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.
The first four are blended scenarios.
Blended 1: Online Admin Support: Core learning activities and support are face-to-face. This is basically a face to face course that uses a VLE to provide administrative information online. The learning and teaching doesn’t have an online element, it is still face to face. The course handbook might be put online or some of the learning resources might be put online. Assignments might be submitted online but the occasional support can be done by email as well. This course template basically represents a face to face course that uses the VLE a little bit.
Blended 2: Follow Up: The core learning activities are still taking place face-to-face but it might have additional teaching and learning tasks online that blends with face to face teaching. The online tasks could run in-between the sessions or students could be asked to prepare something for a face-to-face session online or do a resource collection online that they bring to the class next time.
Blended 3: Parallel Template: This template is much more online and learning activities run in parallel. Students still come to the class and must be present physically but they also have couple of exercises that they need to do online. So you have some presentations prepared by students online, sharing of experiences, students are asked to do some tasks like creating glossaries and so on. All of these are done while they are doing some of the face-to-face stuff. So this would represent an example of a proper blend of a face-to-face in the online world.
So the trick with this template is actually to make this activity complementary and lecturers need to think quite differently with this template. They should use face-to-face only for what face-to-face is best, like proper discussions and not do lecturing online.
Blended 4: Face-to-Face Events: This template is almost a fully online one. All core learning activities are conducted online. Only a few face-to-face meetings or workshops are carried out, for example at the start and mid-way through the course to initiate or wrap-up online activities or discussions.
In comparison how do the distance templates look like?
Distance 1: Distance Online Support: This is quite similar to the ‘online admin support’ template with the difference that the course is fully distance. So this one is based around paper-based distance learning course. People get their reading packs delivered; they have to work on this individually and some support is provided online. The package may include resources such as CDs, DVDs and videos. There is no face-to-face component in this template.
Distance 2: Online Resource Based: This template means people are using a VLE and the core teaching and learning activities are conducted online but the activities are mostly resource based. Print based materials are replicated with online materials. So people download readings but still work mostly individually. In terms of the VLE tools they use mostly DBs and downloading things and putting some things to drop boxes.
Distance 3: Online Discussion Based: In comparison to the ‘online resource based’ this is a fully distance course where students are expected to collaborate online. The course is designed as a distance learning course and it uses the VLE as the virtual classroom for all learning activities. The design of it is much more collaborative activities rather than creation of materials.
Full paper: http://www.wlecentre.ac.uk/cms/files/occasionalpapers/wle_op2.pdf
In addition to that they have also created couple of case studies to find out peoples’ practice. They interviewed tutors and we have 34 case studies and a couple of mini descriptional courses. These case studies represent courses. They have asked tutors questions like; What is this module about? What kind of pedagogical models from this template you are using? What kind of learning tasks students do? How are assessments submitted? How are learners supported? Who is involved in this course? Who are the learners and what roles do staff take? What do people use in terms of the learning environment? Who produces the content and how are they delivering the content?
E-Learning Case Studies: http://www.lkl.ac.uk/LTU/ELCS
