Useful Things: The Rapid eLearning Blog

For people short on time and trying to get some online learning material together, the Rapid eLearning Blog is worth looking at. It's fairly straightforward, and pitched very much at people trying to put Powerpoint based classroom material online.

Some good posts to give you a feel for the blog include this one on instructional design and how to approach turning Powerpoints / Slideware from a classroom session into an online course, and this one about learning and memory. As you can see, the blog covers both technical how-to stuff, and more pedagogical material about how best to design and lay out material.

Seasoned online learning folks will probably roll their eyes. Where is the web 2.0 connectivist peer to peer learning and so on? This blog isn't for them. It's for people trying to get some fairly straightforward stuff done, using tools they are already familiar with. It's not going to bamboozle you with gee whizz. It's the kind of blog I'd like to produce, but don't have time, and since they've done an excellent job of it, I don't have to.

The Rapid eLearning blog is corporate, produced by Articulate, who make a bunch of eLearning tools. That said, the blog doesn't require or hard sell those tools, which is nice.

Waking up

Good Morning.
I'll be blogging again here, from time to time, again focusing on quick tips and links of value to people who don't have time to sit up at the cutting edge of online learning. When I started this blog, I was aiming that mainly at University staff, specifically in University College Cork, where I was on contact at the time.
Twins came, and full time employment had to go. Now they are 18 months old, and my eldest has started school, so I have a little time to consult again. I'll be focusing mainly on the online learning space, probably more aimed at the private sector, training companies and so on, rather than Universities, simply because that's where the economics are just now.
Even though the audience might be the slightly different, many of the issues are the same. How can you get stuff up online in a big hurry, when you don't have the time or budget to do a big job on it? That's the kind of stuff I'll continue to cover online here.
If you already read the big blogs on online learning (Like OLDaily, for example) this little blog probably isn't for you, you'll know it already. I'll be keeping a really practical focus here, filtering out whatever I run across or create that I think is worthwhile.

Gone to sleep

This blog, as you might gather, is currently inactive. It was created as part of my thinking around a role I held in UCC, but I'm now a full time stay at home Dad, so I don't expect to be posting here again for some time. I am, however, Blogging fairly actively on the future of Tertiary Education over at http://tertiary21.blogspot.com/
Do pop over and check it out.

10,000 hours doing what?

Malcolm Gladwell makes a good case for the 10,000 hour rule in his recent book, Outliers. The idea is that people who are truly great at something always spend at least 10,000 hours practice on it. While Gladwell is widely criticised by his supposed intellectual betters, largely for selling more books than them, the 10,000 hour rule idea certainlt seems sound.

So what did I spend 10,000 hours doing?

Primary and Secondary School. 15,000 hours. I learned to keep my head down, avoid bullying, and get acceptible grades in predictable tests on boring topics with a minimum of effort.

University 5,000 hours. Unlearning the above.

Workplace: 12,000 hours. Office politics. Processing information into useful knowledge and communicating it to people who seemed interested at the time.

So what have you broken the 10,000 hour barrier on?

The University of the Future

"My daughter is 3 years old. In October 2023, she will probably go to University. What will that university look like? Where will it be? Will it be anywhere?"

I've started another blog, looking at issues around the future of Tertiary education. It's an issue I keep running into, and thinking about, but it is firmly out of scope for this blog, and I like to keep my promises in terms of blog content and scope. Due to my correct work focus, you can expect it to be much more active than this blog for the next while, as Ihave time to flesh out some of my thought on the topic, while I'm not currently directly involved in staff support work. If you have an interest in how Universities and Tertiary sector might look as we go through the next century, do take a look, it's at: http://tertiary21.blogspot.com/

Dr. Steve Wheeler at UCC.

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Steve Wheeler from University of Plymouth at UCC for a lunchtime seminar. Steve presented "It's Personal: Learning Spaces,Learning Webs" which he was later to present online to the Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks Online Symposium http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/blogs/ples/

It was a happy accident that we were able to host Steve, via his Blog we noted he was in Cork on other business, and with a couple of quick eMails everything was arranged - the efficiencies of the online world made manifest.

You can access an audio of the session here:http://www.ucc.ie/academic/ionadbairre/SteveWheeler.mp3 (15mb, 1hr)

And view the slides on Slideshare via Steve's blog here:http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-personal-learning-spaces-learning.html

Find the pain point

If you want to use technology in teaching, great, but first understand why you want to use it. Find a pain point, a teaching problem the technology will help you solve, and you are much more likely to see the process through. If you are using technology just to 'be modern' in your teaching, forget it.

A couple of years ago I did some research about usage of the Blackboard VLE in UCC. Academics I spoke to had differing views of their level of usage:

"I hardly use it at all, I only put up my powerpoints and handouts"

to

"I use it very extensively, I put up all my powerpoints and all my handouts."

For all practical purposes, regardless of their perceptions, they were all in the same boat. They put their materials on the VLE, because they had large classes. Copying and carrying 500 handouts for a lecture was torture. The VLE took it away. They used it for that, and stopped right there. They had solved their pain point, and nothing else bothered them enough to get worked up about finding a tool to solve it. But it was that issue, not quality, or access issues, that motivated most staff to use the VLE.

To successfully adapt a new technology tool, it has to solve a problem with an amount of effort that seems proportionate. Find your problem first, and then try to find the tool to solve it. The latest web 2.0 buzz topic might not be it.

So what's your problem? What takes you the most time and effort for the least learning benefit to your students? That's your pain point, and a good place to start.