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.
Step One – Blackboard Taster: Controlled and direct communication with students to give them a flavor of virtual learning environment. So whatever the course is using whether podcasts, blogs, learning units, DB, they showed them this in an open access blackboard course using the guest access feature of Blackboard so that they can send them a URL.
Step Two – Orientation Module: The orientation module is built upon the Taster. If the course is using DBs then they give them a screenshot. So they help them to learn the learner environment before they have to learn within it. Teach them to use Blackboard while they are trying to learn their studies. If they start to feel that the technology is a barrier for them then they try to deal with all of these in the first two weeks. So building familiarity with what they considered Blackboard to be a campus for distance learner students… All of the content for the orientation is coming from the student handbook or course manual but it’s still mirroring the course design for that subject
Step Three – Module 1 reconfiguration – They are really forcing the key skills by repeating them but now in a subject specific content.
Alongside the Three Steps they have designed a DL backpack. This is essentially a course handbook. The idea is a DL student arrives and gets this backpack; it has the answers to all of their key questions in this one website. And in fact the DL backpack would be used as one of the content areas in the Blackboard course.
A large part of what they do is to try to bring together central services to work on course design, to create these virtual teams and to stop departments having to reinvent the wheel.
