Week 4 introduction: Good practice in online learning

This week is about integrating and consolidating your learning so far.

In week 1, we considered the early stages of an online course and how to set up an environment that will support individual learning online. You had the opportunity to experience a variety of introductions and icebreakers and to select and describe one you could use with your own groups. We encouraged the giving and receiving of peer feedback on your ideas.

In week 2 you had the opportunity to experience online collaborative group work and to reflect on how best to support it as a tutor.

In week 3 we explored online collaboration even further and investigated issues around assessing online collaboration.

The work we will do this week aims to give you opportunities to:

Week 4 aims and outcomes

The aim of this week's activities is to consider good practice in online tutoring. By the end of this week you should have:

Inventories of good practice

This week examines inventories or guides to good practice. There are many of these about and this week we encourage you to explore some more and to develop your own.

In this course we have referred several times already to Gilly Salmon’s influential Five Stage Model of online learning.  This model embodies conceptions of good practice in online learning and teaching.

Gilly Salmon's five stages of online learning

The first stage -- access -- in this model of online learning is largely technical: can I log on? does it run in that environment, on my computer? Until it does, don't waste time with the rest. Do not start designing resources for learning until you trust the various communication channels. The basic guide question at this stage is, can your learners use it?

Week zero of this course was largely devoted to Salmon’s first stage – access – and making sure the channels of communication were clear.

Salmon’s second stage is socialisation, developing learners’ online learning skills and helping them establish both online learning working practices and online relationships. How fault-tolerant are your target learners? What help is provided at the technical, pastoral and topic levels? How do you get to know the learners? Is appropriate security assured? Have ethical issues been considered? Do learners need to know one another in order to work together? Salmon’s third stage, information exchange, concerns engaging learners with the content of the course. Here the design questions are things like, what are the teaching and learning approaches that a learning object might be called upon to support? Is it suitable for all? Must it be? How will we encourage students to engage actively with this content? The topic makes an appearance as the negotiation of the relationship is conducted.

Weeks 1 and 2 and were heavily devoted to stages two and three of Salmon’s model, establishing online work practices, building relationships, and engaging with content.  We moved from a collection of individuals relating one-to-many, to smaller teams relating as a group. We established those relationships by working on content in a variety of group sizes.

Salmon’s stages 4 and 5 are knowledge building and development. Stage 4 is present to some extent in week 1 of this course but becomes the dominant stage in weeks 2, 3 and 4, where developing expertise through sharing knowledge and experience is the main design principle. Stage 5, development, has been lurking in the background throughout, but this week comes to the fore. We turn strongly towards the overall ‘topic’ of this course: What makes for good online learning? What have I learned about this and what to I need to do in future do develop my expertise further?

Your text for this short course has been Janet Macdonald’s book (2008), Blended Learning and Online Tutoring. Three chapters of this book implicitly convey another possible inventory of good practice. In chapters 12, 13 and 14 Macdonald argues for developing learners’ capacities as ‘E-investigators’, ‘E-writers’, and ‘E-Communicators and Collaborators’. At the end of each chapter, in her summary, Macdonald lists points that together might be taken as an inventory of good practice in online learning, or at least online course design. These include things like using generic guides to online resources, using model answers to help students understand how to write well online, integrating online tasks with assessment, etc.

As Mehrotra et al. (2001, p. 29) and many others have observed, ‘learning theories and principles that have been found successful in the traditional classroom remain constant regardless of the delivery mechanism’. Similarly, in the two cases we’ve discussed – Salmon’s five stage model, Macdonald’s model of blended learning – good practice inventories would have common elements and also differences, stemming from the theoretical approach taken, the primary mode of delivery envisaged, the purpose or focus of the inventory itself. There are a number of respected short inventories of good practice: indicators of high value. This week you have been asked to compile your own inventory of good practice in online teaching. You can draw on your own experience, and you should also consider how these other inventories can be realised in the online world.

What next?

Interested in further developing your online teaching? See our suggestions for ideas about continuing your professional development in e-learning.

Key readings

  1. MacDonald, J. (2008). Blended Learning and online tutoring. Chapter 12 onwards
  2. Models of good practice in online tutoring
  3. Salmon, G. (2004). E-moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online (2nd Edition). London, RoutledgeFarmer.
    Note: you might find it helpful to focus on the following two papers rather the Salmon’s whole book. Moule discusses limitations of the Salmon model and the ‘Tipping Point’ paper was Gilly’s response.
  4. Moule, P. (2007). "Challenging the five-stage model for e-learning: a new approach." ALT-J 15(1): 37 - 5. Available at http://journals.sfu.ca/coaction/index.php/rlt/article/view/10911
  5. Salmon, G. (2007). ‘The tipping point’. Research in Learning Technology. [Online] Available at: http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/10919.

Further resources