Students as Digital Producers from Sue Beckingham

The following five tips may be helpful as a guideline for corporate training managers trying to ensure that all employees meet their training deadlines, and also for individual learners aiming to complete their assigned course(s) ahead of the deadline.   1. Calculate Training Time Take the estimated time required to complete the training, then add a 25% buffer. For each course in the set to be completed, note the credit hours or course duration stated for the course. Add these together to get the total time for the set. This is most likely the least amount of time it will take to finish the training. Multiply that number by 1.25 to add an extra 25% —extra time for taking a bit longer on activities or quizzes, or for dealing with short breaks and interruptions during the time set aside for learning. For a training plan with four courses that are estimated to be two hours each: (4 courses) * (2 hours) = 8 hours expected (8 hours) * (1.25 for buffer) = 10 hours planned   2. Plan Amount of Time Per Day Committed to Learning Activities Estimate daily (or weekly) time commitments. Questions: If the plan is for the online course to be completed during the workweek, how many hours per day can the learner(s) reasonably be expected to spend on the training? If the learner procrastinated and had to cram, what is the absolute maximum amount of time the learner could be expected to spend on a single day? Let’s assume learners for this training plan can generally devote 1 hour per weekday to learning and will generally not be working on the weekends. Let’s also assume that super-procrastinators will be able to put in up to 8 hours of training in a single day, but no more than that.   3. MAP CALENDAR TIME Use a calendar to plan 1 day off for every 4 days on. Identify key dates and set alerts. Map out the time commitment on a calendar, starting the day BEFORE the day the training is due and working backwards to set alerts for the recommended start, latest start, and expected mid-point. In our example, the training is due on Friday the 19th, so we will work backwards starting with Thursday the 18th, laying out our expected ten hours of training in one-hour increments.   Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday 1 2 ALERT: Start the training! 3 1 hour 4 1 hour 5 OFF DAY 6 7 8 1 hour 9 1 hour ALERT: Half way done? If not get going! 10 1 hour 11 1 hour 12 OFF DAY 13 14 15 1 hour 16 1 hour ALERT: Training due Friday! 17 1 hour 18 1 hour 19 TRAINING DUE 20   RECOMMENDED START: We find that our recommended start date is Wednesday the 3rd, so we will set an alert (or send an email, or mark the calendar) for Tuesday the 2nd to help make sure learners get started on time. LATEST START: Using our estimate of 10 hours total for the training and the procrastination number of no more than 8 hours per day, we see that students may need parts of both Wednesday the 17th and Thursday 18th to complete the training, so we will send out a final reminder on Tuesday the 16th. MIDPOINT: We will also set an alert for mid-way between our recommended start and latest start as a reminder to learners that they should be half-way through. If our training was expected to take a longer period of time, we might add additional checkpoints.   4. Encourage Learners to Follow Best Practices Now that we know how much time needs to be set aside to complete the training, we need to help learners and their managers understand the importance of planning time for learning. Set aside specific dedicated time for training. Learners and managers need to prioritize daily tasks in a manner that allows the learners to regularly engage with the learning without major interruption. It is hard to follow the flow of the training when the phone is ringing, customers need help, or email and social media are calling. When it is time to train, to the extent possible, learners should shut down all distracting software applications and make sure someone else is available to handle urgent issues that require immediate response. A "quiet" environment for a designated period of time primes learners to focus, learn, and complete the training on time. Make sure the learning sessions are reasonably close together. It is important not to have long periods of time between one training session and the next. With large gaps, it can be easy to lose momentum and for earlier lessons in the course to start to become forgotten. Learners should try to finish courses that are an hour or less in a single chunk. For longer courses, try not to have more than a week between learning sessions. Over weeks or months, the shorter the time gaps between learning sessions, the more course content remains "top of mind," helping set the learner up for success. Watch pacing deadlines and keep up. Without firm milestones and deadlines in place, it can be tempting to procrastinate. It is important to set realistic goals on a daily and/or weekly basis, and adjust those goals if milestones are missed. As noted above, unexpected office work and/or other crucial tasks should be taken into consideration. Allocate sufficient breathing space to allow the learner time to absorb the training materials covered and deal with unexpected circumstances.   5. Celebrate Success Help learners celebrate movement towards their learning goals—and meeting organizational training deadlines. When learners understand that learning is not just a checkbox item, but a strategic activity benefitting both themselves and the organization, making time for training and prioritizing training goals become much easier. It can be challenging—and critical—to make time for training in today’s workplace. Help learners plan for success and reap the benefits of professional development. We wish you the best of luck and happy learning! Wesley, Laura, and the 360training Authoring Team

One of the modules in our new MSc in Learning Innovation is entitled: Learning Design for the 21st Century. Talking to my colleague Paul Rudman the other day, he wondered whether people would understand the term Learning Design. So I thought in this blog post I would unpack it a bit. Essentially it is about helping teachers make more informed design decisions which are pedagogically effective and make appropriate use of technologies. It is clear that technologies offer a wealth of ways in which learners can interact with multimedia and ways to communicate and collaborate with others. However, teachers lack the necessary digital literacy skills to make effective use of technologies. The module will provide a comprehensive overview of the field of Learning Design and lots of practice hands on activities to explore the resources and activities we have developed. A good document to get a sense of Learning Design is the Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design.

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Need a fun way to remind learners of content you covered earlier in training—but don’t have a lot of time to create it? A frame game might be just the thing! Examples Here are three examples of Halloween-themed frame games from the "Special Occasion" section of our Showcase page. Approaches to Frame Games Frame games are pre-configured games, often with formats like Jeopardy or Hangman, that have the same game play mechanics every time, but allow you to flow in new content to meet instructional needs. Ideally the frame game pulls from banks of questions, split by topic area, so that your learners get a new opportunity to practice each time they play. As a designer, if your time is extremely limited, you might just pull the same questions you used earlier in quizzes and reviews into the frame game. In the LS360 LCMS, for example, you pull questions into the game template directly from your assessment item banks, making game setup super fast—under 5 minutes in most cases. If you have a little more time, to get the most "WOW" out of your game—and encourage learners to keep playing it and practicing the content—consider sculpting questions such that each challenge delights and surprises the learner who receives it. Ideas Be playful with your questions. Don’t just provide the definition and ask for the term. Give a mysterious clue, pun, or riddle to elicit the target word or phrase. Use scenarios with snippets of story, rather than a straight question. Pose true challenges and explore side cases to build expertise. Build question banks such that questions become more challenging the deeper into the game the learner goes. Lightly develop the characters within the story, so that learner is curious about them. Carry background and stories over from question to question, providing a little slice of life in each. Add humor, where appropriate. Add unusual or interesting real-world events, where appropriate. Instead of "correct," go a little wilder and more enthusiastic. Make every victory feel like a stadium full of applause. Feedback text can also be a great place to offer learners fun or interesting nuggets of information that they can share with others. Get them craving that next question! Remember: The goal is to get learners to want to practice, "see what comes next," and hone their skills. Dry content will still be dry, even in a frame game format. Feeling uninspired about reframing your existing questions? Grab some colleagues and throw a question re-writing party! Collective brainstorming can help spark ideas (and add to the fun). Splitting the work among several people can make the endeavor much more manageable. Who can write the funniest questions? Who comes up with the coolest examples? The best feedback? If you enjoy the writing process, chances are your students will also!   Have game templates? Have some fun! Laura and the 360training Authoring Team  

As part of the programme for the delegation from the Open University in China this week, Palitha Edirisingha gave an overview of our new part-time online MSc in Learning Innovation, which starts in October 2013. Figure 1 shows the full-time on campus version, alongside the online one. Figure 2 shows the modules and when they are running, along with accreditation exit routes. A key principle we have adopted when designing the course is to ensure it is innovative, demonstrating practical use of technologies for education, as well as theoretical concepts. We have also ensured constructive alignment between the learning and teaching, the assessment and the learning outcomes (Figure 3). As part of an incentive we are giving away 12 iPad minis to the first 12 registered students, so sign up now! More information is available from our website.

I was delighted to receive a copy of the 2nd Edition of ‘Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (Beetham and Sharpe 2013).  The second edition has been substantially revised and has a lot of new content, not surprising given the fast moving pace of Learning Design as a research field. In this addition, I contributed a chapter on Learning Design tools. I provided an overview of some of the key tools, including: LAMS, WebCollage, CompendiumLD, CADMOS, and the Learning Designer. I am currently involved in an EU-funded project on Learning Design, called METIS, which is combining a number of these tools to create an online Integrative Learning Design Environment (ILDE), which will be trailed in the Autumn through a series of workshops with teachers in the UK, Spain and Greece. A particularly interesting aspect of producing the book, was the way in which the final conclusion chapter was done. A version of the chapter was made available on Google Drive and researchers were invited to contribute around a series of questions on the future of Learning Design as a research field. A small group of us met face-to-face and brainstormed what we thought were the key issues and characteristics of Learning Design and their implication for education. We then worked in pairs on the themes. I worked with Chris Pegler from the OU UK on the theme of ‘openness’, we frantically wrote for 40 minutes and then came back together as a group to discuss. It was a very creative and productive way of working and at the end of the meeting we had over 8, 000 words produced! Helen then combined these with the feedback from the public version of the chapter to produce the final version. I think this is a great way of combining social media with face-to-face collaboration. I found it both productive and creative. I can thoroughly recommend the book to anyone interested is finding the latest research on Learning Design. References Beetham.H. and R. Sharpe (2013). Rethinking pedagogy for a digtal age, 2nd Edition. London, Routledge.                

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Assessments are an essential part of instruction. They are used by the instructor to test student’s understanding of the subject matter, to prompt learners to think more about course content before moving forward, and to identify the learning curve of the students in order to direct them towards remedial information (if required), in an online training. When it comes to designing assessments for online courses, multiple-choice questions are widely used because of their efficiency and rapidness. A trainer can easily test different stages of learning outcomes (recall, comprehension, application, analysis and synthesis) with the help of well-crafted MCQ’s. The following five tips may be helpful as a guideline for writing better MCQ’s for your elearning courses: Write short and clear stem A multiple choice question consists of a stem and set of options. The stem may be written in a form of a question, a scenario or an incomplete statement. Ideally, the stem of MCQ’s should be crisp and clear and not more than a line or two. Long and unclear stems are nothing but a waste of time. Academic experts recommend writing stems in question format. Your questions should support the learning objectives of your course Ensure to align your MCQ’s with the learning objectives of your online course and avoid "gotchas" approach by avoiding things that were not included in your course. Keep answer choices reasonable and short Usually, the longest answer choice is often perceived as correct by the students. Debunk this myth, and try writing reasonable answer choices of similar length. Ideally, all of your distractors should represent a common mistake for which you then provide feedback to get students back on the right track. Also, while crafting answer choices, avoid confusing terms such as "none of the above" and "all of the above". Focus on keeping the language consistent throughout the answer options. It doesn’t always have to be 4 answer choices in MCQ’s Generally, people expect MCQ’s to consist of 4 answer options, but this might not be the case in every question that you write. Don’t get worried about the number of answer options (there may be as low as 2). Focus framing answer options that reinforce critical thinking among learners. Feedback is important Feedback is a great way to provide constructive improvement to the learners. Provide proper feedback to the learners rather than restating the question. Incorporate motivating punch lines in correct answer feedback such as "Good job!", "bravo", "Good going!" etc. and avoid criticizing tone such as "No", "You are wrong", "That’s incorrect", for incorrect attempts. Try using neutral phrases for incorrect answer feedback such as "Try again", "Not quite right", and so forth. A well-written assessment is an ideal tool for an instructor to assess learner’s knowledge and understanding of the course content. Frame it carefully to gauge the learning outcomes of your online course.