Here are 10 things you can do online, which add value to printed distance learning materials.
1 Make the printed materials available in digital form - for example, as a PDF or an ePub (e-book) file. This makes the materials searchable, portable (if loaded onto a mobile device), and copy-and-pasteable. (Even if students primarily read the materials in their printed form, they may find a digital version a useful alternative.)
2 Include time-limited subject matter. This is useful where a topic is essentially volatile (for example, because it is dependent on government policy), or topical examples or case studies are in danger of becoming dated. Rather than avoid them totally, you can include them in the knowledge that you can revise them if necessary later at relatively low production cost.
3 Provide exercises or learning activities - to help students develop their own knowledge and understanding of the subject matter. Where a question or task is followed by a model answer, comment or feedback, the online medium allows you to hide this (for example, just by putting it on another web page), so that students don't see it immediately. (Even if you can't force them to answer a question, you can still make them pause - and the dialogic question-and-answer form can help support students' own metacognitive processes.)
4 Include interactive presentations - for example, animated diagrams. These can repay their development cost by helping students develop their own mental models of structures, processes or concepts.
5 Provide self-tests - for example, quizzes, which (with careful writing) can test analytical or even evaluative skills, as well as knowledge and understanding. These are only practical where the subject matter allows for questions with closed, well-defined answers, but where they are students usually greatly value the immediacy of feedback on their study.
6 Link to external online resources - not only resources which present or teach the subject matter well (if they exist and are free, why write your own?) but resources which can you can use as objects or exemplars of different perspectives for students to analyse and critique.
7 Develop digital skills and information literacy - the skills of digital reading, writing and note-taking, and finding, evaluating and using online sources, which are now expected of graduates.
8 Integrate learning activities with digital resources - so that students can for example move smoothly between audio-visual resources and the accompanying analytic questions, or between their current learning task and their products from previous tasks held in the “cloud”.
9 Include cooperative activities - for example, through an online forum, to enable students to share their experiences or findings, or to form each other's conceptual development through discussion, as well as developing communicative skills.
10 Include collaborative activities - for example, through a wiki, in which students work together to produce a shared product, thus requiring them to develop the meta-skills of work organisation and negotiation.
Wednesday 26 October 2011
Thursday 6 October 2011
Mobile vs desktop vs print
If you’re trying to predict which delivery medium will predominate in the distance learning of the future, there are some wise words – supported as usual by decent empirical data – in a recent post from Jakob Nielsen on how people use mobile devices and desktop computers for accessing the internet.
His first prediction is that – contrary to the sayings of some enthusiasts – mobile devices will not be replacing desktop computers. (In general, new technologies seldom displace older ones entirely; theatre, radio and cinema co-exist alongside television, YouTube and download services.) People prefer, if they can, to have all options open to them. The question is how they use them.
His second prediction is that “highest-value use will stay predominantly on desktop”. Even if the split of time-spent-on-internet swings increasingly towards tablets and smartphones (because the best computer for an immediate need, like the best camera, is the one you have with you), desktop machines will retain users’ preference for a large proportion of complex high value tasks, because of their superior screen size and keyboards, as well as (currently) superior internet speed and printing connectivity.
Nielsen’s predictions are about internet use in general. How might they apply to distance learning?
First, they confirm the correctness of the Open University’s strategy of giving students flexibility of delivery medium as far as possible. An increasing proportion of them will own one or more mobile devices in addition to a desktop computer and will expect to be able to transfer study materials and their own notes between them. The new feature enabling students to re-render onscreen structured content on formats for eBook readers and MP3 players, as well as printing, will go a long way towards meeting these expectations.
Nevertheless, Nielsen’s observations suggest that students will still prefer to do much of their work through print (whether supplied by us or printed by themselves) or on a desktop computer. The “high value use” which requires a large screen (or printed page) and keyboard (or physical notebook) is the reading of complex texts, requiring regular scanning and skipping backwards and forwards, and the simultaneous taking of content-rich notes: the core study activities at higher education level. Though small-screen devices such as smartphones will be increasingly used for brief, low-intensity activities such as checking the due-date for a TMA or monitoring activity on a forum, their use for core study activities is likely to be secondary and less-preferred – though still convenient as a backup mode, for example when taking study materials to work on during a child’s evening class.
(For Open University staff: updates on our ongoing work to extend and enrich mobile access are available from:
His first prediction is that – contrary to the sayings of some enthusiasts – mobile devices will not be replacing desktop computers. (In general, new technologies seldom displace older ones entirely; theatre, radio and cinema co-exist alongside television, YouTube and download services.) People prefer, if they can, to have all options open to them. The question is how they use them.
His second prediction is that “highest-value use will stay predominantly on desktop”. Even if the split of time-spent-on-internet swings increasingly towards tablets and smartphones (because the best computer for an immediate need, like the best camera, is the one you have with you), desktop machines will retain users’ preference for a large proportion of complex high value tasks, because of their superior screen size and keyboards, as well as (currently) superior internet speed and printing connectivity.
Nielsen’s predictions are about internet use in general. How might they apply to distance learning?
First, they confirm the correctness of the Open University’s strategy of giving students flexibility of delivery medium as far as possible. An increasing proportion of them will own one or more mobile devices in addition to a desktop computer and will expect to be able to transfer study materials and their own notes between them. The new feature enabling students to re-render onscreen structured content on formats for eBook readers and MP3 players, as well as printing, will go a long way towards meeting these expectations.
Nevertheless, Nielsen’s observations suggest that students will still prefer to do much of their work through print (whether supplied by us or printed by themselves) or on a desktop computer. The “high value use” which requires a large screen (or printed page) and keyboard (or physical notebook) is the reading of complex texts, requiring regular scanning and skipping backwards and forwards, and the simultaneous taking of content-rich notes: the core study activities at higher education level. Though small-screen devices such as smartphones will be increasingly used for brief, low-intensity activities such as checking the due-date for a TMA or monitoring activity on a forum, their use for core study activities is likely to be secondary and less-preferred – though still convenient as a backup mode, for example when taking study materials to work on during a child’s evening class.
(For Open University staff: updates on our ongoing work to extend and enrich mobile access are available from:
- http://intranet6.open.ac.uk/teaching/learning-systems/development/projects/mobile-vle-development – updates on developments as part of the Roadmap Acceleration Programme
- http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/mLearn/?cat=19 – OU blog by Rhodri Thomas on mobile learner support
- http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/teaching-and-learning/mobile/guidance/module-websites/ou-staff-demonstrator-mobile-vle – simulation of the mobile view of a module website on your desktop machine)
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