Promote online learning as an integral part of your organisation's training programmes, make it work effectively and evaluate its impact. Effective Online Learning will show you how. +There are over 100 tools which show you:
- How to design online learning materials.
- How online learning can complement your face-to-face training.
- How to exploit the range of opportunities that exist for integrating online learning with your other training initiatives.
The emphasis is on how to make the technology enhance the learning - not how to use the technology for its own sake.You don't have to be a computer expert, either… Effective Online Learning is designed for people who are relatively new to using technology to deliver their training.
With Effective Online Learning you'll be able to cut through the jargon and hype that surrounds online learning, and untap the potential of your computer as a resource for training and learning.
You'll learn:
- All the features, benefits and barriers of using online learning.
- How to succesfully incorporate online learning in your current training programme.
- How to maximise the learning experience - and get your learning outcomes right.
- How to make group-based online learning work for you.
- How to develop online learning within your organisation - including the cost benefits.
Contents
1: Where are you now with online learning?
This first set of tools introduces you to the world of learning and training with and through the medium of computers and communication technologies. It suggests how you might make an action plan for using this Toolkit, offers a short digest of the jargon of online learning and asks users to assess how ready they are for training and learning online.
2: Online learning – features, benefits and barriers:
This unit offers tools which allow users to explore the principal features and benefits of online learning, within the various contexts in which they will be implementing it. It asks users to translate features into benefits, stressing that the same features can yield different benefits for different target audiences thus making online learning an attractive and workable option for them. The principle of ‘ownership’ is raised.
3: Extending training to online learning:
In this set of tools, you revisit face-to-face training sessions to see how far you can use your existing training skills to support online learners. You will be introduced to the concept of real-time and asynchronous learning environments. These tools will help you decide when, and in what combinations, you might use online delivery. You will start to see where virtual support might extend or replace some or all of your face-to-face training.
4: Supporting online learning:
These tools cover monitoring and supporting learners online and get you to explore the particular tasks and responsibilities involved. The tools will help you identify support opportunities in specific programmes and the ways in which learners might gain maximum benefit from support opportunities that may already be in place. An action-planning tool maps individual development needs.
5: A fresh look at how learners learn:
The main aim of the tools in this unit is to get you thinking about the learning as you implement online learning. Thinking of your own learning is a way into thinking more deeply about the learning that online learners will do, and about the learning that those implementing online learning are trying to get them to do. Tools take you through a ‘ripples on a pond’ model of learning and the concept of ‘competenceuncompetence’.
6: Learning from screens – what’s in online learners’ minds?
This unit helps you to address some of the problems of learning from screens in the online learning environment. The causes of these problems are already well known with video-based training. You will see how online learning problems are not due just to the advent of the new communications technologies, but can be traced back to how people handle visual information. The tools explore ways to ensure that each and every single screen in online learning programmes is doing something useful for learners.
7: Developing online learning within the organisation:
The tools in this unit cover the strategic and decision-making aspects of implementing online learning in your organisation. They help you to audit and develop those online training and development activities that are already taking place. A sequence of tools supports you in choosing a learning management system (or virtual learning environment), taking into account the cost-benefits of your online training activities.
8: Checklists to interrogate online resources:
This unit contains a series of tools to help you to interrogate learning materials that are used within online learning programmes. The scope of these tools covers how you plan to use computer-based learning materials in your training, testing how well they help learners to learn effectively, and finding out how they may need to be modified, adapted or supported, so that they work more effectively.
9: Strategy for designing an element of online learning:
The unit starts by looking at some decisions you may need to make about what lends itself best to online delivery. It continues with tools to help you to put together a new element of online learning or an additional component to bridge an identified gap in existing materials. The tools are focused on designing learning, rather than on any particular software option used to turn your element of learning into something which will work online. Using these tools as a template for designing learning-by-doing and learning-through-feedback can save you hours in the long run, and can ensure that your eventual online learning materials deliver high learning payoff.
10: Getting your learning outcomes right for online learning:
Most online learning programmes are designed with some intended learning outcomes in mind, although they may be dressed rather thinly as ‘training objectives’. These tools help you to clarify the real learning outcomes of existing packages and programmes, and to translate them where necessary into language which makes them readily understood by all concerned. If you are designing your own online learning programmes, then these tools will help you to make sure that your intended learning outcomes serve your learners well.
11: Group-based online learning:
These tools show how the commonly seen gains of group-based, collaborative learning in face-to-face training can be replicated online, by constructing activities in which learners working with their own computers communicate frequently with a limited number of co-learners. The tools in this section take you through some aspects of learning with others, whether in face-to-face contexts or by electronic communication. The tools look equally at the learning side of the equation and at the role of the trainer in facilitating group learning in these different contexts.
12: Gathering feedback from online learners:
This unit contains tools to help you design, conduct and interpret evaluations of online learning. With these tools you will be better able to collect data on how learners assess the importance of your online training to their jobs. You will also be able to get data on how learners perceive themselves using the knowledge, skills and abilities covered in their online learning programme. Finally, you may begin to assess the overall impact of online learning within your training and development strategy.
