Pedagogical Templates for e-Learning

Tim Neumann from the Institute of Education presenting at the 11th annual Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference in Jan 2011

Seven course design models for varying degrees of location – and time-dependence

The Institute have developed a couple of descriptions on how people can integrate technology into teaching and learning activities. It is basically about different course architectures that you can have when you decided on a new course or converting a face to face course.

The target audiences were lecturers who want to create new courses or redesign old courses; tutors who are new to e-Learning and also administrators librarians and all other support staff.

They have seven different course models or course templates; four of them involve some face to face components and three of them are purely distance. 

Three Steps to Success: Building the Right Foundation

Nicola Hayes from University of Leicester presenting at the 11th annual Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference in Jan 2011

“A taster, induction and first module reconfiguration course design for students studying at a distance”

They have a large body of students studying at a distance and location is a barrier in terms of DL students coming to the orientation weeks, induction weeks. So they come up with a concept called ‘Three Steps to Success: Building the Right Foundation’ course design approach.

Nicola talked about student expectation management and that showing them a lot in the brochures is not matching DL students’ expectations. Do they know what a virtual learning experience is? What a VLE is? They have been out of education quite some time. We can’t just sit back and have this passive approach to distance learners. We can’t keep sending out great big lever arches every three months to students.

When they first introduced Blackboard back at 2001, they were saying to their staff that they are going to enhance the students’ experience by just putting their materials into Blackboard; PDFs, some Word files, because they have already made the improvement by making materials available 24/7. So as a result some of these courses are only used as filling cabinets, they are not even being structured particularly effectively. They are also using Three Steps to Success concept to try and get people to approach them as a unit, so they started to help them in their course design, be that distance learning, blended, flexible, and open.

The three steps to success concept could be used for undergraduate or postgraduate campus based and distance learner students.

The Three Steps to Success comprised: 1) Blackboard Taster, 2) Orientation Module, 3) Module 1: reconfiguration -which are presented in Blackboard.