Title: interActive Learning Online...or... how to relate to your students when you can't see their faces

Presenters:

• Meg O'Reilly is an educational designer at Southern Cross University, and co-author of the book Assessing Open and Distance Learners, 1999 Kogan Page.

Intended Audience and degree of prior expertise required:

The workshop is suitable for all academic staff who would like to experience a variety of interActivities both as learners and group facilitators. No experience is required in online discussion forums, though previous classroom teaching experiences would provide realistic scenarios to draw from as a launchpad for design of interActivities.

Background:

The staff development program interActive Learning Online, was conceived after five semesters of course development for the online environment. Initial momentum for online course development involved reconfiguring distance education materials and study packages for the screen-based environment. In terms of working with academics who were early adopters of technology in teaching, educational designers also proactively supported a reconceptualising of their pedagogical approaches in order to promote and maintain the process of active learning for both off-campus students and the staff themselves.

During this time of change, the great majority of academic staff at Southern Cross University have been active in identifying their own staff development needs. In particular, the need for experiencing a variety of forms of dialogue and interaction in, and with, the web and screen based environments, has been identified as a focus of interest. While both staff and students are now gaining more exposure to the online environment, the emphasis on gaining direct experience is clearly evident since teaching staff are aiming to gain online experience while also avoiding trial-and-error experimentation with their students. Quality and effectiveness of online interAction is now of concern in both off-campus and on-campus programs.

In direct response to this identified need for more experience in ways of relating as teachers and learners online, the staff development resource interActive Learning Online has been developed for use as both a stand-alone self-paced tutorial as well as for use as a facilitated timetabled activity.

Aims and objectives:

This workshop aims to provide an opportunity for teaching staff to undertake online interActivities in a concentrated format, to reflect and discuss the effectiveness of online navigation, dialogue and interaction strategies as they are experienced. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• design an online interactive learning activity for their own disciplinary context
• facilitate at least one group interActivity online
• evaluate the match between the design of their online interActivity and the outcomes of the interActivity

Program:

1. Exploring your disciplinary context

The first session of the workshop will provide the opportunity for participants to introduce themselves and, through the online medium, to consider the nature of their disciplinary context. Participants will reflect upon their own teaching and learning philosophies which underpin their orientation to curriculum.

Through a facilitated online forum, this session will encourage participants to consider ways in which these philosophical underpinnings might inform their approaches to teaching and learning online. Participants will reflect on the range of learning outcomes which pertain to their subject areas, and also define how students might gain from opportunities to interact electronically with course materials, with other students and with the teacher.

2. Exploring the environment for interaction

Discussion in the second forum will be facilitated to support critical reflection on the array of web-based communication tools now available to us as academics. What are the strengths and limitations of these various forms of communication?

We will introduce the online environment in the context of Blackboard CourseInfo. Issues which will be explored include the effective use of hypertext, and whether it leads to a fundamentally different kind of reading/ learning experience.

3. Go for it!

This forum requires participants to move into roles as students, immersed in this online environment, exchanging views and collaborating with your peers and teacher. An email game will be jointly selected and used for the core experience of this session. The focus of the games will be structured to address the core questions of teaching and learning interactively online.

Ideas for consideration might include: "What strategies for organising classes and setting up communication exchanges have you found to be successful with your students? What strategies have not worked well? In what ways does the web offer opportunities for 'transformative' learning that may not be available in traditional class-room and distance modes of education? In what sense do web-based learning communities compare with, or fall short of, the kinds of 'transformative' learning experiences that can occur in face-to-face interactions?"

4. mmm, what have we learned?

We will use the final part of the session to focus on issues relating to new forms of assessment available through electronic media and how we can evaluate the effectiveness of our online programs. In particular the questions around assessment of dialogue, interaction and active discussion will be considered.

This forum will also be used for a facilitated formal feedback session. We will be looking for feedback from participants on the sessions and resources offered in this staff development workshop. Questions to be asked include: "What have you gained from it? What worked well, could be done better, has been overlooked, etc?"