e-learning design

Well this is my final post, and I don’t think you can underestimate my excitement of finishing!

I love bogs and wikis and have started using them at work to capture learning discussions. I hate edublogs, I find it chunky and slow. CommonCraft has inspired me to make a video for a learning intervention in the next few months.  

You’ll be please to know now I’m now moving the law firm I work with away from behavioural based e-learning programmes and towards capturing and designing learning activities on a range of integrated technologies.

I’ve enjoyed the interactive and practical nature of the class, however understanding how learning theory moulds e-learning design has been the most useful insight.

I started this course hating e-learning thinking there was no place for it in my educational programmes. I finish the course still hating badly designed behavioural based e-learning programmes. I have a new found understanding that incidental and informal e-learning has created the most advanced and well informed generation to date. As educators we’d be misguided not to harness its power to further drive the pursuit of life long learning.

There are 7 pricciples of Multimedia:

7 Principles of Multimedia Design

1.         Multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.

2.         Spatial Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

3.         Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.

4.         Coherence Principle: Students learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.

5.         Modality Principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.

6.         Redundancy Principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation, narration, and on-screen text.

Recommendations for Design

For assignment 2, I plan on making recommendations to design a course based on the unit of competency “Deliver and monitor a service to customers”

The unit of competency is BSBCMN310A (NTIS has been down for 3 days now)

There are 3 elements which make up the competency:

1.      Identify customer needs,

2.      Deliver a service to Customers,

3.      Monitor and report on service delivery.

This is a fairly commonly used competency is a broadly used to describe customer service competencies.

Context

I work in Learning and Development for a Law Firm. With almost all staff tertiary qualified we use competency based training for legal support staff and some shared services.

For the purposes of this assignment the learners will be client floor staff. This includes reception staff and waiters. They work in a busy law firm, with up to 200 guest per day. Their main job is to welcome guests when the arrive and take their enquiry or show them into the appropriate meeting room.

Many of the staff are new to the firm, they have prior experience in the hospitality industry and no formal qualifications outside of secondary school. For the purposes of this assignment we will look at 5 staff, 3 of which are culturally and linguistically diverse.

I plan to construct the course to reflect cognitive learning theory and using a ranges of technologies.  

Albert Bandura (1977)  outlined two key elements of learning;

1. Experience

2. Expectations

Bandura (1977) states: “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”

Constructivist approach provides the tools and the information and leaves the learner to generate meaning.

A major theme in the theoretical framework of Bruner is that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge. The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so. Cognitive structure (i.e., schema, mental models) provides meaning and organization to experiences and allows the individual to “go beyond the information given”.

 http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html

This is one of the most interesting learning approaches:

Facilitation theory (the humanist approach)

Carl Rogers and others have developed the theory of facilitative learning. The basic premise of this theory is that learning will occur by the educator acting as a facilitator, that is by establishing an atmosphere in which learners feel comfortable to consider new ideas and are not threatened by external factors (Laird 1985.)

Other characteristics of this theory include:

• a belief that human beings have a natural eagerness to learn,
• there is some resistance to, and unpleasant consequences of, giving up what is currently held to be true,
• the most significant learning involves changing one’s concept of oneself.

Facilitative teachers are:

• less protective of their constructs and beliefs than other teachers,
• more able to listen to learners, especially to their feelings,
• inclined to pay as much attention to their relationship with learners as to the content of the course,
• apt to accept feedback, both positive and negative and to use it as constructive insight into themselves and their behaviour.

Learners:

• are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning,
• provide much of the input for the learning which occurs through their insights and experiences,
• are encouraged to consider that the most valuable evaluation is self-evaluation and that learning needs to focus on factors that contribute to solving significant problems or achieving significant results.

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsd/2_learntch/theories.html

The cognitive approach is based on the premise that learners, learn by associating past experiences with the present and generating new solutions to the problems.

Advance Organizers are like that: they are simply devices used in the introduction of a topic which enable learners to orient themselves to the topic, so that they can locate where any particular bit of input fits in and how it links with what they already know.

http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/advance_organisers.htm

I found this excellent table explaining the behaviourist approach

 http://simplypsychology.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/behaviourism.html

Behaviourism Summary

What is your definition of Learning?

Learning is a change in skills, knowledge or attitude.

The social learning theory of Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. Bandura (1977) states: “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” (p22). Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, an environmental influences. The component processes underlying observational learning are:

(1) Attention, including modeled events (distinctiveness, affective valence, complexity, prevalence, functional value) and observer characteristics (sensory capacities, arousal level, perceptual set, past reinforcement),

(2) Retention, including symbolic coding, cognitive organization, symbolic rehearsal, motor rehearsal),

(3) Motor Reproduction, including physical capabilities, self-observation of reproduction, accuracy of feedback, and

(4) Motivation, including external, vicarious and self reinforcement.