A couple of videos we created recently to explain more about our approach to the elearning infrastructure and development:
Tag: certificate in online education
Certifying another 20 elearning teachers
Last night we presented the Certificate in Online Education to another 20 teachers from Technology Institute and Health Sciences. Over the past week we’ve been verifying that everyone has completed the assignments and other requirements. We’re still learning about the best way to deliver the course to get active participation especially when we’re not present in Mekelle. Before coming to back to Mekelle we were a little worried that few teachers had completed any of the assignments or their courses. But actually most had completed what was asked of them, just that we didn’t know – either they’d started to develop a different course to the one they’d first told us about, or they’d created the required activities, but not submitted the links to notify us.
Most of the teachers are now moving onto the advanced course which we started this week. We’re not starting a new basic course this semester, as we’d really like the elearning team to deliver this themselves with our support from a distance, rather than Jaime and I continually running the workshops.
Has been a fun couple of weeks in Mekelle, but hard work and much more to do, as ever. I have a few other blog articles to finish writing and get posted up, so hope to do this over the next few days. With such a short visit, I didn’t get the time to catchup with everyone I wanted to, but hopefully I’ll be back again in May/June time for a slightly longer visit.
20 new teachers with Pedagogical and Technical skills for e-learning – Mekele University
This week Alex and I have completed the introductory module of the Certificate in Online Education for teachers of Technical and Health Sciences faculties of Mekele University in Ethiopia. This course began in October 2010 with 1 Face-To-Face week. During the online period from October 2010 to February 2011, the participants had the opportunity to create course Web using tools that are useful in teaching, converting traditional courses and learned to use Web-based components to enhance face-to-face instruction.
All course materials are placed on Moodle and include module content (course outline, lecture notes, additional resources, audio and video lectures, assignments and open educational resources) and communication (forum, chat room, e-mail).
This material is intended to strengthen the current teaching of the courses to the current students in learning activities through access to computer labs on university campuses.
In this version of the Certificate in Online Education, we have included the evaluation of the developed courses based on peer review and on action plan for the future development work.
- Peer Review: participants gave the opinions and constructive feedback on the peer’s course. The completed form was uploaded as submission for this assignment.
- Course Review and Action Plan: each participant completed this form based on the feedback from the trainers, from other course participants and from their students.
Of the 26 participants who started the Certificate in Online Education in October 2010, 20 have completed the requirements to receive a certificate conferred by the Computation Sciences School, University of Alcala, Madrid Spain.
Mekele University has 20 new teachers with Pedagogical and Technical skills for e-learning and at least 20 new courses provided in a blended learning environment, taking the best of the classical classroom training (face-to-face instructor-led learning), and the best of online learning (self-paced learning, follow-up mechanisms on the Web and greater flexibility to meet the different learning styles).
Jaime
Creative Commons COE: download now available
As I mentioned in my previous posting, we’ve been spending some time recently developing a Creative Commons Certificate in Online Education specifically tailored to those teachers new to using online and blended learning. We’ve just released the first version of the course and made it available for download.
You can view the course on our Moodle installation at: http://moodle.alexlittle.net/course/view.php?id=13 (use the ‘login as guest’ option).
You can also download the course in Moodle (1.9) backup format from: http://alexlittle.net/blog/download.php?file=coe.zip so you can install it on your own server to edit/remix/reuse or deliver as-is within your organisation.
The course is still under development, there are many aspects that we’d like to improve, a priority will be to try and reduce the download size, currently it’s around 36Mb, which is likely to be too big for anyone to download on a dial-up speed connection. Any feedback on the course is very welcome and if you use the course materials in your organisation I’d be really interested in hearing about it.
Although this is the first release, we have delivered the content to several groups of teachers over the past 18 months in Mekelle, so it is a product of our experiences running these training courses.
So far, we’ve been delivering the course in blended mode: face to face workshops at the start and end with an online period inbetween. We’re also like to run the course purely online, so we hope to start a facilitated/tutored presentation of the course in the coming months. If you’re interested in participating in this then please contact me.
Development of Creative Commons Certificate in Online Education
Our original plan for delivering the elearning training in Mekelle was to develop our own Moodle training content, maybe not all from scratch, but at least the general structure and depth, reusing existing videos and open content wherever possible. Given the time constraints we had before starting the first training sessions, we were unable to complete writing our own content. Instead we licensed the MoodleBites for Teachers and Course Designers courses so we were able to upload this onto the servers in Mekelle. We did reorganise the content slightly to fit in with what we were trying to achieve, but this was far less effort that writing our own.
Using the MoodleBites content gave us good quality and well structured content and activities and has worked very well for us over the training we’ve been giving for the last 18 months. They’ve also been very helpful in providing a facilitator (Anna) for us to help give some alternative approaches and other perspectives on delivering course online for our course participants. They’ve also generously allowed us to use the content for limited groups outside our original license, without any extra payment.
However in the longer term, as we’re looking to provide elearning training and support to other universities in Ethiopia and further afield, it’s unsustainable for us (or the organisations we’d like to work with) to license the content at each new organisation. So we’ve returned to the idea of developing our own content, specifically, writing a Certificate in Online Education (COE) distributed under a creative commons license.
As with most other open content, the real value comes from the facilitation, tutoring and mentoring along with the actual certificate, rather than the content itself. We’re hoping to use our new content for the training we’ll give in the coming few weeks and takes into account the environmental factors (such as limited bandwidth, initial tutor skills/training) which are different when delivering elearning training in European or US organisations.
Our aim with the Certification in Online Education is not to produce a technical training course in Moodle alone, nor to provide solely elearning/pedagogy theory, but a balance between the two. The MoodleBites training, as it’s name suggests, is focused mainly on Moodle, leading to develop the Moodle skills necessary to complete the Moodle Certification. Our COE isn’t designed as preparation for Moodle Certification, but to provide teachers who have probably never written or used online courses a way in which they can begin to see what’s possible to provide effective (blended) elearning courses by using free software tools and Open Educational Resources.
I’ll post again once we have the course published and available for download.