E-xtraordinary Learning for a Digital Age

Introduction

An exciting week this week! Several new e-toys introduced and a very demanding look at Employability Skills. We are still suffering the “knock on” effect of the day lost to a Public Holiday.  One student who was working excellently has decided that she cannot continue with the intensive because of family commitments.

The week reviewed!

This week the literacy focus was on personal interests and Employability Skills, highlighting strengths and sharing ideas for improvement. The digital focus was on: copyright and creative commons; adding images to blogs including editing as necessary; making and embedding Voki and either Slideshare or Prezi. For easy access to interactive, and other Employability Skills websites we used a Symbaloo page – Careers/Employability.  This has links to a variety of career, apprenticeship and other employment related sites using different coloured tiles for different categories. The course blog was also updated with posts relating to the week’s activities.

Our third lecturer Lina (Micky) was centre stage this week delivering great sessions on image editing/uploading and creating/embedding Vokis into blogs. She is herself quite new to blogging and has used her own blog brilliantly to share and expand on her sessions. We also had sessions on: Copyright/Creative Commons by Phil; and by myself on Employability Skills and Slideshare/Prezi.

This week the students have begun, and in some cases already completed most of, the following:

• find, edit and upload to their blogs an appropriately Creative Commons licensed image relating to their own interests and post about how the image relates to the interest
• complete a series of interactive activities to facilitate consideration of their own Employability Skills
• challenges from Lina’s Blog on image editing, uploading and Voki creation and embedding
• post on their blog about their own Employability Skills with a Voki and either Slideshare or Prezi embedded
• comment on other student blogs

Checkout their work by visiting their blogs – they are all linked from the sidebar in the ELFADA Course Blog

Again this week students have been working hard, completing tasks and submitting drafts for feedback into the evening and weekend.

Our visit from a PfP person seemed to go well! From my personal perspective it was exciting to talk about the project.

Next week

Next week is our last week and again we will lose a day, this time for the ANZAC Day Public Holiday. Most of the week’s activities will be catching up and completing tasks that have small omissions. The tricky part after next week will be maintaining the momentum without the daily virtual class sessions.

A priority for next week is recruiting students for our second pilot due to start on the 14th of May. Our processes are quite long because of the need for students to do pre-enrolment placement activities to determine their Certificate level.

Conclusion

Although students are at various stages with respect to completion of activities we expect that most of the six will have completed at least two of their three units to the standard appropriate for their level by the end of the fourth week some will clearly evidence all three of their units. Those with some still to  complete should be able to do so as they start on the work for the rest of the CGEA

Introduction

A short week this week due to the Public Holiday on Monday. This meant we had an awful lot to do to keep on schedule! The students worked brilliantly all week. As expected everyone is now at different stages with respect to completion of tasks. We have one student who has more or less dropped out due to Internet problems and a second who has been unable to attend consistently for personal reasons.

The week reviewed!

This week was a look at online safety through reviewing a variety of visual and audio-visual texts, posting a review of one of the videos and then making and posting a visual text on online safety using ToonDoo. For easy access to a limited collection of links we used a Symbaloo page.  This has links addressing online safety issues with different coloured tiles for different visual/audio visual text types. The course blog was also updated with posts relating to the week’s activities.

Those students and lecturers for our first pilot ELFADA course who were online during the virtual class session on visual texts made a Toon together we did this through desktop sharing with each person taking turns to control my desktop and add their own choice of character and text. For me it illustrates the level of motivation of this group of students that one of them attended this session while travelling as a passenger in a car!

Being able to record sessions and make them available if a student misses one is a huge advantage. Obviously watching a recording is far less interesting that actually being in a session but for students who have had to miss sessions it is better than nothing. This has happened a couple of times and enables the student to catch up flexibly.

Next week

Next week our third lecturer who has joined us several times to get to know the students will be dong sessions onresizing images for blogs and other online purposes and on making and embedding Vokis.

I also admit to some trepidation about next week as we will be visited “really” rather than “virtually” by a PfP  manager. I know I shouldn’t be worried but there is always that slightly scary feeling when those who manage funding come to visit!

Conclusion

Although some students are a little behind on completion of work this is not surprising given the range of the group (from Cert I,Cert II and Cert III) and the diversity of computer systems in use that have caused occasional technical glitches. These have sometimes necessitated longish troubleshooting sessions using desktop sharing to view student configurations. We have also had one Public Holiday and another to come in the last week which hasn’t helped. However the program is heavily “front-end loaded” to allow for catch-up time in the last week (week four). There will be nothing new introduced after the middle  of next week (week three).

The First Week

 Introduction

Well we have had the first week of our first pilot of ELFADA. No time to turn round or to think about anything else this week. However I have pulled together some  of the thoughts from each day, to give a feeling for how it is going so far.

We have nine students in this; the first of two pilot runs. The plan allows for a maximum of 20 in each run but I had a preference for a lower number particularly for this first pilot and I feel that 9 is a good number. We also have a wider Certificate level range than originally intended as some of those wishing to participate were placed at Cert III CGEA level.

The format for the four weeks (four days a week) of intensive online activity is this – each day:

• 9:00 am to 11:00 am (2 hours) synchronous virtual classroom session (with a 5 min leg stretch break)
• 11:00 am to 2:30 pm (3 hours) asynchronous independent work with drop-in support available as needed via virtual classroom
• 2:30 (up to 30 min) reconvene in virtual class for a review of the day
• Daily activity is guided by a “Today’s Tasks” doc, with references to the CGEA website (LMS) for resources and templates & to the course blog for “how to”, supporting and model blog posts

First fleeting impressions!

Day 1

Wow! We just had the first day of our first pilot run of Extraordinary Learning For A Digital Age (ELFADA). So exciting! I am still “coming down” after a very demanding day of almost 6 hours in virtual classroom. My colleagues Micky (Lina) and Phil and myself were all online for the start. The students showed great engagement – lots of participation in activities. Very busy in the middle part of the day! Lots of student questions – with great use of the drop-in option.

Student first impressions at the end of the first two hour morning session.

Day 2

Phil did a great job with Learning Plans – this part of the CGEA is one that I really don’t enjoy teaching! I have no idea why I dislike it but I do! Lots of issues with the LMS today and also one student with computer issues. Again having Phil in the team with his computer expertise was very useful as he spent some timeworking virtually with the student to solve the issues.

Day 3

I was apprehensive about today. there were a lot of tasks around customising blogs and writing an initial very short post and I was unsure that these would all be completed. Those concerns were unfounded. Everyone made a good start customising their blogs with theme, avatar and widgets and also writing that first short post. These ranged from a single sentence to several paragraphs. Length is unimportant at this stage – a first blogpost is a huge watershed!

Day 4

A catch-up and review day. Micky was able to join us for the morning session where we collected some feedback on the course so far.  Today had a focus on Learning Plan reviews and on catching up on any parts of tasks uncompleted earlier. Phil did Learning Plan reviews with each student individually and also worked with them to identify missed tasks.

How did it go

On the whole very well! The students are excited about blogs and several who have missed parts of days have worked after class to complete activities.

We feel that the combination of the availability of a lecturer in virtual class for students to drop-in and quick responses to email queries is effective in helping to maintain engaagement and momentum. This was reflected in student feedback with all seven of those in virtual class on Thursday morning responding yes to a virtual class poll about whether this was useful

We did a lot of “tweaking” in a small way throughout with some completely unplanned bits being included. The “Daily Tasks” sheets are also working very well. The inclusion of these was not in the original design – I originally intended to just have web-based Daily Tasks lists but I felt that having to keep accessing the website fo rthis during the day could pose problems for some learners and for some computer configurations. So I am producing a pdf file for each day’s tasks. This is uploaded to the CGEA website, it can also can be sent via the virtual classroom file transfer window and by email. The students then have the choice of using it on screen or printing it (if they have a printer and this is their preference).

We had some small issues mostly with the CGEA website (LMS). Our state training dept is changing from CE8 to Blackboard 9 and our Institute is one of the last to change. Migration of the CGEA course did not go well because of its size and complexity so it was not ready for use in the project and we are still using the old CE8 course, the platform for which is no longer being fully maintained.

Conclusion

We have made a good start. Now we need to maintain the momentum and also start recruiting for our second pilot run. This will necessitate a juggling act because the issues that we had with staff sickness and the slow administrative process to get a replacement on-board have meant that we are running late and so will have reduced time between the end of this pilot and the start of the second one. However we hope to start circulating information for the second pilot next week.

Introduction

Well so much for posting regularly on this blog! We have had a difficult few weeks. A colleague, also the  member of the project team tasked with partner and student liaison is currently on sick leave (since mid-February). Consequently I have been trying to do more than half of his other work as well as my own teaching and the project commitments. Posting on this blog was thus not the highest priority! However I think we are now getting back on track.

Where are we now?

In the continuing absence of my colleague I now have a new team member on board (since mid-March). He is experienced in CGEA delivery, agency and student liaison as well as having e-learning expertise in virtual classroom (Elluminate/Blackboard/Collaborate), the Institute LMS and as a blogger.

We have experienced some delays and so we now have a start date of April 2^nd for our first pilot run – this is a few weeks later than originally planned and will leave a very short interval before the second pilot . However delays were not entirely unexpected as in my experience they always happen so the original dates were arranged to allow a little leeway for this.

The current state of play is as follows:

• student enrolments are in progress
• an outline timetable (more detail still needed) is posted via a GoogleCalendar on a page on the course blog
• a short “about ELFADA” page is posted on the course blog
• about 75% of the “how to” and model course blog posts are completed in draft form ready to publish as required
• about 50% of the virtual class sessions have been fully prepared – most of the remainder will utiliise a high proportion of application sharing and/or will be student driven at need
• selective access to the necessary supporting resources, on the full CGEA course website (LMS), has been programmed in and additional pages created for ELFADA specific resources (virtual class recordings and other links)
• an issue caused by the local education dept. (which currently hosts the Institute email system) blocking all emails from facebook has been overcome by setting up a specific Gmail account for the Facebook presence enabling us to create an ELFADA group

What next?

The immediate challenge is to be ready to start delivering the program on April the second. To achieve this we have a number of activities to be completed next week:

• students and those helping them to get online for the first time will receive by email the link for the virtual classroom with the “getting started” procedure, they will also get the link for the ELFADA course blog timetable/calendar page and that for the PfP survey
• a post pack with be sent to students containing a student diary, their USB drive, other student “goodies” and the parental consent form for the PfP survey
• as enrolments are finalised students will be added to the course website and individual blogs will be created in readiness
• team delivery roles/virtual classroom availability will be finalised
• further “how to” and model course blog posts will be finalised as will virtual class sessions
• preliminary contact will be made with partners/other agencies re the second pilot

Conclusion

After the hiatus of the past few weeks it feels as though we are now “getting there” in terms of readiness to deliver our first pilot. We will probably have slightly fewer students than originally hoped for the first pilot. However this may well be to our advantage as there will be less pressure in terms of needing to comment on student blogs and otherwise feedback to them. This will enable us to have more time to review, reflect on and “tweak” the program during the pilot.

Introduction

This blog is the public profile for our project “E-xtraordinary Learning For A Digital Age” “ELFADA” for short. Checkout the “About the project” page to find out what we hope to achieve.

We are in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia – most but not all of our students across the Institute are based in the Wheatbelt, although we have increasing numbers from other parts of regional WA and from the Perth area.

Because of our “thin” market (most of the Institute’s students are external/flexible delivery, studying through various blended learning models with differing proportions of different delivery strategies including online/e-learning (virtual classroom, LMS and others), paper-based, block release, work-based and workshops.

Getting Started!

Well we are back on campus and were into project start-up mode this week! Last week, although lecturers were back at work, was taken up mostly by professional development and various admin activities. Everything is a bit chaotic at the moment as is usually the case at the start of the year.

Most of the project work so far has been setting up this blog and the course blog, planning in more detail the content of the course and the Web2.0 tools that we will help students learn to use. For the rest of the team this has included beginning to explore blogging. Because the students will be using blogs for simple, media rich portfolios it is essential that the team can support them and it is also preferable that we all post on the course blog and preferably on our own individual blogs as models for the learners.

The course blog will have a lot of posts prepared in draft form so that they can be published sequentially as required for the first course delivery. For subsequent deliveries we may either make all the posts private and then make public sequentially or password protect and remove the protection sequentially.

The team all have familiarity with virtual classroom (Elluminate/BbC) and with the current LMS(CE8) – we are in transition to Bb9  and this is likely to pose issues. The plan was to use Bb9 for this project, however our full CGEA course on CE8 has not migrated well (it is big and also has a lot of customisation to suit the needs of our literacy learners) so we may have to use an alternative approach. We will see what the next week brings!

Conclusion

Next week we will be continuing development and our team member tasked with partner liaison will be catching up with our partners.

Jo Hart