Developing an Online Course!

I am facing the challenge of planning, developing and facilitating an entirely online course. In fact, I starts in a week! So, I am busy.

Private Label Wikispace
I have created a new wikispace for the course and sequenced the learning over 10 weeks, with weekly online web conferences and reading and activities to complete from a text book between online sessions. A wiki page for each week has text references, handouts and learning resources on it to assist the learners.

Learning Resources
I have created flash movies from Ms PowerPoint and iSpring Free to demonstrate dividing medical terms into their component word parts and also demonstrate pronunciation of medical terms.
Flash cards and scatter game created with Quizlet will allow learners to have fun while they practice their medical terms and abbreviations. Medical word part crosswords created with Hot Potatoes will enable practice and self-assessment. There are also some quizzes made with Ms Word forms.
I hope that I have created a variety of learning resources for my learners. I have trialled these with my f2f students and they love them. In fact, if I don't get them up immediately after a class, I get terse emails demanding to know why they are not available (this is mostly because I have not yet finished creating them!) It is good to know that my f2f learners appreciate the effort I have gone to to provide extra learning resources. Hopefully they will also benefit my online learners.

Gilly Salmon
I have just bought Gilly Salmon's 2 books and am desperately reading e-tivities The key to active online learning. Love the book and am trying to incorporate some of Gilly's ideas into my course.

Online Assessment
I had misgivings about online assessment but I think I have it worked out now. I will use an observation checklist to assess pronunciation, spelling, dividing medical terms into their word parts and diseases and disorders. I will observe these with activities set into my online web conferencing sessions. I will also require learners to work in groups (pairs) to research and present on an organ of the digestive system. This will cover appropriate use of medical terminology, pronunciation, spelling (submit the presentation in written form),anatomy and diseases and disorders. Then there will be a Policies & procedures research project and a written task.

Challenges
My big challenge will be to engage the learners with online web conferencing (Elluminate)to the extent that they are comfortable speaking (using the mike) and are able to present by the third week - or perhaps I will leave the presentations until later. They will be thrown in the deep end so I have carefully planned my online sessions using icebreakers and Polls to build confidence online as we don't have much time to get familiar with the platform.

Another challenge is to create a sense of belonging and support for the learners. I hope to do this by utilising the discussion forum for learners to share their learning. Having been a learner online I know that a strong sense of comradeship and support is possible and can be stronger than that achieved in f2f classes where you just tend to talk to the person next to you.

Another really biggie is that I will be facilitating these online sessions alone. This worries me as I know that we do not have the time to be trying to solve technical problems. Also I do not have much confidence solving technical problems. A friend has volunteered to come to the first session to give support and technical advice - thank goodness!

Where am I Now
I am creating ppts for the online sessions and lesson plans. These are being tweaked as I get more into Gilly's book - pity I had not read it before I started! Still have a couple of ppts to narrate for flash movies. And need to finalise my assessment tasks. Just as well it is holidays and is too cold to do anything else.

Future
Will tell you how it goes in the next blog.
Oops, forgot to tell you that it is a medical terminology course but I guess that you guessed that.

Qizlet

I have discovered Quizlet!
Don't know why I didn't try it before. I picked up one of my e-learning exercise books and in the front page I had written quizlet.com
Now what was this? I had no recollection so I had a bit of time and decided to investigate.

Quizlet is the best thing! It is an online program that creates Flash cards, Learning and Scatter game from a list of words and their meanings - just perfect for my Medical Terminology classes!

Choose a Study ModeScatterLearnFlashcards

Study these flash cards | Study medical flash cards

As you can see this is perfect for my students as a learning tool, and to test their knowledge.
Click Choose a study mode to change from Flash cards/Learn/Scatter game

Now I am in the process of creating these for all of the body systems to use in an online Medical Terminology course that I am developing. It adds to the flash movies (iSpringFree), CrossWords (Hot Potatoes) and Fill in the blank Quiz's that I have created.

Painless Learning
The idea is that my learners will be so busy playing these games that they won't realise that they are learning!

Photo to Cartoon

Have been playing with photos

Original Photo

Cartoon
Using Kuso Cartoons I changed the picture into a cartoon


I really do need to update my photo!

I Love Wordle

Better Late than Never
Trying to catch up with my 23 Things - but I need some photos

One Thing Leads to Another
So I decided to have a go at Wordle.
I love the look of it and watched a video on uses for education. previously I had simply thought of it as decorative but now I can see educational uses and plan to use it when teaching Cert IV TAE later in the year.

Follow this Link for ideas I especially liked 52 Ways to use Wordle in the Classroom



What do you think?

More and more
I'm sure I can use these with learners

Document Design


Assessment Validation


Unit of Competency