IntroductionThis page is presented with minimal styling so that the text can be printed or copied easily. I need to add links and references. A PDF version formatted for printing is available [310Kb] September 2006. In the classroom |
Between lessons |
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Summary: OFSTED use a wide definition of the word e-learning. These notes focus on simple activities.
I have written these notes for colleagues who are trying to make sense of the various ways in which computers, the Internet, and other newer technologies can help the teaching and learning process. It is all about students and learning, despite the plethora of technologies and I shall focus on simple practical applications of e-learning. I teach in a general Further Education college in the UK and my writing will reflect that context.
The current edition (OFSTED, May 2006) of the OFSTED Inspectors Guide defines e-learning as follows...
E-learning is learning facilitated and supported through the use of ICT. It may involve the use of computers, interactive whiteboards, digital cameras, the internet, the college intranet, virtual learning environments and electronic communication tools such as email, discussion boards, chat facilities and video conferencing. E-learning should form part of the overall teaching and learning strategy for courses. There should be appropriate references to e-learning in schemes of work, lesson plans, assignments, course reviews and staff development plans. An overall strategy for e-learning should be supported by senior managers."...and this is a wide definition. ICT stands for Information Communication Technology and embraces computers, networks and the Internet. There is no specific mention of the educational use of blogs, wikis or other Social Web tools (see later) but their use could be included under 'electronic communication tools'.
These notes make a broad division between e-learning used in the classroom, and used between classes to support students. These notes do not go deeply into skills and methods, and I hope there is enough here to point you to further resources and research.
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Most Colleges have limited budgets for IT equipment, and, as they install more new equipment, so the cost of keeping that equipment working and up to date increases. Once you install a projector and a networked PC in a classroom, the entirely reasonable expectation is that there will always be a projector and PC in the room: given a four year replacement cycle, that implies a £400 to £500 per year average cost just to keep that room running with current kit. Most Colleges will have a strategic plan for ICT, and within that plan, will be targets for rooms with projectors. New installations are often targeted in areas where staff have volunteered to use ILT with students or where the ILT Champions know that keen teachers are based. This is another reason why you should make contact with the ILT Champion or e-guide in your subject area, and with any e-learning coordinators who may exist in the College.
The systems needed to provide online support to students have much lower costs associated with them. If the College hosts a leased VLE, the cost of a server and service agreement averages to about £2000 a year assuming a 3 year life for the server. Some VLEs like Moodle are Open Source, and there is no cost to the software, but no support. Commercial fully supported VLEs such as Blackboard will incur an annual licence fee depending on the number of users, but the cost per user per year is still very small. The main cost of online support is your time. I am firmly of the belief that you should see an overall return on investment if you plan to spend about half an hour per week supporting a three hour evening class.
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Summary: there are many ways of using a projector and networked computer. You don't always need to use Power Point.
Long before there was 'death-by-power-point', there were bad presentations. Really bad presentations. So don't blame the software or Microsoft; the genesis of painfully dull presentations predates the computer." (Reynolds, 2006)
Many people seem to think that a PC and multimedia projector can only be used to show Power Point presentations. This is not the case at all, and having an Internet connection on the PC can enhance the range of possibilities considerably. The projector copies what is on the computer screen but there is a change of apparent scale so lettering can often appear small on the projected image, that is why Power Point has the font size set to 24pt by default.
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Below are some suggestions for using a networked PC and a projector in an 'ordinary' classroom with a class of students.
Displaying Web sites: remember to set the font size to large in the Web browser. For maths and many other subjects there are interactive Web sites in abundance. Geographers are just beginning to get the measure of Google Earth. Some Web sites that are very useful to students have confusing navigation design, and I have found it helpful to show students how to navigate the site on the projector - follow this up with a handout with a labelled screen grab and students are far more likely to use the Web site. You can collect a series of Web addresses in a Word file first and just click on the links to load the pages into the browser. I make Web pages with Word that consist of lists of links to useful Web sites for a topic - these pages can also be posted on the intranet or to your class blog.
Web searches: even with just one screen you can set up a search activity using groups of students working on different topics and keywords around a subject. I'd introduce the task by reviewing the criteria we can use to evaluate a Web site for accuracy, relevancy and authority (see Evaluating Web sites reference). Perhaps some discussion of the quality of results found in relation to the breadth of the search phrase might help students to develop their search skills. The Web sites found can be saved and sent to students by e-mail or posted on a class blog (see later). I have found that students are more likely to use a resource that they have had a hand in creating.
Table completion exercise: this uses MS Word with a table showing some set of general principles and then using whole group questioning to get specific examples, perhaps arranged in different columns of the table - in effect we are using the word-processor to gather the results of questions. The resulting document can be sent as an attachment to e-mail or posted on the class blog.
What-if or simulation: I often have an MS Excel spreadsheet set up with something like a scatter diagram or a graph of a simple formula with parameters picked up from cells in the spreadsheet. I change some of the variables and ask students to describe the changes. Then I say what I'm going to change next and ask the students to predict the result. We see what happens and discuss the outcome. I often need to repeat this to explore different aspects of the situation. A lot of ground gets covered in 10 to 20 minutes this way.
As suggested by the quote at the beginning of this section, Power Point itself is not the problem, it is the way people use the software in the classroom that can induce a state not far off suspended animation in students. Below are some suggestions that I have gleaned from various Web sites, and a short leaflet written by the marketing guru Seth Godin (Goding, 2006). I use these suggestions myself, and my students seem to be awake and responsive.
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Dance and music: Use Power Point as a counterpoint to your spoken exposition. That might mean using images and a few text boxes on each slide. You do the explaining. Don't read out the slides!
Diagrams and pictures: Use Power Point to display diagrams showing the relationships or flow around a system or pictures of each step in a practical procedure. Students have copies of the diagrams or small handout printouts of the pictures (see later). You point out the key features as students label their copies. Whole group questioning could be used to bring out the stages in the diagram or critical features in the photos. The students will retain more information if they have to do something during the presentation. In the case of a complex diagram, it would be better to use Custom Animation to build the diagram in stages so that students can see how the system fits together. You could have components in the diagram with names missing and ask the students to suggest what the next stage might be based on their prior knowledge of the topic.
Video and sound. You can play short video and sound clips from within Power Point. Video can be used to show a process or situation. Audio can be used to set up a discussion using roll-play or to provide contrasting points of view with different voices.
Don't use bullet points: Controversial this one but I find that I am using text boxes with small comments or call-outs (boxes with arrows on) more these days, usually in relation to images. I find that I am writing in whole sentences or using quotations.
Consider a separate handout. Don't always use the handout option in the Power Point Print dialogue box to provide handouts - often the writing on the slides is far too small to read when printed 6 to a page. I'd provide a handout prepared in Word with cues or starter phrases for note taking, perhaps leading into a small group task. If you are presenting information based on a complex diagram, then it might be a good idea to provide a full sized printout of the diagram with spaces for labels.
Use authoring mode: Why not leave gaps on the slides for student views or answers to questions and simply edit authoring mode to record responses? You can even add new slides easily to capture ideas and perhaps agree the ground rules for later activities - even decide who does what with names. The resulting Power Point slides can be saved and distributed later by e-mail or placed on a VLE.
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Summary: Interactive whiteboards can be used in two modes; screen annotation mode and white board mode. Contents of the white board can be saved for later use.
An interactive whiteboard can sense the position of a 'pen' that you write with and feed back that information to the computer. The software supplied with the interactive whiteboard interprets the position of the pen and 'writes' on the image projected onto the white board. At the time of writing each manufacturer of interactive whiteboards produces its own software and the facilities and options of the software control what you can do to some extent. Much of the software supplied in the UK is mapped to the National Curriculum as the school market dominates.
There are two main types of interactive whiteboard: the 'hard' boards and the 'soft' or 'membrane' boards. Hard boards are made of wood or steel and coated with a surface you can write on with an ordinary marker pen. The special pen supplied with the board is an ultrasound transmitter and an antenna or induction loop in the frame of the whiteboard senses the position of the pen. Pens can be replaced although they do cost £70 or so. Membrane boards, as the name suggests, have a grid of wires sandwiched between two slightly flexible surfaces. As you press on the board with your finger or a plastic 'pen', a contact is made and the position of the contact is reported to the computer. Membrane boards can be rendered useless by sharp points (drawing pins, compass points) although this appears to be rare in practice
Your College ILT people will probably have standardised on one make of interactive whiteboard to simplify support and training. The best staff development is to book yourself into a room with an interactive whiteboard and work through the manual and play. The time period between 5pm and 6pm is often quiet in Colleges (day classes finished and evening classes yet to arrive) and this is a good time for playing.
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There are two main ways to use an interactive whiteboard: annotation mode and whiteboard mode. As the name suggests, whiteboard mode presents you with a blank white space in which to 'write' with the 'pen'. Your lines are faithfully reproduced and may be smoothed somewhat by the whiteboard software. The software will also have shape drawing features, offer a range of colours (including stripy paint) and a range of supplied graphics. There is usually a screen image of a keyboard to spell words out in a regular font, and sometimes there are stopwatches and calculators that can be summoned with the pen. Handwriting recognition is available - sometimes as an add-on program from a specialist supplier, but these systems need to be 'trained' to fit your handwriting. Specialised backgrounds (music staves, graph paper, football pitch layouts) can be applied to the whiteboard.
The magic thing about the whiteboard is that you can summon a new screen by clicking a menu item: the old screen is saved by the software. You can keep a record of all the whiteboards worth of content you have drawn in a lesson, and this information can be exported as pictures and even as a complete ready made Web site for uploading into the VLE or placing on the College intranet. The re-cap in the next lesson can be simply a question of re-loading the whiteboard file.
Screen annotation mode allows you to write on the computer screen - labelling features of software or 'highlighting' parts of a Web page in a contrasting colour. Again, each set of annotations that you create is captured by the whiteboard software and can be saved, converted and recalled. You should remember that you are annotating a screen grab of the computer screen within the whiteboard software - there will be a floating menu (or an actual button on the side of the screen in some cases) that allows you to switch between the annotated view and the 'live' screen. When you switch from annotation to the live screen, your annotations will disappear - they are still on the screen grab in the whiteboard software. I liken this to having two 'layers' on the screen and swapping them round when demonstrating this feature.
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Summary: Some colleges have large classrooms set up with 15 to 20 student computers, desks and chairs in the middle, and a projector and interactive whiteboard. So called 'blended learning rooms' provide a rich environment for the use of ILT in an integrated way.
A blended learning room is a classroom that has a set of computers for students to use (usually 15 to 20), a projector and networked computer for the teacher to use, and possibly, an Interactive Whiteboard. A blended learning room also has desks and chairs that allow students to work away from the computers, and which allows tutor exposition without the barrier of the computer monitors. A typical arrangement is to have the student computers around the three walls of the classroom and the desks and chairs in the middle area of the classroom, often in a horse-shoe arrangement.
Teaching in a blended learning room can take the form of
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The presentation will often involve the use of the projector, possibly with a Power Point presentation or possibly by using resources on the VLE. The presentation introduces the topic and the group work activity. Perhaps the students are going to work in groups to produce a Power Point presentation on one aspect of an issue of relevance to the course.
The group work will probably result in members of each group dividing up the tasks between them. They may decide on the structure of the presentation based on their existing knowledge of the topic. This phase may take place in the area of the classroom that has desks and chairs. Some students may use the computers for research relevant to the tasks.
The demonstration phase will involve the students sitting in the area of the room with desks and chairs and watching the tutor carry out a procedure: perhaps dropping a hyperlink onto a Power Point slide or perhaps extracting data from an article on a Web site. Students should have some kind of 'tip sheet' that they can write notes on. I find that students will ask questions about a demonstration and relate the answers to the tip sheet. I also find that the 'tip sheet' can be very short and can consist of screen grabs with a little text.
The computer task results in the students being logged into the computers and producing the artifact (Web page, Word file, Power Point presentation, Wiki page) that was the objective of the lesson. Provided some planning has taken place, and the demonstration covered all phases of the task, most students can work unsupported. The tutor can work with the students who find the lesson difficult.
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Summary: Some colleges have a small stock of portable projectors and laptops. You can use some ILT with classes through use of such equipment.
If you have a plain teaching room and no access to computers, then it may be possible to book a laptop and projector. In this way, you can make some use of ILT with that class. It is unlikely that you will be able to get Internet access with portable equipment unless there are network points in the classroom, so you will be limited to software and other resources that can be installed on the hard drive of the computer (or be used from a USB stick). Most AVA departments will have portable speakers or a 'boom box' that can be connected to the laptop to provide louder sound than is possible from the computer.
Portable equipment takes time to set up and you will need to check that you have all the necessary mains extensions. It is always worth checking that you have the right video lead for the laptop and projector that you are using; this is especially important if you are using your own laptop as the AV department will often have standardised on a single type of video lead. If you are planning to use your own laptop or other equipment please be aware that many Colleges are unable to offer any form of insurance for the personal property of staff or students. Keep your laptop with you at all times when in College.
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Once set up and working, you can use the projector in a variety of ways: recording the outcomes from discussions in a prepared Word template; running searches on an encyclopedia installed on the hard drive of the laptop; demonstrating the use of software in conjunction with a handout with screen grabs, and, of course, Power Point presentations and sound and video playback. Special purpose CD-ROMs can be used with a group of students very effectively.
All is not lost regarding the Web: if the Web sites you wish to show are static, i.e. they are simply Web pages and not generated on the fly from a database, it is possible to use MS Internet Explorer to 'make the page available off line'. MS Internet Explorer will then keep a copy of the page in the cache on the hard drive, allowing you to show the page in the lesson. Internet Explorer can also save Web pages as a single file (MHT files) complete with all the images and certain kinds of interactivity intact.
If you really need interactive content, then it is possible to download and 'install' a copy of Moodle to a USB stick drive (allow at least 256Mb). The special version of Moodle packaged for use on a computer hard drive or stick installs a Web server, database and the Moodle files itself to the stick. You can load the Web pages by going to the special address http://localhost/ in the Web browser on the laptop. If you restore the backup of a course to your Moodle on a stick, you can demonstrate the course and use any interactive materials you may have included. It has even been suggested that students can use a Moodle on a stick to keep an electronic portfolio.
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Summary: You can provide examples of ILT use in lessons even if there is no equipment in the room. You can also try to swap rooms now and again.
If you have no IT equipment at all in the teaching room, and there is no portable equipment available, you can still mention IT based resources in your lessons.
Lists of Web addresses that will be useful to students can be distributed as handouts, or, even better, posted to a class blog. If you use a class blog, the Web address of the blog can be included in the footer of every handout. Screen grabs of really important Web sites can be prepared and you can add labels. Power Point makes screen grabs easy to manage.
Talking of Power Point, you can use the package to make attractive and full colour transparencies for overhead projectors. The default font sizes work well: it is best to avoid complex backgrounds when designing layouts for OHPs. It is possible, although far from ideal, to demonstrate the use of a software package (say drawing a scatter diagram in MS Excel) using a series of screen grabs printed onto OHPs. If the students have copies of the screen grabs on paper, they can ask questions and make notes for when they try the procedure on a computer.
Screen grabs are images of the contents of a computer screen and most operating systems have a facility for making these. On Windows computers, there will usually be a button on the keyboard with a legend something like 'Print Scrn'. This button is often found in a group of keys just above the number keys on a full size keyboard. When you press the Print Scrn button, the current state of the screen is copied to memory, and the resulting image can be pasted into Power Point and labelled.
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Summary: If you want to use ILT, get yourself timetabled in a room with some equipment even if the staff development comes later. Try informal swaps if you can't get a room with IT equipment.
Room allocation is a contentious issue in many Colleges. Some departments 'own' certain rooms and are often reluctant to allow use by other classes. This policy can have benefits in the sense that certain staff develop a sense of ownership of rooms, look after the accommodation and provide displays of student work and subject specific information. The downside of this system is that it allows a room with scarce IT kit is to be used by a colleague who perhaps is not using the equipment every lesson, or indeed any lesson. Most managers will encourage sharing of resources and will try to timetable staff who like the idea of using ILT in lessons into rooms with some equipment. It is worth making sure that the manager who timetables your sessions knows that you are interested in using ILT in some form; even if you need staff development and will be building your skills as the year progresses.
Some Colleges have poor records of equipment in rooms; those rooms where there is a computer for each student will usually be flagged as IT teaching rooms, but there is more room for uncertainty when a room has a single PC with projector installed. Colleges are getting better at room tagging and tracking room use, so there may be a list of rooms with various types of equipment available. The AVA people and the ILT people will usually know where equipment is installed.
If formal timetabling approaches do not allow you access to IT equipped rooms, then you may need to fall back on informal barter arrangements. Most teachers will agree to the occasional room swap (say once a term) if you ask politely and state that the reason is access to IT. You will then need to plan the one or two lessons per term as effectively as possible without overloading your students.
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Summary: e-mail can be really useful for one to one feedback on written work. Bad news should be given by phone or face to face. Watch your workload and give students realistic dates for marking.
A colleague recently asked me "was it OK to carry on using e-mail or should I look at something more recent like blogs?"
The colleague in question had an organised set of distribution lists (and taught her students how to set up their own lists) and used e-mail mainly to provide feedback and set targets on a one to one basis, so there was no need to add another facility to the mix. There might be a case for a class blog if 'visibility' for the course (or tutor) will be politically useful within the organisation and if there is enough common material being posted each week or if the main support need was to provide links to Web sites of value to the students.
I think that e-mail is a most effective way of providing one to one support and feedback to students between lessons. I also think that many adult students could benefit from the experience of taking part in structured e-mail correspondence - including receiving, filing, editing and sending attached files - as a general 'life skill'.
One technical point regarding attached files: the cheaper laptops sold on the high street tend to have MS Works installed in place of Microsoft Office. MS Works is a basic and useful package including a word processor, spreadsheet and graphics software but it saves files in a special format of its own. You might want to ask your IT support people to install the MS Works import filter, this is a free download from Microsoft. Admin access is usually required to install filters. You can then open and read WPS files from within Word, and you can save files in WPS format. Students who use MS Works might want to learn how to save their word-processing files in Rich Text Format (RTF). RTF files can be read by any recent word processor on any operating system. I recently had to help a manager convert a CV that had been sent by e-mail as an attached file in WPS format - not a good way of making an initial impression!
A simple framework for supporting a group of students by e-mail includes three phases;
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I'm assuming that you are supporting a face to face course and that all the usual advice, guidance; diagnostic tests and so on have been completed. See Duggleby 2000 for a comprehensive set of templates for running a purely distance learning based course
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Summary: Newsletters and auto-responders can be used to deliver lessons by e-mail. Best used for written material that can be broken into smaller pieces.
There are systems for automatically sending e-mail to people who 'sign up'. These systems fall into three main types;
Newsletters as the name suggests are like periodicals delivered by e-mail. If you want to send a monthly bulletin to a large number of people, you can use a newsletter system to automate the process. If someone 'signs up' to the newsletter in (say) April, they will get the May edition along with everyone else who has already subscribed. Some newsletters are plain text, some in Web page format (HTML) and some are sent as attached PDF files.
Auto-responders are usually used to send e-mail lessons in a set order. Suppose you had a series of 10 'lessons' by e-mail about (say) health and safety. When someone 'signs up' for the course, they receive the first installment, and then they receive subsequent installments each day, week or month according to the period you set in the auto-responder administration form. Auto-responders support 'roll-on, roll-off' style correspondence instruction. I am interested in the idea of using an auto-responder to deliver staff development or even just simple information in short messages to new staff via the College e-mail. Drip feed might be more effective than handing someone a 90 page pack. It may be that each automatically sent message is simply a one or two sentence summary and a link to the College intranet.
Mail lists are two way mailing systems. You can send a single e-mail to the 'listbot' and the program will then send your message to all the members of the mail list. Any member of the list can reply, and their reply will in turn be copied to all the members of the list. Mail lists were popular in the early days of the Internet and pre-date the Web. To some extent, they have been replaced by forums, but some lists are still widely used and popular.
All mail systems must be set up so that they obey the various anti-spam laws now in operation. In practice the best way to manage this is to have participants 'sign up' via a Web form. The server will then send a confirmation e-mail to the e-mail address supplied by the participant and this confirmation e-mail will include a special Web address. When the participant visits the special Web address, the participant has confirmed that he or she wants to receive the e-mails. This process is known as two stage confirmation. It is good practice to include instructions from 'un-subscribing' from the service in each message that is sent.
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Summary: A class blog is a simple way to support students between classes; you find and add links to appropriate material each week and the students can follow the links. No passwords, no clunky navigation. Motivated students may ask questions using the comment facility.
Blogging is the new craze, but I have no intention of encoraging you to start an intimate Web diary!
Blogs or Weblogs are simply online diaries, most of them are embarassing to read, and a few exuberant souls have lost their jobs as a result of unwise posting. The tools used to maintain these diaries are very easy to use and they allow us to produce Web sites to support students between lessons.
A typical blog will have a series of posts or articles, and the most recent addition is always at the top of the page. As you add a new post, the old ones move down and the oldest drop off the front page. Older material can be found through monthly archives and often through category based archives. Many blogging systems provide a full text search so that students can find any material by typing in keywords.
Blogs are not usually used to present large quantities of content, a Virtual Learning Environment course would probably make a better content store. Blogs are best used to provide links to existing resources on the Web that you have found, evaluated, and that fit your lesson plan for the week. Students often find evaluating resources they find through search engines difficult and they often miss out on excellent and useful material because they can't navigate the larger Web sites.
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You can apply your professional knowledge of the subject and your teaching skills to selecting the right activities and pages to support your lesson that week. If you feed your blog each week (allow about 20 minutes to half an hour for each blog) by the end of the year, you will have a 'calendar' of Web links and activities which can be recycled into a VLE course or used in other ways.
I personally use a blog for a specific class or group of students. I encourage them to use the comment facility to ask questions and to post the results of class activities during the lesson. I have also posted the results of discussions in class on the blog during the lesson - students have discussed and re-worded the post displayed on the projector.
Other colleagues use blogs in different ways. Some use a blog as an announcement board for a whole subject group, and some use the blog as a repository for notes and images of practical work. The basic message is that blog systems provide a flexible way of publishing information on the Web, with the possibility of student feedback.
Student blogs are a different question, see the section on Student Blogs in this document.
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Summary: Students may want to write using a nickname. Check College regulations about student publishing to Web. You might want to 'edit' a collective class blog.
Students can create blogs for themselves very easily. My Space and Face Book are very popular among younger students but these are really social networking tools for finding friends and showing off. A blog can provide a space for writing and to put links to other pages.
Students in FE Colleges are likely to be studying at levels 1, 2 or 3 and may not be confident writers. Once published on a public Web site, material is fair game for all kinds of archiving and aggregating systems. I was recently faced with a Web page I wrote ten years ago. I long since deleted the Web server account and had forgotten about the site but the Way Back Machine found it. For these reasons, I am suggesting that FE College students should consider operating their blog under a nickname or 'handle'.
Tutors could also consider having 'closed' blogs, perhaps within a VLE like Moodle. Social networking software like Elgg can provide fine grained control over which posts and items are public, which are private to the individual and which can be shared with one or more groups. Elgg makes it possible for the participant to set up their own groups to share with. Most blogging systems allow posts to be created in draft form by some users and then 'moderated' and approved by the 'owner' of the blog. The teacher can act as editor, and the editing process can act as a focus for feedback on writing.
In higher education, there is an ongoing debate about wether students should publish to the Web under their own names or not; institutions may be developing policy in this area over the next year or two. FE Colleges often have a number of HE courses run under the ageis of various Universities: tutors should be aware of any policy differences.
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Summary: wikis are Web pages with edit buttons. You can use a wiki like a scrapbook for a class to save the results of research, images, and files.
Imagine in a f2f session that you organised a 'poster session' with students working in groups. Each group is given a topic to work to - perhaps a choice within a range of topics - and they have access to resources to produce a poster. Towards the end of the session, the posters are displayed and talked through and work remains available for some weeks for other classes to see.
A wiki can provide you with the online equivalent of a poster session. A wiki is a set of Web pages with an edit button on each page. No special technical ability is needed to edit pages or to add new pages to the wiki. Students can work together to produce pages around a theme, and these pages can be made visible on the Web. The wiki can be used as a class scrapbook to record any useful snippets of information. Most of the more recent wiki engines will support image and file uploads.
Wikis have been around since 1995 but have only emerged into the mainstream Web recently. Ward Cunningham designed the original Wiki that is still operating, now with thousands of pages. Probably the best known, and most controversial, wiki is the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Anyone can add and edit pages in Wikipedia (although registration requirements are now being introduced) and the project has grown considerably. Some of the information in Wikipedia is questionable - I ask adult students to look up a topic they know about (e.g. tool engineering or a chemical process, or a medical condition) and see how good the coverage is, and I find this leads to a critical use of the resource.
The application that manages a Wiki is often referred to as a Wiki Engine, and wiki engines usually run on Web servers and are accessed through a Web browser. The first wiki engine was a very simple program with less than 20Kb of code and more recent systems offer far more facilities. There is a view that the newer 'all singing and dancing' systems can defeat the concept of a wiki as a simple system for editing Web pages. Students who meet one of the more recent and often quite feature rich systems often use a subset of the available facilities.
Wikis can be public, or publically readable with editing restricted to registered users, or they can be totally private. Wikis were designed to support collaborative editing, but having a personal wiki is quite a useful way of storing and making links between large numbers of small pieces of information. These e-learning notes were drafted in a wiki, and the order of the topics was changed several times the writing progressed.
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I have used a simple activity with students using a wiki engine in a blended learning room. I 'seeded' the wiki with pages about a series of topics. Students were allocated a topic as they arrived (I wrote them on index cards, with only one card for each topic, so that each student had a unique topic). When a student navigated to the topic page they had chosen, the student found a question and a few starter links. The activity was to find more information and to write a short paragraph that described the topic. The student was also asked to record the best Web pages found during research and to indicate the search phrases used to find the pages.
Because the students were working on distinct pages, there were no problems with two students editing the same page. The resulting pages were used as a resource later in the course, and students did add and edit the pages from outside the college. As is often the case, you need to introduce the use of the wiki (or forum, or blog commenting facility) to students in a face to face session. My experience is that just pointing students at the wiki and suggesting they use it for homework won't work for students unless they are post experience students working at degree level.
As wikis are less familiar than blogs or forums, the next section describes some of the features available in more detail. The easiest way to use a wiki with a class is to use the Virtual Learning Environment, most now include a wiki component. Commercially hosted wikis are available on the Web; names to google include wikispaces, jotspot, editme, and others. Commercially hosted wiki servers usually feature wysiwyg editing.
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Early wiki engines used a special pattern to signal that a phrase was a page title; the page titles were phrases of at least two words written with capital letters without spaces, LikeThis. These page titles were called WikiWords. As I use wikis a lot for drafting text, I began to ThinkInWikiWords. More recent wiki engines can use any phrase as a page title, and they often use nested brackets to signal that a phrase is being used as a page title.
In addition to editability, a wiki often features autolinking of pages and the ability to list pages that link to a given page. Autolinking means that when you mention the title of an existing page on another page in the wiki, the wiki engine automatically makes a link to the page you have mentioned. The hope with autolinking was that 'page collisions' might occur; someone editing a wiki page may think of a new WikiWord and add the pattern to the page, only to discover that the page already exists, thus making a link to another person's work in the process.
You can often click on the title of a wiki page and see a list of pages that link to that page, I have seen this feature referred to as backlinking or topic search. This feature can be used in several ways. For example, I have added the wiki word DoThis to my wiki. On any page where I need to add or edit material, I add the DoThis wiki word followed by a list of the things I need to do to that page. The wiki word DoThis is automatically linked to its page. Clicking on the title of the DoThis page gives me a list of things I need to do throughout my wiki, with links to the pages that need altering. Students can add the wiki word AnswerMe to a page, and the tutor (or other students) can click on the title of the AnswerMe page to get a list of questions, with links to the context of the question. Librarians will immediately recognise that you could use appropriate wiki words to describe classifications or categories. Adding these words to appropriate pages will provide topic indexes to a collection of pages very quickly.
These features really become useful when the wiki has a significant number of pages present, and has a number of people actively editing pages. Wiki pages should ideally be kept short, perhaps more like index cards with one or two sentences and a few links. A large collection of short pages will also make the search facility more useful - wiki searches work with page scope.
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Ward Cunningham, who wrote the first Wiki engine and who runs a public wiki has noticed a dynamic or trend in the development of pages. He has evidence to suggest that pages start in 'thread mode', where participants make observations about a topic and sign their contributions with their 'wiki name'. After a period of time the theme of the page stabilises, the main aspects of the topic being documented become apparent and the page is edited so that it becomes less like a discussion and more like a document. Ward calls this 'document mode'. The transition from 'thread mode' to 'document mode' may take some time.
Some wikis have large memberships and some conventions have grown up over time. These wikis (the meatball wiki being one example) have quite a structured way of working, and new members will be 'socialised' into the community over time. Students who like the wiki idea might want to find a wiki that is about a topic they are interested in - observing the usual guidelines about social interaction on the Web. It is unlikely that a whole class of students would have the time to build their own wiki community, unless the process of community formation is the main objective of the class. Wiki like systems are being used more often for sites that invite user feedback such as Web sites about tourist attractions. Wikis are also widely used to document Open Source and other software.
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Summary: Automatic assessment through quizzes takes more time to set up but saves marking time. Use where a large number of students do the same lessons. Quizzes are best used for 'knowledge' and 'application' objectives.
Online quizzes involve multiple choice questions, gapped completion questions with drop down lists of suitable words, and other 'closed' question types.
The advantage of online quizzes is their immediate feedback. Students really like not having to wait for marks, and tutors are often prepared to put the extra effort into preparing the questions with answers in advance. Quizzes are not suitable for assessing evaluation or synthesis skills; automatic assessment is limited to objectives that involve knowledge and application (in terms of Bloom's taxonomy of learning objectives). Objectives that use words like "list", "state", "distinguish", "recognise" lend themselves well to automatic assessment. Other methods will be needed for objectives that use words like "evaluate", "compare", "provide examples of" and so on.
Online quizzes can be authored in several ways;
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Hard wired quizzes have the questions embedded in a Web page, often using Javascript or a similar scripting system to respond to student choices. Macromedia Flash has a quiz generator built in as a series of templates. The advantage of hard wired tests is the flexibility they offer for question types that suit your subject exactly. The downside is the skill level needed to produce the quizzes, and the lack of tracking of student results. A long term downside may be the lack of portability of question sets between different systems. The popular Hot Potatoes series of programs is a program that you install on your computer for generating Web pages that contain 'hard wired' tests. Hot Potatoes can overcome the skills issue, you don't need to know anything about Javascript to use the software, although some basic knowledge of how Web pages work will be useful.
Quiz server systems afford some degree of tracking and provide server space for teachers to produce quiz items from a range of supplied templates. The Quia Web site is a well known example of a quiz server, and tutors can set up class lists and set quizzes and track the results of students. Quizzes can also be shared between tutors and this can help cut down the work load.
Most VLEs contain quiz tools of some kind, and many handle the tracking of student marks automatically. The Moodle VLE has a system of 'question pools' so that collections of questions can be classified by category and shared between courses (questions can also be kept private to a course). Most VLEs allow for the import and export of collections of quiz questions in standardised formats: best to seek local advice on this question.
If you are planning to spend a lot of time compiling questions for automatic assessment, it is worth asking some questions...
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Is there any help available in my organisation to get questions that I draft in (say) Word on the system?
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Summary: online forums allow students to conduct discussions between lessons. The text of the discussion remains available to students (and the tutor).
Online forums or 'bulletin boards' are messaging systems. Students can leave messages for other students who can reply later. The students do not have to be online at the same time, although effective forums do need students to be 'logging-in' several times a week. Forums are described as 'asynchronous' communication because the students do not have to be 'logged in' at the same time.
A forum will typically have a number of 'topics'. Each topic starts with a 'post'; possibly a question posed by the tutor. Students will then 'reply' to the topic. Online forums have very flexible permission systems. Tutors can allow students to start topics of their own, or not at required. Forums often allow students to be arranged in groups, so that students in group A cannot read or post to the discussions held by group B.
There are two ways of presenting messages in forums: linear and threaded mode. In linear mode, you post a question or brief and the students reply with their observations. Each observation is seen as a reply to the original post by you. If student B wants to comment on what student A says, then there may be posts from other students between Student A's response and Student B's comment. Linear forum discussions are best thought of as a formal seminar or meeting where the tutor orchestrates the questions and the students take turns to answer.
Threaded discussions are more like a cafe, bar, or informal chat. Student B can respond directly to Student A, and the reply will be associated with Student A's reply to the original post. Threaded discussions are often presented as a series of headings with the title of the posts under each heading. Threading can degenerate into chaos. Students may find that a threaded discussion is good for brainstorming a topic, or for logging points of view around a controversial subject. The discussion then becomes a store of ideas for later writing or reflection.
Some forum software provides you with a choice of presentation mode. Students can view in Linear or Threaded style.
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You can use an online forum in a variety of ways. The best response will always be generated by you posing a question or instructions in the forum and then following up answers as they arrive. The activity should have a definite time frame, and should involve a clear set of actions. Forums where students can ask questions if they feel like it, and which do not have a clear time frame, often fail to reach critical mass and never take off.
I have used a forum with some 16-19 students studying a unit that involved finding out factual information and applying one or two general principles to case studies based on the information. I posted research topics to a forum each lesson or two, and students had to conduct their research and post back findings to the forum. There was a rule about the format of the postings (Web address, two or three sentences summarising the Web site, search terms and search engine used to find site, and comments about the extent to which the site could be trusted, publishers and so on). Students used the link base they created later in the Unit to assemble information into assignments. Students had a 'social topic' where they could harangue each other, as well as the research topics. Students could not create their own topics.
I have also used a forum with post experience students. We worked in learning sets of about 4 to 5, and within their group they could create new topics as required. Each of the 6 groups was allocated different research topics that required evaluation and judgement as well as factual research. Findings were summarised and posted back to a common whole class forum by a spokesperson. Activities were completed within 7 days or 14 days. The 'spokesperson' was selected using a different rule for each activity (e.g. person whose family name is last in the alphabet).
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Summary: As more people get broadband connections, audio-video conferencing over the Internet will become easier. At present, different providers of audio-video conferencing use incompatible systems.
Online chat, instant messaging and skype are examples of synchronous communication, this term simply means that all parties have to be available at the same time to communicate. Forums, wikis and e-mail are examples of asynchronous communication in that people can log-in and contribute at different times. Synchronous communication can be very useful for one-to-one tutorials online or for small group work. If your face to face teaching style involves seminars or structured discussion with small groups of students, then you may well find online chat or Skype and similar systems useful as you move online.
Skype is the brand name of a system for making video-phone calls that can also be used for conference calls of up to 4 people. You have visual and audio contact with other callers-this has obvious benefits for tutorial and advice giving. There are other similar systems, and there are video-conferencing systems that do not use the Internet. As bandwidth improves and as more people have broadband Internet connections, access to video-phone facilities will increase in the future. The main barrier is that the systems are mutually exclusive so that a skype subscriber can't connect to (say) a Vonage subscriber. We sometimes forget how much international cooperation was needed to allow the phone systems of the world to work together seamlessly.
Chat is text based, and younger students may be very adept at what I might describe as 'discursive peer communication' in this medium. Its use for formal educational discussions is often overshadowed by the expectation that chat sessions are for social interaction and not for serious discussion of ideas. I find that it takes a couple of sessions to establish that I am actually conducting a seminar like activity, and that 'turns taking' is in force, and I make the transition through humour and mock 'teacher like' responses.
The chat systems built into VLEs have the advantage that all students will be able to talk to each other; but the systems are often rather clunky and unresponsive due to the need to reduce load on the VLE server. Younger students find the VLE chat clients very limited compared to their favourite instant messenger system or Web based chat applet. Another advantage of VLE based chat systems is that they can keep transcripts of chat sessions: the idea of a virtual meeting with action points and 'minutes' in the form of an edited transcript might help to move students away from the chat-as-social-activity mindset.
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Can your students organise themselves into small groups, and to hold a chat session in that group on a certain time and day?
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Summary: you might be surprised at the extent to which students will use chat and e-mail to organize peer support. Online communication is less 'risky' than visiting people at home and may lower the barrier to peer support groups. The College may be able to help students who lack IT skills to join in with their fellow students.
Students interact socially at College; evening and weekend students often make new friends and compare notes about jobs and experiences. As part of this social interaction, there is comment on the lessons and the subject as a whole. I and other tutors have begun to realise the extent to which these social interactions extend to using online communications to build what amount to peer support networks. Adult students will often exchange phone numbers after the first few weeks and I discovered that one group was meeting regularly on MSN chat to go over the lesson material.
This self-initiated peer group support can be really valuable as a way of encouraging students to persevere with evening courses, and as a way of getting feedback about your teaching. Students will pass around good Web sites and recommend software. The relative anonymity of online communications (and mobile phone numbers) reduces the risk associated with exchanging addresses or visiting people's homes, and may reduce the 'barrier' to the formation of a support group.
It may be worth pointing out any help that is available to students about IT and the Web. Learning Centres often have staff who help students use computers effectively and these staff can support students in getting an e-mail account and perhaps an MSN or Yahoo instant messenger account.
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Summary: a Virtual Learning Environment is one name for a system that rolls up all the various tools used to support learning online into one application.
VLEs are also known as Learning Management Systems and e-course systems. VLEs are complex applications that run on Web servers. You will usually access a VLE via a Web browser, both to participate in a course and to write the course. A VLE provides a range of tools including wikis, blogs, file upload, web page authoring with simplified tools, very comprehensive quiz management, and chat tools. The VLE organises students into classes, and allows teachers to manage the online facilities offered to a given class. The VLE manages user accounts so that students (and tutors) can access all the tools and the courses to which they have been enrolled using a single user name and password.
A major value added that a VLE affords is student activity tracking. Most VLEs have some form of 'gradebook' function that records the results of online quizzes and your grading of student's assignment work. Most VLEs also track which resources a given student has looked at, and for how long that resource was open (of course, the student could have been watching telly or listening to Slipknot while the resource was open).
Unless you have strong reasons for using other software, I would suggest that you use the College VLE to provide students with any of the online support facilities described earlier in this document. The only exception to this in my mind is using a class blog on the Web as a 'gateway' to your VLE course, and as marketing for your course and your teaching.
VLEs can provide a huge range of functionality, but do you not have to use everything with each class right away. Your tutor rights will enable you to 'switch off' functions you do not need. Depending on your target groups of students, you might decide to start a VLE course with just course handouts, Web links and a few pages of explanation. As students get used to the idea of online learning, you can introduce new facilities (perhaps a forum to support a specific activity, or a wiki to collaboratively produce notes on a topic) as the course progresses.
Students will benefit from a 'walk through' demonstrating how to navigate the VLE. This can be done quite quickly using a projector. Your ILT people will often have a simplified handout aimed at students. Learning Centre IT support staff or coaches will be able to help students access the VLE.
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Moodle is a popular open source VLE, and Moodle can be installed on commercial Web server space, or even on a USB stick drive for demonstration purposes. Open Source software can be downloaded and used at no direct cost. Installing Moodle is not a major operation if you have a Web server that uses the Apache server software, supports php scripting and has the MySQL database server already available.
If you work in an FE College in the UK, you should find that there is already a VLE installed, supported and that training is available.
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Keith Burnett, 2006. Most recent version will be at http://bodmas.org/elearning/