Coaching connected learning across borders

Since I went freelance in 2010 most of my work in European projects has been on the issue of monitoring quality of the online course that we are developing. So I thought I would wrap up this tour of online learning with a few observations on how this has been done. Tracking quality should be…

So how come I have been able to write 7 posts on online learning and only now in post 8 start discussing the tools? The TPACK model suggests that content knowledge, pedagogy and technical skills are all necessary for a successful online course. Actually the model is directed at learning in general and not just…

In the M-HOUSE project we are targeting home-based adults to explore the business skills they have from their experience of running a household over many years. In the same way that reframing the work of hotel attendants as exercise actually helped them to lose weight, we hope that reframing the often-undervalued work of running a…

When we ask content experts to design online learning, the default course will look something like this: Content (article, book, video lecture) + Test (quiz or essay) Content (article, book, video lecture) + Test (quiz or essay) Content (article, book, video lecture) + Test (quiz or essay) Content (article, book, video lecture) + Test (quiz…

I am often charged with quality evaluation of online courses. What would you think if, as part of that evaluation, I asked the tutors the following: After your first week of tutoring, could you tell me one fact about each participant if I gave you a list of their names but without looking at the…

Where many online courses are weak it seems to me is in neglecting the social aspect. Highlighted on its own like that it can seem rather irrelevant. I have found that many new online students just want to ‘get on with it’ and go straight to the content. Come to think of it, if there…

I had an online student once who told me at the beginning of a 20-week online course that eLearning was clearly going to be an inferior experience compared to face-to-face learning. Many people feel that way, partly because for most people eLearning is unknown whereas they have been doing face-to-face learning since they were 5…

Tell us about the state of the art of online learning in 20 minutes, the CCD-FLITE project asked me as part of our latest meeting in Lisbon in October. My reaction? If you had asked 15 different people to do that talk, you would have got 15 very different talks. Ie don’t take what I…

M-HOUSE course Part 2 How do you transform an idea into an actual online module? There are many ways of doing this but below I can share the process we went through recently in the M-HOUSE project as we prepared our online course for its first pilot run starting in November 2014. The aim of…