Week 1 (30 May – 3 Jun)
This week I began taking two courses for my master’s degree at Boise State, OPWL551 Storyboards & Scenario-Based eLearning and OPWL525 eLearning Content Design and Learning Management Systems. While I enjoyed the readings and assignments in both courses this past week, I wanted to share some key takeaways from my first week in OPWL551.
Takeaway 1:
The client is your partner and the ultimate decision maker. While this is, or at least should be, apparent to everyone I think it has its rightful place in our text and serves as a reminder of our purpose. So, I don’t want to think of the client as someone who is paying me for my services, rather, I want to take the “client” as my student.
Why do you want to do that John? Well, that should be simple to understand if you have read anything prior to this post, however, at the center of teaching is influencing a life-long learner.
So, treat the student like your client and remember they are your partner in this adventure that is learning.
Takeaway 2:
If you treat your student as if they were your client then you should always be able to provide them with a good, better, and best option for their learning journey! Let them decide which path they want to take but always make the best option available or at least known to the client.
Takeaway 3:
Don’t trust anything the teacher tells you! Wait, what do you mean John? That seems a little counter to what your entire purpose is with this Blog…
Calm down, what I mean is that it is my responsibility to provide you with evidence-based practices and factual learning opportunities. I won’t remove my emotion, I will give you my opinion, but I expect to be challenged when I am teaching. This forces me to stay on the top of my game with what I am teaching, and it allows the student some opportunity to teach me as well. I can only hope that when those moments happen (notice I didn’t say if) the student takes that to heart and realizes they had a bigger impact that day.
Takeaway 4:
Incorporating technology isn’t about how we can use technology in training, or how we can leverage technology to influence younger generations or even what the best technology is to use. Nope, it is all about how we can adapt technology to aid the student in the learning process.
Wait, what is the difference? Well, when we talk about how technology can aid the student the focus is no longer on the technology it is now centered on the student and if you go back to takeaway #1, the student is our client.
Takeaway 5:
Learning involves making sense of the presented material by attending to relevant information, mentally reorganizing it, and connecting it with what you already know.(Clark, 2013)
Again, evidence-based foundation for this metaphor of learning that is backed by over 100-years of psychologists. This also goes right back to takeaway #1 where the student is our client and you should motivate them to learn more than you can ever teach them.
Imagine a world where teachers took this approach about teaching. It isn’t just about getting the student to pass the test, it is about enabling the student to be better than they are today and know how to find the information in the future, reorganize it, and apply it to their own situation or scenario.
Takeaway #6:
Cognitive load theory still applies to eLearning! Your goal with eLearning is still to quickly get your student through working memory to process and store information into long-term memory. In simple terms, we have to chunk and present data appropriately so that our learners are not overwhelmed.
Our focus for the first few weeks will be on theoretical understanding of eLearning so that we can appropriately build content through evidence based practices that produce results.
Σχόλια