Learner support networks

The group of learners I am envisaging for my ECA: design of communication-based elearning activities mostly won’t have access to a professional support network – they are freelance teachers working for a number of agencies.  I am indulging in a bit of wishful thinking by imagining that my organisation (one of the agencies) will pay me to design and deliver something like this with one objective being to make this type of support available, and to encourage teachers to access it.

The social support they will have access to will vary widely.

The academic support will be down to the moderator – I would like to be able to offer them some free online resources to help those interested in exploring the area further, and would make myself available via email and Skype for individual or group questions and problems.

I have very limited access to any kind of support network myself as I work and study alone at home at the moment – an appalling state of affairs which I’m hoping to change very soon!  I do have a couple of friends to whom I can talk about H807, and that’s a great relief.  It would probably be very good for my mental health to bother Anne or other group members more, but I always feel guilty about imposing, especially when everyone’s on such tight schedules.

Designing “scaffolds”

McLoughlin, C. (2002) ‘Learner support in distance and networked learning environments: ten dimensions for successful design’, Distance Education, vol.23, no.2, pp.149–62.

Q1 Read the ten dimensions, and pick any two you think are important. Why are those two relevant to learning materials that you’d like to design?

I consider learner orientation to be key in any activity design, especially one that is teaching scaffolding and learner support in itself.  I am thinking of showing teachers ways of correcting writing by second language learners that are themselves scaffolded so that the writer moves towards self-direction, and I hope that by doing so I can make the trainees aware of the benefits of acquiring skills in finding and evaluating online resources for their own self-directed professional development.

My second desert island dimension would be experiential value.  My freelance trainees suffer from lack of opportunity to support and learn from other teachers and I would hope to offer them a positive experience of collaborative peerwork that might encourage them to use the VLE’s affordances for such activity.

Q2 What are your first thoughts on how you’ll design your materials? If you choose the ‘alignment’ dimension, for instance, how will you make sure that your teaching approach is consistent with – aligns with – the outcomes you want your learners to attain?

I think the trainees should see an example of scaffolding in action before being asked to articulate what it is. Perhaps clues should be provided in the form of readings with interactive quizzes before they are asked to identify and comment on scaffolding in a discussion forum and then try their hand at using it to correct a sample piece of learner writing.  This is more goal orientation and alignment than experiential value, which would come in afterwards as they have a go at correcting collaboratively using Google Docs.  (The feedback from the first and second tasks would help them perform better in a final assessed correction task – adaptability).

How to make it learner-oriented?  One way would be to get them to identify any common problems they have as a group with writing correction in the socialisation/information exchange stage, and research possible solutions using external resources.  That sounds a bit weak, I think, as it’s a little unfair to assume they have these digital literacy skills to begin with.  And rather unimaginative to limit the long hard learning journey that goes to form an autonomous learner simply to knowing that there’s more than one way to search online.  Perhaps i could ask them to explore Google Docs’ other features on their own and report back if there’s anything else there they could use, not just for correcting writing but to enhance language learning or its provision in any other way?  That might encourage them to realise that they are perfectly capable of evaluating an app, or at least identifying functionality and applying it to a context, without drowning them unfairly in the infinity of the internet.