Rowland’s Blog about e-learning matters

A blog about the educational use of blogs and wikis and anything else to do with e-learning and also some stuff about learning generally.

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Finally I have some time

December 3rd, 2005 · No Comments
e-learning · general learning




Things have been very hectic since I went to the conference and this is the first time I have had to write on this blog. My session seemed to go well and I had some positive feedback from a number of participants. Every body had an opportunity to discuss possible advantages of e-learning but the concept of e-learning improving pedagogy may have been a step too far. There was not a lot of time in a 45min session to do a lot but hopefully participants went away having been encouraged to think about the concept.

One interesting idea which came out of the discussion was whether the attempt to use e-learning in your teaching, because it is a “new” and “unfamiliar” environment, encourages you to rethink your pedagogy. Certainly the feedback you get from using things like conferencing will allow you to see, to some extent, what learning might be going on. The first time you do this it can be a bit of a shock and this revelation that your students are not learning as much as you hoped can encourage a rethink.

As for the rest of the conference there were some interesting ideas from some of the sessions:

  • The first keynote from Lewis Elton gave the message “don’t do things better, do better things”. Which I take to mean something like “it is no good continuing with ineffective learning strategies (like lectures) and just making them slicker as they will still be ineffective – we need to use new learning strategies”.
  • The final keynote from Mike Prosser made an interesting link between the way that tutors conceptualise their subject discipline and the way they teach. For example those who think theit subject is a number of unrelated facts tend to teach in a transmission mode, trying to get the facts over to the students. As there is also a correlation between the teachers methodology and the student’s learning this could well be an issue. In general a “delivery” model of teaching leads to a “shallow” type of learning and vice-versa. Mike stressed that the “big change” in learning occurs when the students are “active learners” which is not the same as being active.
  • A number of sessions reinforced my own ideas about the effectiveness of staff development and offered some research evidence. In particular staff development works better if learning is tackled in subject teams and tasks are authentic in that they relate to a real need, either intrinsic or extrinsic.

    • Finally I was reminded about the the two SEDA staff development “modules” on e-learning which I need to explore further. They are Exploring learning technologies which is a subset of Embedding learning technologies and both are part of the SEDA Professional Development Framework.

    I need to think through how my staff development e-learning modules can be integrated with this framework.

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