spent before December. Perhaps EDC can help to pool small amounts from each project into a Learning Centre lead development of resources to support distant and online students.

List of activities that may need support


 * Turnitin
 * Blackboard
 * Elluminate
 * Blogs
 * email groups
 * powerpoint
 * delicious
 * open office
 * Google and advance google
 * How to use Firefox
 * More listed at the Computer Literacy Resources development page

Levels:

We will need to arrange these activities and the support needed for them into 3 simple categories:

level 1 – "Access" - Basic level stuff. Turn on a computer, what is a browser, save a file, etc

level 2 – "Interpret" - What are blogs, what is blackboard, what is a discussion board, how does online video work, etc

level 3 – "Create" - Creating audio, video, pictures, links, blog posts, forum posts etc

It was suggested that we will need to devise a screening process, probably self screening, to assist people to quickly access the support they need.

From here:

This project will proceed in the following steps:

1. Make a list of skills and applications that need supporting 2. Make a list of repositories to trawl for existing resources 3. Delegate people to a number of skills in the list, and they go through the repositories looking for level 1,2,3 resource examples 4. The final resource list becomes a script for developers

Actions:

Action – LB send minutes of this meeting, update list of skills and applications list on the wiki and create a repository search list

Action - HL to coordinate people searching for existing resources and adding good examples to the wiki

Action – LB to develop wiki templates ready for further development

Action - Leigh Bron and Terry to explore left over funds from other projects