As of August 1st, 2008, the Edutech web site will no longer be updated. Edutech was funded by the Swiss Virtual Campus programme, which ended on July 31st, 2008. Some activities will be taken over by the e-Learning Services group at the SWITCH foundation.
eLearning Scenario: Integration of Information, Communication and Training
Introduction
This page introduces you to a eLearning scenario that integrates written information with discussions and training in a course strongly relying on the discussion forum that was originally created in a predecessor version of Vista. For any pedagogical question the author Andreas Ninck can be reached by mail.
Table of Contents
- Description of the Scenario
- Elements in this course
- Four mini-scenarios (tasks) of the course
- Practical and technical considerations
- Instruction for implementing the scenario in Vista
Description of the Scenario
Aim: Supporting students to acquire a systemic reflection approach to theoretical and practical problems while developing products and services in a social context.Pre-condition: Students have practical job experience of at least one working environment and are currently employed.
Four phases:
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See the "Kursziele" in the "Kursinfo"-part of the Vista demo of the course for more details.
Elements in this course
- Homepage with the title, the access to most of the tools used in the online part of the course and a footer with the name and email address of the teaching professor.
- Permanent menu bar on top of the page
- Organizer page with practical information about the course containing
- Description of the course "Kursbeschreibung".
- The detailed objectives of the course "Kursziele".
- The detailed organization of the course "Organisation"
- The address and maps for the face to face part of the course "Kursort"
- List of reading material "Literatur"
- the teachers email address under "Feedback"
- Content Module "Online Material" with the learning activities, the required information for their execution and software to download and use in the exercises.
- Content Module "Material für Präsenzkurs" with content from the face to face part of the course
- Organizer Page with useful links
- Content Module with the Get-to-know-each-others activity for the start of the course.
Four mini-scenarios (tasks) of the course
Two tools are use:
- the Learning Module "Online Material" to display the task and give access to texts
- the discussion tool to provide an environment for the corresponding topic.
Getting-to-know-each-others
Students are asked to present them-selves in the discussion (forum) tool to help them get to know each others before the face to face part of the course starts. The task includes details such as:
- Who am I?
- I what work environment do I work?
- What type of problems do I have to solve?
- What are my expectations in respect to this course?
See the example "Sich vorstellen" which is in 1.1 of "Online Material" and the results in the forum* under 1.1.1 of the Vista demo of the course.
Intensive reading through position taking
Student are asked to read a text and to react with a forum message where they indicate
- which are the three most important statements with which they agree.
- which are the three most important statements with which they don't agree.
- which are the three most important questions they would like to ask in respect to the content of the text.
See the example "Senge Artikel" which is in 1.2. of "Online Material" and the results in the forum* under 1.2.2 of the Vista demo of the course.
See for more details in German: 3 dafür, 3 dagegen and French: 3 Pour, 3 Contre.
Intensive writing through pre-structuring of student's texts
Students are asked to provide an real life application of a case (among a number of cases presented in the face to face part of the course) in the forum. The specifics demand to structure the description under three sub topics:
- General description
- example case
- possible measures to be taken.
See the example in point 5 of "Archetypen" which is in 1.8 of "Online Material" and the results in the forum* under 1.8.1 of "Online Material" in the Vista demo of the course.
Organized writing and corpus building with Micro Articles
Students are asked to regularly produce a short text that:
- summarizes the learning experience of a day, a project, an important meeting, a reading text, a seminar, a work week, etc. in one short but well structured page.
- represents a training exercise in thinking and reflecting.
These Mirco Articles should become a systematic routine written in fixed weekly sequences or at the end of each work period or project. This would produce - with time - a micro articles collection that could document the individual learning history.
See the example "Mikroartikel" which is in 1.10. of "Online Material" and the results in the forum* under 1.10.1 of the Vista demo of the course.
See for more details in German: Mikroartikel and French: Micro article.
*Note: the forums in the demo have been reconstructed artificially with a limited number of some of the original students' messages however erasing their names. The original forums did often contain twice or thrice as much postings!
Practical and technical considerations
The pedagogical aims of this online course are to allow the students to do important learning work from home. This includes the exchange of short messages as well as debates, complex group work and the administration of complex home work. The course is strongly text based, but provides many online tasks that are done by the students in the discussion forum. Thus the main two tools are the Learning Module and, principally integrated into this, the forum. The course especially excels in its clear and abundant information to the students, to be found under "Kursinfos" on the course homepage. There, the course objectives "Lernziele" indicate clearly what will be learned when, how, where and with what material. So that is where you will get the best overview and understanding for this course and its numerous activities.
But the course also excels in its very creative use of the forum to make students write shorter and longer opinion pieces as well as technical case study descriptions or solutions to organizational problems.
Please note: The 4 described mini-scenarios have been chosen among a larger number of activities as they where the easiest to copy and implement, but others are well worth your attention if you are ready to create more complex tasks that might involve group work or external tools such as emeeting tools or wiki pages.
Instruction for implementing the scenario in Vista
- Create a Organizer Page called "Kursinfo" in the demo.
- Upload and place in that Learning Module all the material needed for the organization of the course. That is:
- Description of the course
- Addresses and maps where to find the face to face sessions.
- Description of the course organization
- The objectives of the course
- List of reading material
- The email address for getting help
- Create a Learning Module called "Online Material" in the demo.
- Upload and place in that Learning Module the pages with the learning tasks, the corresponding forum topics and any needed additional texts.
- Create another Learning Module, called "Material des Präsenzkurses" in our demo.
- Upload and place in that Learning Module any texts and material created for and in the face to face course part.
- Create a Organizer Page called "Links" in the demo.
- Place the links that you created in the URL tool there.
If you plan to organize the availability of the activities in a time depend (or another) way you will need to use the selective release to do so, but this feature can not be displayed in a demo course.
See the Vista demo of the course and click onto "Vista Demos - Integrated Course Demo".