{"id":15,"date":"2005-05-18T15:56:19","date_gmt":"2005-05-18T19:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/2005\/05\/18\/ten-ideas-for-making-e-learning-"},"modified":"2005-05-18T15:56:19","modified_gmt":"2005-05-18T19:56:19","slug":"ten-ideas-for-making-e-learning-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/2005\/05\/18\/ten-ideas-for-making-e-learning-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Ideas for Making E-Learning Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

At the .LRN Foro Hispanico in Madrid last week, Rafael Calvo<\/a>
\npresented some thoughts on how to evaluate, holistically, whether a
\ncourse that includes an online component is being delivered
\npedagogically and logistically in ways that will be successful.<\/p>\n

That got me thinking, and I scribbled down the following list:<\/p>\n

1. Subscribe and reply to bulletin boards and forums by email. 
\nOpenACS \/ .LRN support this.  It’s extremely cool and useful to be
\nable to participate but never have to actually visit the website. 
\nPeople live in email. So smart developers and admins will go to where
\nthey live.<\/p>\n

2. “Structured Collaboration” (based on the story of the binge-o-matic<\/a>). 
\nMost people freeze up when presented by blank space and asked to write
\ninto it.  They need prompts.  If you want a group of people
\nto discuss a book online, give them a form that structures what you’d
\nlike them to cover.  When they see how their thoughts and ratings
\ncompare with others, they will be stimulated  to comment. 
\n“Did I miss something?  why am I the only person who thought this
\nbook sucked\/ was great?”  Side benefit: structured data from many
\npeople is much easier to analyze.<\/p>\n

3. Seed content.  People react better than they act.  So put
\nthe ball in play.  This is in fact how blogs work, and why they
\nwork better than bboards — someone writes a post, and people react to
\nthat post.  In theory these reactions could be threaded, which
\nmight combine useful features of both.<\/p>\n

4. Auto-tag content contributions by context.  If I upload
\ndocument X into folder Y, Document X should be presumed to inherit
\nwhatever metadata is used to describe folder Y for search purposes. <\/p>\n

5. Optimize user group size and structure to maximize affinity; take
\nadvantage of user profiling to validate affinity.  This is a fancy
\nway of saying that people will interact within groups they feel
\ncomfortable in, and much less beyond the scope of such groups.  So
\nget the group size and structure right, and then provide enough
\ninformation on group members so people can feel comfortable they’re in
\nthe right group.<\/p>\n

6. In-line benchmarking.  The idea here is instant feedback. 
\nWhen you take an online survey, you’re much more likely to be engaged
\nif the results are presented back to you immediately comparing how you
\nanswered questions with how others did.  We’ve deployed this for
\nthe .LRN-based Compass <\/a>application run by the 3E Project at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government with great success.<\/p>\n

7. User portraits. With each contribution of content, whether a bboard
\npost or a document upload, or whatever, when there is attribution to a
\nuser the user’s name could be accompanied by a thumbnail
\nportrait.  To manage page size, this might be restricted to the
\nfirst post a user makes in a thread.  But I think this little tip
\n(which I haven’t tried yet, but have seen proxies for) would do a lot
\nto warm up what can be a sterile experience, and help keep the flaming
\ndown.<\/p>\n

8. Personalized syllabi.  Again, another innovation we’ve deployed
\nin the 3E Project’s Compass application.  Based on how you answer
\ncertain surveys\/ diagnostics, you get a personalized syllabus before
\nyou come to a 3E exec ed program.  Saves you time and you’re much
\nmore likely to read the material if you know it will be relevant not
\nonly to the course, but to you.<\/p>\n

9. Class Notes Blog.  For each class in which there is a
\ndiscussion as part of the learning experience, someone should be
\nassigned to “blog” what was said.  Again, we’ve done this with
\nsuccess at 3E with the Compass application, where each class instance
\nis set up as a subsite with multiple associated application modules
\n(surveys, forums, but in this instance also a weblog module, which
\nOpenACS\/ .LRN provides natively)<\/p>\n

10. Active moderation.  Don’t bother putting any technical means
\nof online collaboration unless someone is assigned to stimulate,
\nmoderate, and maintain it.  <\/p>\n

What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the .LRN Foro Hispanico in Madrid last week, Rafael Calvo presented some thoughts on how to evaluate, holistically, whether a course that includes an online component is being delivered pedagogically and logistically in ways that will be successful. That got me thinking, and I scribbled down the following list: 1. Subscribe and reply to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[589],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cesarbreastories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/298"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}