Daily Bookmarks 01/27/2009
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An absolutely riveting online course: Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching
Not a whole lot new to me here, but a solid collection of principles to guide online facilitators. If you’re looking for an introduction for facilitators or administrators who aren’t familiar with online learning or don’t really “get” why you can’t just shovel face-to-face content into an LMS to have a great course, this would be a good way to help show what’s required to go beyond the mediocrity typical of many online courses.
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Principle 1: The online world is a medium unto itself.
The search for excellence begins with this principle: The online world is a medium unto itself (Carr-Chellman & Duchastel, 2000; Ellis & Hafner, 2003). It is not just another learning environment, like a separate classroom down the hall; it is a categorically different learning environment. There are vastly different dynamics in online versus on campus courses.
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Principle 2: In the online world content is a verb.
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We are moving to a mode of learning that is less dependent on information acquisition and is more centered on a set of student tasks and assignments that make up the learning experiences that students will engage in, in order to meet the objectives of the course (Carr-Chellman & Duchastel, 2000). In the online world, content is a verb.
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Principle 5: Sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence.
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Establishing a sense of community often signals movement to a deeper learning experience (Benfield, 2001). It is through sustained communication that participants construct meaning (Garrison, et al., 2000) and come to a more complete understanding of the content. Indeed it is through such interaction and through attending to the processes of learning and teaching (as opposed to attending only to content) that a deeper rather than a surface approach to learning is encouraged (Ramsden, 2003). Without this connection to the instructor and the other students, the course is little more than a series of exercises to be completed.
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Principle 7: A great web interface will not save a poor course; but a poor web interface will destroy a potentially great course.
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Principle 8: Excellence comes from ongoing assessment and refinement.
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Concise writing is best for elearning » Making Change
A concise post pulling a bit of research where the lesson with the fewest words resulted in the most learning. Nice argument for keeping your e-learning short, although look at the original to see what they were actually studying in context (scientific processes with cause and effect, using visuals as well as text to explain).
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Plain language WCAG 2.0 checklist from WebAIM. If you don’t want to slog through all the technical language of WCAG 2.0, this is much easier to understand.
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jaysscratchpad » Solving Muliple Edit Problem Using the Include Command
One issue with using wikis for collaborative group projects is that you can’t have multiple people simultaneously editing the same page. If all you need is a bunch of separate parts aggregated onto a single page (without any editing to make them all a cohesive document at the end), the technique outlined here would be a good workaround.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.