Monday, February 12, 2007

ICT Professional Developemt

Greetings from the Australian Computer Society Professional Development meeting in Melbourne.

We are discussing:
One interesting aspect is the way structured assessable online discussion is used as part of the CPEP. This takes place using a web based discussion forum in Moodle. Other experiments have been less successful, such as having the students contribute to a wiki of terminology.

Another issue is that traditional scholarly research material is a bit dry and dull for the average ICT professional. Also there is a lot of readable material available online, but course designers and students need to learn to be selective.


Any thoughts?

1 comment:

J said...

Hi Tom,
My life for the 6 years has been devoted to producing online learning resources for high school students (my own website is devoted to chemistry education).
What I have noticed is that although there is a lot of talk about "e-learning programs" very few, if any of these are really about student learning, most, if not all, are about teaching, and as such would be much better named "e-teaching programs".
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that teachers (including lecturers) are time-poor and don't have the time to devote to producing effective online learning resources (which is where I come in ofcourse). Off-the-shelf solutions, like Moodle, seem to be a quick, readily available, relatively affordable solution to the problem of getting "stuff" online, but don't take into account the way students learn. In order for a program to be considered an "e-learning" experience it MUST be able to present the same concept in a number of different ways reflecting the variety of ways people learn, as well as provide an interactive learning experience, immediate feedback which identifies learning deficiencies, and can lead the student towards new learning experiences to correct the deficiency.
Now this seems like a tall order, and it is, but there are clues to a better approach to online learning activities by using more constructivist teaching methods.