scholarships by Select Education. MirandaNet
provided a blended learning course consisting of a
face-to-face component, an online discussion forum,
an e-journal for the submission of coursework and
case studies, and access to a range of educational
discussion forums. The learning environment,
therefore, provided both theory and practice: student
assignment tasks were designed to demonstrate both
knowledge and performative evidence.
The students, from Bulgaria, the Caribbean,
Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Russia and
Zimbabwe, had all worked as supply teachers in the
United Kingdom. Two had PhDs, four were working
towards, or had, Masters-level qualifications and
two had Graduate qualifications. Although most had
good ICT skills none had worked as an e-facilitator.
1.2 The learning process
The course was entitled ‘The role of the moderator
in ecommunities’ and consisted of three workshops
at approximately monthly intervals. Each workshop
consisted of input, discussion and application and
generated an assignment task that incorporated
critical elements of theory and practice. The final
assignment ran for almost two months: students had
to present a project on e-learning.
The online discussion forums enabled the
students to explore the assignment topics and to
develop their understanding and application. The
intention was that the majority of the learning would
take place in the forums, and that students would
gain personal experience of the communal
construction of knowledge. This approach was a
novel one for many of the participants: they
expected to learn from being taught – by taking
notes, using text books and writing essays.
It was also an interesting comparison with the
ways in which they taught, and the expectations they
had of their pupils.
The first workshop was an introduction to online
communities and the MirandaNet Forum, in which
ecommunities were linked with professional
practice. Students built a skills list; identified their
competences and discussed how they would be
implemented. At this point there was a hands-on
introduction to the MirandaNet forum they would be
using for the course. Then followed the principles of
efacilitation, with an introduction the to 5-step
model (Salmon, 2002).
The students were then set their first task, which
had to be submitted within two weeks. “Devise a
Code of Conduct for participating in online
communities.” The requirement was to have at
least three posts in the Code of Conduct forum,
contributing their own ideas or commenting on their
colleagues’ ideas.
The first forum, Setting a Code of Conduct,
contained 47 posts. It closed at 10:37 on 03-05-04.
Towards the end of this period the students
contributed a number of observations about their
learning.
The second workshop was held four weeks after
the first. The focus was on working in online
communities and analysed online interactions. This
was applied to theories of learning, and the use of
the ejournal.
Task two required students to consider the skills
needed for participation in an online forum. They
were asked to consider technical, communication,
inter-personal and management skills among others.
Once again students had two weeks to complete the
task. All had to have at least three posts in the ‘What
skills are needed for participation in an online
forum?’ strand, again contributing their own ideas or
commenting on their colleagues’ ideas. The second
task generated 44 posts in the thread.
This to a certain extent overlapped with the
second in terms of timing. Students were asked to
investigate a range of online educational forums and
use their postings to exchange information about the
online forums that they found. They had to
participate in at least three, evaluate the ways in
which they work, record their contributions and
comment on them.
There were 61 contributions to this thread.
The final task related to the workshops re-
examined the relationship between theory and
practice. “Use Salmon’s 5-Step theory to evaluate
your progress and learning on this course. How
effective was it for you? How did it relate to your
own learning style? How does it relate to the ways
in which children and young people learn?”
Salmon’s 5-Step theory – Access & motivation;
Online socialization; Information exchange;
Knowledge construction; Development – posits a
progression from one stage to another throughout the
learning process of an online course. All course
participants should have reached Step 4 –
Knowledge Construction, and the completion of the
assignment should have enabled them to reach Step
5: Development.
This learning critique generated 47 posts, all of
which were highly detailed and analytical. The ideas
generated by the students formed the basis of long
discussion in the third and final workshop, held in
mid-July. This examined the models of efacilitation
and lessons and examples from the forum and other
communities. Salmon’s 3 management issues: Time;
Emotion; Participation were examined in the light of
personal experience, as was the 5-step model.
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