Education 2.0 & 3.0

As society has evolved, so too has education. To meet the changing needs of our world, an explosion of online education has focused on adult learning. Adult education covers a wide range of topics, as many adult learners strive to improve their lives through professional development or changing careers (Mace and Bacon 2019).  For career fields that require hands-on work and interactions with clients, for example, online education presents a unique challenge for educating adult learners. Therefore, to reach these students, understanding appropriate educational models in an online format is essential (Diep et al. 2019). As society changes to include more online learning opportunities, the field of education must stay abreast of these shifts and use these strategies to provide the best education possible for new and longtime professionals. When teaching courses online, consider applying evidence-based strategies to improve engagement, satisfaction, and comprehension for your students of all ages. The following five tips have been developed from research geared toward pivoting live classes into effective online or blended learning courses.

By now, we have all realized that preparing for the upcoming fall semester isn’t going to feel like any other August filled with syllabus preparations. Whether we are planning for a remote, digital or hybrid course, or a cautious, unfamiliar version of an in-person course, the entire semester has to be planned to “expect the unexpected.” This daunting pedagogical task is made more complicated if you have multiple courses to prepare, and even more difficult if you teach at more than one college.

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically upended traditional schooling and made remote learning the “new normal.” Teachers are scrambling to offer some form of continuing education using virtual technologies, with the recognition that traditional approaches to curriculum, instruction, assessment, and grading must be altered. While it might be more expedient to present online lessons, electronic worksheets, and resource packets, we propose that the learn-at-home circumstance offers an opportunity to present students with more engaging and meaningful learning experiences. More specifically, we recommend providing students with assignments and tasks that challenge them to find information from various sources, critically appraise what they find, and use what they learn to address interesting issues and genuine problems.

For every pilot flying an aircraft today, there is an instructor who made it happen. Teaching someone to fly an aircraft involves multiple layers of skill and ability, psychological intuition, courage, and logic. Online course design can benefit from what we have learned about teaching someone to fly.

Today, pilots can accomplish all knowledge-based training online and complete all airline jet flight training in a motion-based simulator. This technology is so realistic that a new First Officer joining an airline will begin flying passengers without having ever been in the actual airplane beforehand.

Are your learners failing to apply the acquired knowledge from online learning to their jobs? How do you ensure effective knowledge transfer? Answer these 10 questions before, during, and post eLearning development and ensure effective knowledge transfer.

I do like the idea of a linear course, of being guided between key elements in a predictable path, of getting assurance that I’m progressing well and understanding the essential concepts. I do like the idea of this, but I fully fail to engage with the programme!

Design a beautiful VLE, full of useful functionality and interactive elements, make the module structure easy to follow and offer ample opportunities to collaborate with the instructor and my peers. Or don’t. Throw together some hellhole of a website with links that go nowhere, looking like it had a design by-pass in the late 90s. Either way, I’m going to do three things. I’ll go straight to the assignments section to see what you’re going to mark me on, then I’ll find a way to gather all the reading materials and print them (I know, how Twentieth Century!), finally I’ll head to the calendar to schedule webinars, meetups and find out what reading we’ll be discussing and when.

The higher education landscape is shifting and institutions are facing a decline in overall enrollment. Rather than opting for a traditional classroom experience, students today have come to expect greater flexibility in deciding when, where and how to learn. In fact, it is predicted that by 2019 at least 50 percent of all classes will be delivered online and that percentage will only continue to increase. To adjust to student expectations and keep enrollment up, higher education institutions must offer online courses or blended classrooms to compete with other colleges that already have those options.

Use your storytelling powers wisely and you’ll watch your students flourish. Successful consumers of stories love to talk about them, so use your new storytelling skills to create student ambassadors for your online school.

"UNESCO coined the term ‘OER‘ back in 2002 to describe an initiative intended to bring about educational resources that were universally accessible. Open Educational Resources are described as ‘learning, teaching, and research materials in any media, digital or otherwise, that belong to the public domain, or have been released under an open license permitting free access, use, and adaptation, as well as redistribution by others without restriction.’"

Looking for some tips on how to help you better integrate technology in your instruction? The visual below has you covered. It features 10 activities you can do in your class with the help of web technologies. These activities include how to: run a virtual field trip, quiet a noisy classroom, use videos for mini-lessons, coordinate live video, add multimedia elements to presentations, use digital exit tickets, study and critique web content, gather student feedback, launch a wiki page or blog for a collaborative assignment.

Covid 19 has educators and educational institutions worried about and preparing for possible school closures. What happens if students have to stay home for days or even weeks? How can we keep them learning remotely? What strategies and technology tools

Any time I start work on a new learning project, someone always asks me how I think the learning content should be delivered. Should it be an eLearning course or instructor-led training? Should it be a how-to video or job aid? And while these questions are important to answer, my response is always the same: Why does it have to be one or the other? Why don’t we try designing blended learning?

This padlet contains some examples of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) tools that span the six types of learning identified by Diana Laurillard (2002). These learning types lie at the heart of UCL's Arena, Blended, Connected (ABC) approach to learning design. Suitable tools are identified under each learning type, which can be used in addition (or as an alternative) to conventional methods of teaching, learning and assessment. Add your own post by clicking on the cross at the bottom of each column. We also welcome comments and questions underneath posts - please share your experience. N.b. scroll down to the bottom of each column to view all posts.

We are generally mindful that PowerPoint presentations (PPTs) are utilized widely in organizations. But, do we utilize this material in places other than meeting corridors? PowerPoint presentations are considerably more than simple packs of valuable data – they are valuable sources of learning content that can be utilized to produce very viable online courses. Most of the time, these PPTs are used in classroom training sessions and later sent via emails to learners. However, we need to look at what the criteria are for deciding whether face to face course really is convertible to eLearning.

Consortium of small colleges makes progress in launching online humanities courses, but report shows that collaboration has not saved institutions money and instructors time yet.

The University of Arizona developed a toolkit to help new instructional designers and online instructors get up to speed in creating courses for students that might never show their faces on campus.

Scorecards offer benchmarks for digital learning and instruction.