Looking Forwards with e-Learning Theory and Pedagogy

Having reviewed the Mayes and de Freitas (2004) study, they provide some very helpful pointers to incorporating e learning theories and pedagogies into my online teaching approach. 


As I said in my previous post, my current face-to-face practice begins with an associationist approach to defining outcomes and breaking a topic down into manageable chunks. But once I get into teaching and learning activities, my approach becomes more cognitive, with learners being encouraged to make their own meaning with scaffolding from tools and activities. Whether my learners could ever be called a community of practice, as in the sociative genre, is less arguable, as they are often from different disciplines, levels of experience, intellect etc. However, by the end of a programme, I do think my activities become more socially constructivist in style, with groups being asked to work together to make sense and communicate main messages from an event.


In moving into e-learning, my early efforts have fallen into the category that Mayes and de Freitas (2004) describe as "pragmatic rather than pedagogic" (p4), consisting of groups of participants for whom getting together to learn is completely impractical. In adopting more of an associationist approach to delivering content, we have failed to exploit many of the affordances of the new technology.


Mayes and de Freitas outline the following overall approach to e-learning design

• carefully defined intended learning outcomes,
• learning and teaching activities that enable the students to achieve that learning, 
• assessment tasks which will genuinely test whether the outcomes have been reached

I'm sure I can do a better job of breaking down the various learning outcomes needed, and that incorporating more constructivist activities into the programme will help my learners to build better frameworks for their own learning.


However, the big gap I can now see in my approach is that I have left assessment too late in the process. In the current programme, assessment only occurs at the end of a five module programme, by which time gaps in understanding may have been missed. An important affordance of technology is that formative assessment becomes much easier and offers the chance to make learning much more personalised. This takes me back to one of my eye opening moments on H807 - web 2.0 assessment (Elliott, 2008).  I can now see that formative assessment is a vital element in being able to offer learners scaffolding for their development.


Not quite back to the drawing board, but a lot of food for thought;-)




Ref:

Elliott, B. (2008) Assessment 2.0: Modernising Assessment in the Age of Web 2.0 [online], Scottish Qualifications Authority; available from http://www.scribd.com/doc/461041/Assessment-20 (Accessed 12th April 2011)

Mayes, T. and de Freitas, S. (2004) ‘Review of e-learning theories, frameworks and models’ [online], Bristol, The Joint Information Systems Committee, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Stage%202%20Learning%20Models%20%28Version%201%29.pdf (Accessed 24^th May 2011).