Week 1: Learners and learning environments

By the end of this week, you should be in a position to:

We start the course by thinking about the wide range of decisions that you will need to make in planning and preparing a course to run online, using learning design principles.

Already in the introduction to your course text, Sharpe and Beetham (p7) articulate the processes of design:

These processes are cyclical and you may notice that we will be guiding you through the phases repeatedly in this course. The form of design we are concerned with here is learning activity design, and I suggest you start your study this week by reading the short chapter introducing and defining learning activity design, namely Chapter 2. In this chapter, Helen Beetham offers a diagram of a learning activity (Figure 2.1), which has four elements, each of which can be the focus of your design:

Let us start our own journey together by thinking about our learners. As education professionals, you will know that learners vary enormously in their preferences and approaches to learning, their priorities at different times in their lives and their requirements for support. One of the challenges in preparing for online learning is in knowing how learners differ and more importantly - which of these differences are important influences on their learning experience. Which of the many ways in which learners differ should course designers be aware of?

In Chapter 2, Beetham suggests that:

'depending on the task and context, it may be necessary to consider the following characteristics of learners:

(Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age, p31)

As we work through this week's activities, you are encouraged to build your own such list of learner characteristics that are important for you to be aware of in your own context. We will ask questions about how much we know about our learners already, and how we might fill in gaps in our understanding. We use the concept of 'readiness' to give shape to our discussions.

1. Introduce yourself and your learners

(1 hour, probably split over a few days)

Your first task this week is to introduce yourself to the other members of the course. You will have already completed your 'profile' for the course last week, which previous groups have found serves as a useful record and reminder of the members of our group. The introductions this week are intended to help us find out not just who we all are, but in what contexts we teach and what kinds of learning we design.
Find the “Me and my learners” thread in the discussion forum in this week’s section of the course site. As well as introducing yourself, tell us something about your learners.

Once you have posted your own introduction, read the postings from some of the other group members. Find one other person where you can see similarities between your learners and theirs and one other person where your learners are very different from theirs. Respond to their postings, highlighting the similarities and differences you have observed.

What do you notice about what people feel it is important to share about their learners? Which of these learner characteristics are likely to be important to the online learning experience? You might like to make some notes in your learning log.

2. Course site visits

(1.5 hours)

The burgeoning of MOOCs (massive open online courses) in the past couple of years makes it possible for us to browse a range of online learning courses in order to get a feel for what current learning environments look like and how they might accommodate different types of learners. This initial exploration of other course sites will also be our first excursion into evaluation since we are inviting you to comment on the advantages and disadvantages of the design of these sites.

How might we evaluate an online learning course?

What we propose you do is to visit at least three courses from the list below and for each one complete the established evaluation instrument: Quality Matters Rubric Standards 2011-2013 http://www.qmprogram.org/files/QM_Standards_2011-2013.pdf. This rubric has emerged from well-documented research into the design of online learning, and is a quality instrument to assist in peer reviewing of online and blended learning sites. The rubric organises itself around 8 core standards. These standards are:

Once you have completed the rubric for any given site, we would like you to reflect on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the site, and what you particularly find interesting in how it is organised or presented and contribute to the evaluation of the course on the wiki page Course site visits.

A selection of open course sites

What follows are links to a range of examples course sites. The first few are from the Coursera initiative, which aims to offer courses to anyone, for free. You will need to register to access the course sites, but registration is free and open at the moment to the courses in the list below. You are also invited to propose and evaluate some example sites of your own.

3. Are you ready?

(1.5 hours, probably split over a few days)

Learner readiness is one of the ways in which course designers have attempted to conceptualise some of the important ways in which learners differ.  Some universities and colleges offer prospective and beginning students the opportunity to take a quiz to help them to self assess their 'readiness' to be an online student.

Take one or more of these quizzes now, thinking about yourself as an online learner about to embark in this short course:

How do you think your results would compare to those of your learners you described in the 'Me and my learners' task above?
After you have looked at your results, go back and look at the survey tools themselves. Do they ask the kinds of questions you would need to ask of your learners? How general or context-specific are these surveys? If you were designing such a survey for your students, what questions would you want to include? (If you are interested in the research literature on the design and use of such scales, there are some references listed at the end of this section.)

Post your thoughts in the 'Are you ready?' discussion forum and comment on the postings of at least two of your peers.

4. Week 1 Reflections

(1 hour)

This week we have discussed one aspect of designing for learning - our learners - and the ways in which our designs can be informed by an understanding of our learners' characteristics and readiness to study online. We have taken a tour of some existing course sites and considered how they match intended learners’ needs. To consolidate your learning from this week's activities, we suggest you make some notes in your learning log and share extracts from your log in the Week 1 Reflections discussion forum.

As a starting point, try to list

We have also asked you to jump back and forth between the roles of teacher and learner this week. We hope that noting down your thoughts and observations in your log will help you to see online course design from these multiple perspectives.

Key readings this week

(1 hour)

Background resources

(Not provided)