Facilitating eLearning--a summary of what I learnt. 6 August 07

I was lucky enough to receive some one to one coaching from Leigh today, to help me get my head around some of the channels of communication in our Facilitate e learning course.
He should be in sales, because when I thanked him for his help, he replied that all I needed to do to repay him, was to post a summary of what I had learnt on my weblog.
Well that’s a good learning technique and so the following is my attempt to clarify for myself, how some of the technology in the course works. If this document helps others, then that is a bonus. As most of this technology is new to me I expect there will be some errors and omissions, however I hope that by the time other members of the group have had a look at it and added their pointers (and corrected where necessary) then we might have something that could be described as the Idiot’s Guide to surviving weeks 1 & 2…

Well it seems to me there are 5 channels I need to get to grips with at this stage. There will be more coming along later like Wiki, but that is for another day. The 5 are:

1 Blackboard:
This has the course material in it and assessment information. It is accessed at
https://emit.manukau.ac.nz

2 The Discussion Forum: This is a Google e-mail forum where members can talk about the course and associated issues (a bit like talking during the tea breaks in a face to face course). The e-mail address is:
learning-communities-aotearoa@googlegroups.com
At Otago Polytechnic I receive emails from this source in my usual Groupwise system and I can reply in the usual way.

3 Sometimes there will be e-mails, but from a different address as below:
Google Groups noreply@googlegroups.com
These are e-mails that relate to the management of the course e.g. Cheryl’s e-mail dated 1 August 07 where she asked to join the group. We receive these e-mails because the course facilitators want to hand over the management of the course to the participants.
Personally I’m not ready for dealing with management issues, so I ignored this one (sorry Cheryl). At this stage I’m struggling to deal with the basics. Perhaps later I will be able to engage with course management matters. However I can see the facilitators’ reasoning, because one day hopefully, we will be managing a course on line.

4 Course Blog (weblog)
It sounds to me as though this will become the main means of communicating about the course. It can be accessed at:
Online-learning-communities.blogspot.com
It contains:
instructions about the course (LH pane – info supplied by facilitator)
a calendar of upcoming events
a list of all links referred to
a list of topics put onto the discussion forum referred to earlier.
(2, 3 & 4 are in RH pane and are imported from other sources).

5 Individual weblog. For me this is accessed via following address:
kevinhelm.blogspot.com

Then I must sign in with my user name and password. We will be encouraged to load our assessment evidence, reports, comments etc into our individual blogs.

My blog is set up so that it automatically sends me an e-mail of what I have entered into it. When I asked Leigh why would I want an e-mail of what I have in my blog, his answer made a lot of sense. So that if I want to then pass that information onto the other members of the course I can do so easily by forwarding that email to:
Learning-communities etc.

Another advantage of an individual blog, is that it is an easy matter for the facilitators to have a look at everything I have done for assessment purposes.

Leigh reminded me this individual blog is available to the world so it should be professional – a chance to advertise myself / my work. I’ll have a go at including a photo in the blog at some stage.

So far I should have 3 postings (the term used for adding documents to a blog).

The first posting is about the work I do & myself.
The second posting is about the results from the learning styles & strategies (this has suffered a major format shake up in transferring from a Word doc. to Blog, so is anything but professional looking – I will need to tidy that up.
The third posting is this ‘Idiot’s Guide to surviving weeks 1 & 2.....( I have prepared this in Word and so I hope it transfers to the Blog without getting scrambled)

As well as the various communication channels, Leigh set up Elluminate software for me. We tried a microphone I had, but it was not receptive enough. Leigh’s advice – buy one from The Warehouse for $30 (an earpiece and microphone combo.)

For me the Elluminate sessions are difficult to attend because I am away from my office a lot. A solution looks like it may involve a laptop.

One final tip Leigh gave me was Tab Browsing sometimes called Power Browsing. This is a simple way to have multiple tabs open at once. Two ways to do this:
Control T and copy the address I want
Click the scroll wheel on mouse pad down (like a middle key) on the link in a doc and that puts that doc in a tab
That way I can read the parent doc and then open up each tab and view between tabs easily.

Tab Browsing was totally new to me and so I’m happy to pick up extra tips as I go.
I look forward to receiving feedback on these notes.
Thanks for your help Leigh

Cheers
Kevin