Session 2

What do I know about e-learning?
Last year, I enrolled on the course called “e-learning Strategies and Management”. As this session is about e-learning, this provides a chance for me to revise and rethink what I have learnt.

e-learning involves the use of ICT to support and enhance learning with the effective use of digital resources and learning tools, collaboration with colleagues and mentors in other locations, the experience of a virtual environment and access to online courses from home or within the community. It has the potential to provide learning content and with other learners in an interactive manner.

Last year, I had a chance to use WebCT to design an e-learning environment. In doing so, the objectives should be clear. Resources, activities and learning objects involved should meet the objectives. The instructions for using learning objects should be clear. The learning objects should be easy to navigate and learners have greater autonomy in studying at their own sequence and pace. The e-learning environment should allow for two-way interaction and provide feedback for the learners. The information must be accurate and up-to-date. Whether the objectives would be attained better using some other forms of learning objects or without using the e-learning environment should be considered. The e-learning environment built should help learners to construct knowledge through scaffolding.

It is really difficult for teachers to know who is/are learning under an e-learning environment. Hopefully, some LMS provide a tracking system that records the activity of the students on the web site. For example, under ‘My Progress’ in WebCT, the history of the content pages visited by a student is provided. But this is not enough. In addition to the descriptive information in the tracking function, some charts (such as bar charts and histograms), statistics and analysis should be generated automatically for teachers to monitor and compare the performance of students. Analysis may include a report on the strength and weakness of a student in a certain learning area. For example, if a student is found to be weak in phrase verbs according to his past records, the teacher can assign additional materials on phrase verbs to that student. Based on the analysis, teachers can tailor-make different exercises to help students of different abilities and weaknesses. And they have a clear profile of the performance and progress of the whole class.

Unlike conventional classroom teaching, it is difficult for teachers to identify at-risk cyber-students. A tracking system allows teachers to easily know which student has a low login rate for the web site. For those who read and write few messages on the forum, the teacher may design some tasks that require peer-to-peer interaction online. The tasks should be further divided into a number of sub-tasks with scaffolding design to guide the students.

There are various assessment techniques such as rubrics, self-monitoring, contracts and portfolios as sources of continuous or interactive assessment. (Last year, I also tried the learning contract.) The criteria for evaluation are the joint efforts of teachers and students. The students are given voice in their assessment and this can provide them a clear understanding of what is expected of them and the assurance that their accomplishments will be recognized. They are evaluated by suitable assessments, and the assessments in turn can drive learning.

What do I want to know about e-learning?
In what way(s) can my work place help enhance e-learning?

What have I learnt at the end of this session?
From my view, e-learning or ICT is just a tool to enhance teaching and learning. At present, I don’t think there is already a curriculum in some place in the world that solely relies on the resources on the Internet. Although educational resources and useful websites are abundant in the Internet, I may say they are just learning objects. How they work well for teachers and students greatly depends on the way how they are employed in a certain curriculum. Unless a digitalized curriculum comes into effect, I think blended learning is more suitable in Hong Kong for the time being and especially for the new secondary 334 curriculum. The face-to-face learning can prepare students to still work hard towards the paper-and-pen examination. The online learning helps students to adapt and adopt a new way of learning (self and life-long learning). As investigative study and liberal studies are encouraged in the new secondary 334 curriculum, students can be trained to be independent learners and broaden their horizon through suitable e-learning environments.

My company has developed websites for a number of subjects. I don’t say we are preparing a good e-learning environment. The websites mainly serve as a resource centre for teachers and students to download educational materials. How my company can “empower” teachers and students through e-learning is not so successful. As teachers and students are still not get used to e-learning, publishers would not be ready to spend too much on this. More importantly, publishers must survive commercially in the first place. Besides, publishers are often a negative influence on educational reform, doing traditional things like online tests and CD-ROMs full of PowerPoint presentations. These perpetuate current practices.

In my view, a much more innovative approach can be employed in my work place – simulations, data sets and visual (DVD clips) materials which students can use to investigate topics. Such resources may help teachers and students to taste and acquire the experience of using ICT to explore topics gradually. These would be better resources than traditional resources to change teacher’s approach to teaching/learning.