I have been asked to find out what system other institutions use to work out staff deployment when teaching an online course - very much to my benefit as it will be me that is deployed!!!!

For example:

I deliver a blended learning course where there are 30 guided learning hours and 30 hours expected 'independent learning' (with tutorial provision if necessary).  60 hours overall per student.

We now wish to offer it as a totally online course  (with tutorial provision, to include at least one induction session and a two hour 'formal - externally marked assessment'). 

Presuming that the lecturer (me) will be 'on call' for different students over a longer period than 30 hours in total, how can a 'fair and reasonable' time allowance against which the lecturers deployment (or contact time) be calculated?

Can anybody out there offer any advice, examples etc?

Thanks

WendyJ :0)

 

Good to see from other blogs that I am not alone in struggling with the stats. Reassuring. I have found my reacquaintance with maths and hateful numbers quite demotivating, though, however clear the rationale for its study. As usual, there is no quiet retreat for the part-time student to get to grips with these things; work, family and temptation must be contended with by a systematic and determined effort.

I posted a comment to Christine that I think that once a definite need to use such a quantitative approach materialises in a piece of research, it will seem less abstract. The task on the course is important but (necessarily) still quite arbitrary. If, just for example, I wanted to measure the participation in various types of online course of people of the 4 different blood types (!!), then I might be able to use SPSS to describe various relationships.

One question is: what kind of merit would such a study have? There are so many variables.

I have been noticing common themes in the work of Mary Parker Follett (Schilling M 2000, Decades ahead of her time: advancing stakeholder theory through the ideas of Mary Parker Follett, Journal of Management History) and in collaborative learning / knowledge.

Both decentralise authority / power / decision-making away from a few key stakeholders. On a personal level, I like the levelling out, the sort of egalitarianism of all this. For learning, it provides opportunities for increased social learning in e-Learning, and can potentialy be used effectively in role-play.

One of the other activities that we have been undertaking has involved the idea of going on a treasure hunt in the Second Life environment. So far, Fiona Littleton has devised two such hunts and has given the players just a brief clue to get them on their way. These being:

1. High above the chapel walls lies the great work of Michelangelo.
2. In an Augustinian garden, play with these laws.

The first one was easy, the Sistine Chapel on Vassar Island. The second was a little harder as it required a little more research outside of Second Life before the treasure hunt could begin; but we would be eventually rewarded once we had worked out that it was Mendel's Garden on Genome Island.

These Second Life treasure hunts had a number of purposes, first of which was to give players the opportunity to become familiar with the Second Life environment; another one, was an opportunity to see the diverse nature of uses, constructs and artefacts within Second Life; finally, there is an opportunity to see how "treasure hunts" in Second Life could be used for creating a learning experience.

One of the of most potent themes to surface from this module is that people like games to have a degree of acceptable challenge-ness, i.e. it shouldn't be too easy and it shouldn't be too hard. The treasure hunt, like the WebQuest, is, for me, an intellectual pursuit to "unlock the puzzle" - it's not about being first or to receive the reward at the end; it is about the "challenge" itself and to succeed in that "challenge" to the best of my abilities - the "challenge" therefore becomes a personal quest to see how well I can perform.

UPDATE - 02.04.2009

The final clue from Fiona is:

1. Find the place where Viola and Sebastian live on

Week 5 of the course saw the teams being given an exercise that involved building a game around the Second Life platform. Team 2 member, Nicholas Palmer, once again, got the ball rolling by providing a useful mind map of the task at hand.

The game was based around the well-worn concept of role playing games (RPG), the format of this type of game is something that I am very familiar during my teenage years as I was an avid player (and sometimes author) of the "Call of Cthulhu" RPG system. Hamish Macleod offered a couple of examples that the teams could use or create something that was of interest to them. Hamish's examples included:

1. An Employment Exit Interview
2. Drama on Drug Action at the Synapse

The team members suggested some ideas that could make a potential RPG. One of my proposals involving a sales pitch by a young team of comedians for an idea of a comedy show to some hard-bitten TV executives was taken by Marie Leadbetter and developed further by basing it upon the BBC TV's "Dragons' Den" format. Marie was kind enough to create a wiki for the team to start fleshing out their ideas. The wiki was broken up into 6 sections:

• Game Description
• Rules
• Characters
• Scenarios
• Platform / Design
• Theory

One of the side-effects of developing this game was that for some of the team, the concept of "Dragons' Den" was not clear to them despite the presence of the rules and links to the BBC show and the Wikipedia article. This suggested to me that we were not using an universal cultural reference point on which to build and, as such, they felt they were not able to make a productive and fruitful contribution to the team project.

One of the issues here, is that teams need to turn around an idea into a fully-fledged "product" within a week. This means that the teams need to "virtually" meet with each other to get the ball rolling. Given that some of the team members are quite geographically and temporally displaced it does mean that they cannot always attend virtual meetings on Skype or Second Life. We can, of course, communicate via the Discussion Boards on WebCT, but again it could sometimes take up to a whole day before a reply is received. Therefore, in order to complete the project, some of the team members will have to "trailblaze" the project forward and having the other team members "piggy back" on when they are able to - this is clearly not an ideal situation as you want team members to have an equitable and democratic experience.

The Dragons' Lair RPG wiki can be accessed here...

Confusing about explanatory / exploratory... the idea mentioned in the previous post is actually more explanatory than exploratory; there is a definite potential hypothesis.

This overlaps with the Online Language Learning course. The idea of designing a role-play that utilises a competitive wiki still appeals. It might be a good way of facilitating language learning. It might need to be complemented with synchronous meetings.

I was previously thinking of comparing Japanese learners' participation in such an exercise / project with a face-to-face role-play along similar lines. This faltered because there are just so many variables that it seems impossible to draw any conclusions whatsoever, no matter what the outcome.

Instead, there is now the idea of comparing an online collaborative role-play - like the Loch Ness exercise in OLL course (we have to work together to organise a trip there) - with an online collaborative / competitive one. Thus the research is purely exploratory, and there isn't so much pressure to come up with explanatory data. It might show, if used with several groups, some pattern of participation. Are learners more involved when in competition - particularly if set up as a kind of points-acquiring game?

Data can reasonably simply be drawn from observing the history of changes in the wiki and how many entries are made.

Very important: set-up of the exercise needs to be extremely clear to ensure learners understand the (possibly) motivating factors.

Maybe...

Over the last few week on the "Introduction to Digital Game-based Learning" module, we have been given numerous opportunities to look at an assortment of games with a view of developing an insight into how they might help with learning. Not only are we grappling with the nebulous concepts of "play", but also discovering how games could potentially help with the learning process.

One of the outcomes of the module is the opportunity to "play" and make our own connections and synergies between what we experience and that of the games and play literature. The course has offered a number of oppprtunities to play games, such as a treasure hunt in Second Life (I'll have something to say about that in a future post); creating and play games that make use of Google Earth; and developing a role playing game for Second Life (again, a future post will address this). This week is the turn of the WebQuest, which according to Dodge (1995) is:

"...an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing."

I was first introduced to the concept of WebQuest in the "An Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning" module and got to experience one in the "Effective Course Design for e-Learning" module, where Stuart Easter developed a WebQuest as part of his Learning Event. Stuart's WebQuest went along the lines of finding a "single phrase" that linked the following "names / words / links":

• Circle Line Party
• Dan Hamill
• A link on Google Earth
• Jane's Addiction
• London Pillow Fight

A quick Wikipedia search, would have you discover that the answer is flash mob. Hamish Macleod began his WebQuest by asking us to "to discover what notion, or phenomenon, links (by inclusion or exclusion) the following words or phrases":

• Alice in Wonderland
• Artificial Intelligence
• A lonely girl
• the Bangalore World University
• viral marketing
• a denial
• Michael Douglas

However, the WebQuest wasn't going to be quite as simple as that as "the solution [was] not merely some potential linkage, but [a] specific linkage that [he had] in mind." which added a whole different complexity to the quest, which I personally relish - it's an intellectual pursuit and a battle of wits and minds that have kept the "little grey cells" of humankind engaged since time immemorial.

In many ways the Wiki Paths: The Great Link Race game works on a similar premise of the WebQuest and is part of a genre of games that involves "cracking codes" and "unlocking puzzles" that are in pursuit of "forbidden knowledge". The new Ron Howard film "Angels and Demons", a prequel to "The Da Vinci Code", is currently supported by an online game making use of Photosynth (which in itself is interesting as I will be using Photosynth for my final module assignment) which requires users to try and find clues and symbols to try and unlock the secrets of the Illuminati and shows how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to build engaging and compelling educational games (and not a single person was killed in making these games).

Note: The answer to Hamish's WebQuest is alternate reality game.

References

Dodge, B. (1995). Some thoughts about Webquests. [online]. Available at: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html [Accessed 6 March 2009].

During the wiki weeks I thought I would first take a look at the approach I was grappling most with - social critical and reading Shor's education is politics article - I found it very interesting due to the many parallels with this modules approach....

It seems our tutors are quite the libertines and problem posers! - and it all lies in the chat.......

here are the connections I could relate to:

' a Freirean pedagogy tries to develop a student centred dialogue'

Some values describing the 'Freirean pedagogy':

Participatory - learning process interactive and co-operative so that students do a lot of discussing and writing instead of listening to teacher talk

Situated - course material situated in student thought begining from their words and understanding of material

Critical - discussion encourages self reflection, how we know what we know, and quality of learning process -(why do we do what we do - what personal filters or biais or previous experience guides the way we are (holistically or at any one point in time), choices we make or how we act, react and interact - a lot of interpersonal, communication, rapport and building relatonship skills in the work place also covers this - for a commercial gain however rather than a socially driven libertine reason!)

Democratic - classroom discourse is mutually constructed between teacher and student - students have equal speaking rights in the dialog

Dialogic - basic format of class is dialog around problems posed by student and teacher. Teacher initiates process and guides it into deeper phases. Teacher invites students to take ownership of learning

Desocialisation - dialog desocialises students from passivity in classroom and challenges their learned authority-dependence and desocialises teacher from domineering teacher-talk socialised into - instead they are problem posers and dialogue leaders

.........

Affective - problem posing and dialogic method includes a range of emotions from humour to compassion to indignation - and we have seen many of these emotions already within our own discourse

Shor, I. (1993). Education is politics: Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy. In Paulo Freire: a critical encounter. P. McLaren and P. Leonard (Eds.). (London, Routledge): pp. 25-35

Read an article on the Metro this morning about a British martial-arts athlete training with the videogame Streetfighter.

Tyrone Robinson is one of the hopefuls for the 2012 games, and uses the game to hone his tactical and coordination skills. 

The vrtues of such games for training are extolled by Des Blackburn, Performance Analyst for  Great Britain Taekwondo:

"To complement their physical training our athletes are also encouraged, in their spare time, to play this type of game, as it is known that doing so can increase their attention span, depth perception and hand-eye coordination"

http://www.gamezine.co.uk/news/game-types/fighting-games/british-olympian-uses-street-fighter-iv-hone-skills-$1272408.htm

i found the idea quite interesting, and wonder how much simulation will be used in the future to train athletes in martial arts.