How flexible and for whom?

Palaskas and Muldoon

Flexible learning – “providing a range of learning approaches to suit student diversity… educational experience… more closely matches the needs of the learner”.

There are now closer ties between on-campus and off-campus students through technology and the library.

The finding was that communication technologies such as Blackboard can be used for both on-campus and off-campus students, but that academics need a fair amount of support to use these with best practice pedagogy and teaching and learning techniques. They discuss taking the good aspects of class and online teaching in a blended approach.

At CQUniversity, we already have Moodle established. I don’t know to what extent it is being used for blended learning, because I still hear on-campus students saying they don’t go into Moodle much because there is nothing for them there. I know other courses require all students to do online work.

Online learning is said to increase flexibility and autonomy in the students. It does allow for a more personalized approach to the timing of the work. However, the paper does say that blended learning, where there is a mix of class and online delivery is better than either. Sometimes, this is just not an option, so perhaps there might need to be innovative ways to overcome this?

The list that this paper gives from McCombs (2002) is interesting. It is certainly a good list to go by when designing an online course. In particular, emotional safety and creativity are two aspects that are often overlooked in the design of courses. I like the creativity aspect in that maybe an essay can be substituted with some other form of composition for assessment submission.

The authors do go on to talk about online aspects such as discussion boards, and having resources online. One thing that is anecdotally extremely common at CQUniversity is that students like to print out resources and have them as hard copies. This then leads to a conundrum… academics like to put more online because it is easy and can link to so many more resources, webpages, and papers, but students then feel like there is more to print out and get frustrated with the volumes and cost of the printing. The authors point out the use of integrated note-taking features of technology. I know I myself struggle a little with that and even now as I type, I have the paper open on the left half of my laptop screen, and this document open on the right half. If I had the luxury of dual screens like I do at work, it would be even easier. So I’d say that lecturers would need to be careful with what they direct students to, and if the students might perceive it as something to print out. Online interactive activities, on the other hand, are harder to print – this means that the students might focus more on the doing, rather than the keeping… but I have been asked for summaries of lessons – my guess is to print out because they are always available to go back to online.

One of the strategies mentioned in this paper is to provide a “media-rich environment”. This, I believe, is paramount to student engagement. When was the last time you saw Discovery Channel show a documentary that was text appearing on the screen with an intermittent picture every now and then? BORING! Discover Channel is exceptionally interesting, but (don’t tell the kids) it is educational!

Yes, this might take a little extra effort on the part of the academic. Having, however, just rewritten my Physics study guide, THAT was a lot of effort too. So next time I think about rewriting it, I might do something a little different – more interesting – definitely. Of course, you might ask why I just rewrote a boring study guide? Well, as I said, many people work best with something printed out in front of them!

Ah, preparing the student – comfortable and familiar with the technology. Here is a major crux. We have Gen Y students who really don’t need, or want, to be hand-held through technology guides, and we have non-natives to technology, having only just owned their first computer 6 months ago when they started their enabling course, and everyone in between. We need to have a system (or several) that can put everyone on a level playing field right from the beginning of the course. Academics need to engage in the orientation of their students, not only to university, but to the technology. On some of our campuses, it is lecturers who do take the new students through Moodle during orientation week and that is excellent as they know exactly how the students are going to be expected to engage with the systems. If only more academics would realise that an extra 2 hours in orientation, means that all their students will be ready from day 1 of term, and there will be far less time wasted with questions such as, ‘How do I log in to Moodle? Where is that reading? What do I do in an online forum?’

There is a long way to go and there will be a constant need to update both students and academics to fully utilize online technology in teaching.