First thing tomorrow morning I am off to give a session at the SEDA conference. I suspect that there will be no access to the Internet at the conference so it will be either find an internet cafe or not blog for a couple of days.
My session is exploring whether e-learning can help to imprive pedagogy and I am using a PBL approach to explore ideas with groups of participants.
One of the issues with this sort of discussion is that it gets bogged down in the “old question” does e-learning improve learning, to which the stock response seems to be “it is not the technology it is what you do with it”. Though I might agree with this response this is not what I am getting at.
I am trying to explore whether using e-learning can be used to encourage tutors to improve their pedagogy. In the way of an example let me suggest two, very simplified, scenarios where this might happen:
- first the “negative scenario” – a tutor decides that they are going to try out a virtual learning environment by putting their lectures on-line and then giving the students a quiz to see if they have learnt anything. They do this and the net result is that the students have not learnt much. Reflecting on this the tutor decides that they need to use some other pedagogy than basic lectures if the students are to learn.
- then the “positive scenario” – a tutor sets up a discussion area on the university VLE for students to discuss ideas from the course. To her suprise she finds that some of the students continue to use the discussion board outside the prescribed sessions and as a consequence engage with the material much more deeply. She realises that a discussion forum can help to give students more time to discuss ideas to improve learning and decided to encourage this use by a more structured approach.
It will be interesting to see what I can get from the groups who take part in this session. I hope we don’t get bogged down in the other “old chestnut” about the difficulty of accessing materials on VLEs and the “control obsession” of many university IT departments.
Perhaps more on this after the conference
