Like any good play, an online course has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Okay, admittedly some good plays – like Waiting for Godot – have none of the above, but bear with me on this. Some courses are short one-act plays, and some are full-length Shakespearean dramas – especially when real-life tragedy does unfortunately intervene, and participants are forced to withdraw because of bereavement or illness.
Photo by Flnz
Whatever sort of play (or novel, or piece of music, or opera… comments invited) you compare an online course to, a good online course should have a beginning, middle and end. Waiting for Godot may be great on stage, but it’s not the effect you’re looking for in your online course.
What you are looking for is a clearly structured sequence of learning activities and tasks that lead somewhere. You want a beginning, middle and end that relate to learning content:
- a beginning that introduces and orientates the learners to the content,
- a middle consisting of well, the actual content, and hopefully,
- an end that results in the application of the content to meaningful practice, be it learning a language or brain surgery.
But at the same time, your online course needs a beginning, middle and end that relate to the group:
- a beginning that introduces and orientates the learners to each other and the tutor (and the VLE if new to them),
- a middle consisting of learners working collaboratively and individually on tasks relating to the course content, and
- an end in which learners celebrate achievements, share final products or projects, and say goodbye to the group.
So far, so clear, and as many teachers would point out, not so different to what we do in face-to-face classes. However, as Gilly Salmon was one of the first to point out, a purely online course needs an overt socialising phase if the group is to gel, and participants are to work effectively together online during the rest of the course. The socialising, or ‘climate setting’ phase, is of paramount importance online, and it’s not always obvious how to do this online. (Of course online, just as in face-to-face classes, there will always be participants who hate working with peers, and prefer to work alone. To what extent these participants should be forced into pair work is debatable.)
Let me describe just two beginning activities for an online course. The challenge with purely online courses is to make these kinds of activities fun and challenging, and hopefully the two activities below are just that (please feel free to disagree in the comments, and/or to provide other beginning activities!):
Activity 1: Profiles 3-2-1
As one of your beginning activities on an online course, it is always a good idea to get participants to fill in their profile if you are using a VLE. You can spice up the potentially rather humdrum info participants will inevitably post by also asking them to include three, two and one things about x, y and z, e.g.:
- 3 of your favourite songs
- 2 unusual things you have eaten
- 1 thing you would change about yourself if you could
For online language students, the 3 – 2 – 1 items above can be made more or less linguistically challenging, depending on the level. Topics can also be chosen depending on who your online students are – for online teacher training courses, for example, participants could add 1 thing they particularly love about teaching…. best to ensure a mix of unusual topics in your 3-2-1 activity though.
Task stages:
1 Ask your online students to complete their individual profiles in the VLE, including general information about themselves, and the 3-2-1 points you think will work well for the group.
2 Make sure that your own profile is already completed, and follows the same guidelines. This will be a helpful model for your students in terms of length, style and content.
3 Ask participants to read the profiles of their course colleagues, and to send an e-mail to one or two of them, asking for further information about any point(s) in the profile that interest them. You could set this up as a chain, so that each participant is sure to receive one e-mail from a course colleague, about their profile.
4 A week or so later, prepare a quiz based on the unusual information in the profiles, and get participants to complete it to see how much they remember about their course colleagues — they can of course also look at the profiles again to jog their memories! Make absolutely sure that there is one quiz question per participant profile, including yourself, and that no one is left out!
Activity 2: Glog yourself!
This is an activity that uses a great free online tool called Glogster. Glogster allows you to produce a single webpage in the form of a poster, to which you can add text, images, audio and video. It’s a sort of all singing and dancing online poster.
Here is a Glog that I use to introduce myself on online courses:
and here is another Glog made by one of our recent online course participants (reproduced with permission).
Glogs look great, and they combine the best of Web 2.0 tools: ease-of-use and a range of media. Your Glog is stored on a web page, so that you can reuse it (simply by pointing people to the url), and you can also update and edit it at any time by removing or changing elements.
Task stages:
1 Create your own Glog. Be warned — it can be quite addictive, and you can find yourself spending between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on how snazzy you want to get!
2 Make your Glog available to your participants, for example via a dedicated forum in your VLE.
3 Ask your participants to go along to Glogster and create their own Glogs.
4 Ask participants to share their Glog url in a forum in your VLE (or embed it into any other social media they may already have, or that you are using in your course, such as a class blog, wiki or Ning)
5 Encourage participants to visit each other’s Glogs, and to then post comments or queries about the individual Glogs, on the Glog itself or in the same VLE forum.
6 Provide a visual summary of the all Glogs produced, for example by taking a series of screenshots, and creating a visually attractive PDF (for more tips on how to create visually attractive summaries of online tasks, see my previous posting about this)
If you try out any of these beginning online activities, do let me know how it goes. Please also feel free to share any beginning activities that you use on your online courses, and that you feel work particularly well. And finally, please also feel free to explore issues such as what to do with participants who simply do not want to be involved in socialising type activities online… Over to you!
[My next two blog postings will deal with middle activities, and end activities respectively – stay tuned]
Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
January 2010
Great intro for this post (I have got to read Waiting for Godot) and clear easy to follow steps for the beginning stage. In the Yes! Courses (An online course offered to teachers in South America by the British Council) tutors go for the 1st stage. There are some ideas we could actually try (like write of favorite songs) in these courses. Thanks Nicky.
Great advice, as usual, Nicky! And it applies as much to online teacher education courses as it does to language courses. Coincidentally, our online MA TESOL starts its spring semester this week, and on my (Language Analysis) course students have a number of “beginning” tasks, including creating a gap-fill about themselves, and posting an entry in the class blog. Something new this course is a “technology check” whereby they have to perform a number of simple tasks (open a video file, find a journal in the e-library, comment on a blog posting, etc) and report back once they’ve succeeded in all tasks. This has been instituted after discovering – in previous courses – that some students hadn’t been able to make some key application work, but had been too embarrassed to admit to the fact – a sort of “Waiting for Godot” situation, perhaps?
Thanks for your comments Miguel and Scott.
Miguel, if Waiting for Godot were summarised in a tweet, it might go> ‘2 characters wait for s/one who doesnt show up, for 3 acts’. Great play, great dialogues. Glad you think you could try out a version of the 3-2-1 activity – let us know how it goes!
Scott, love the tech check task, an excellent idea. I think we sometimes can be in danger of expecting that our online students may be more tech savvy than they really are. Although having said that, I remember the days when a simple beginning task like filling in a profile, or posting an introductory message to a forum, was considered demanding enough technically for participants. But these days we are finding that even participants who are new to online learning, and don’t have much previous experience with technology, can handle tools like Glogster. Perhaps due to people in general being a little more tech savvy overall, and also due to the fact that these tools are so easy to use now.
Nicky
The tools are easy to use – up to a point! The problem is that there are so many variables you have to take into account to be sure that they will work in all circumstances. There’s the basic issue of Mac vs PC compatiblity, for a start, and then all its multiple variations: Firefox on Mac vs Firefox on PC; Internet Explorer (which version?) on either, etc. I’ve spent all this morning trying to embed a video clip into Blackboard, so as to be sure it will open in each of these permutations – which involves testing the clip in different file extensions: .mp4, .avi, .wpm, .mov etc. In the “unplugged” classroom all you had to worry about was whether your board-pen would leave a permanent mark on the whiteboard! (Sob!)
Yes, we have occasional browser incompatiiity issues with Moodle at times (eg for some odd reason you can’t always see the WSYWIG editor for forum posts when using Chrome). One solution to your video clip thing might be upload it to an external website such as Blip TV or YouTube, then simply use the embed code in your post? Also means the video is streamed instead of participants having to first download it to watch it (hell on dial-up). Or had you already tried that…?
Nicky
Nicky’s right, of course – it makes sense to open a dedicated channel on something like YouTube and let them handle both the conversion and the delivery – anything they show will play in any modern browser and then you can forget about multiple formats, testing compatibility and dealing with the dreary tedium of Blackboard.
I’m not sure the compatibility issues are so big – any decent OS running the latest version of Firefox (I’d automatically ban any learners trying to do an online course with Explorer, but maybe that’s just me) will do just fine. Firefox is a small download, so it makes sense.
So if people are allowed to install Firefox, problem solved:
1) Host video on YouTube
2) Use Firefox
Those institutions who have, shall we say, rather stringent software policies, usually end up forcing people to do this kind of study at home where they do have control over the medium, but it would be a lot easier for everyone if IT policies reflected ease-of-use rather than trouble-free days of fun for the IT staff…
Gavin
Thanks for your advice, Gavin. This is where I admit that I still regularly use Explorer myself [ashamed look], but I’ve noticed in our website statistics that Firefox has had a massive increase in number of users in the past few months. No doubt due to all the horrendous problems Explorer has been having (causing) lately…
Nicky
Nicky
Re putting videos up via YouTube, this was exactly the advice I was given by a colleague a day or two ago, after I’d been complaining about the amout of faffing I’d been doing. I followed his advice and it works a treat. My only worry is that any Tom, Dick or Harriet can view my New School videos – and even download them. (They’d have to be pretty sad, but still…)
If you’re of a sad disposition, you can see the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ms3tOsM7bM
I offer it as an example – not necessarily a good one – of how a little video clip can help ‘humanize’ the online learning process, by giving voice – and face – to the instructor.
Thanks for the link to your video Scott, I agree that it’s a very nice warm way to welcome students onto a course. Btw, nice range of books in the background, although I don’t think I spotted a copy of How to Teach English with Technology 🙂
Now that we are on the topic of videos, another nice )and probably very obvious) way of integrating very short bits of video is to summarise small areas of course content e.g. by using a PowerPoint slide and a screen capture program like Jing or Camstudio with voice over. We tend to upload video to BlipTV, which to my mind looks a little more slick (my own bias no doubt). I feel a post about uses of video in an online couse coming on…
And going back for a moment to the topic of Glogs (described in Activity 2 in the post above), I just had to add a link to this Glog, created by colleague and past participant Miguel Mendoza http://mike97.glogster.com/my-glog/ It includes a really great mix of media, as well as getting across an excellent sense of Miguel, his context, interests, etc. Thank you Miguel!
Hi Nicky and all
In my online MA course, our task in one module is to think of different tools and ways to introduce ourselves to our colleagues. Using Glogs is a good idea if there is enough time. Some suggested Voicethread, which can be used in a similar way.
I have known most colleagues from their brief introductions last semester but still have the feeling I need to know them on a more personal level. I believe having a feeling of community and some degree of trust is very important for fruitful discussions. Knowing about participants professional and personal backgrounds might also help understand their point of view better.
Scott, regarding how to show media, another issue is that sites like youtube are often blocked in many countries or institutions. So uploading your videos to such sites is no guarantee that everyone will be able to watch them, at least not without some knowledge of how to circumvent such restrictions.
I decided to use vimeo.com because it is not so mainstream and therefore not blocked as often 🙂 It also allows me to password protect individual videos so only students or trainees of a certain course can view them. This can also come in handy if you want to protect your students’ privacy when they have to upload recordings. On vimeo, you can decide whether you want to allow people to download your video or not.
Thanks for your helpful advice about vimeo, Nergiz, and for reminding us that YouTube may be blocked in some places. There are a few alternative video sharing sites, so as you say, a good idea to go for something less well-known.
As for socialsing activities, we find that they aree not just important at the start of an online course, but need to be included regulary during a course, and we try to include at least one short task per course week (or every two weeks depending on course length) which allows for personalisation, linked as far as possible to the actual course content for that week. So, for example, if one of the tasks in the week is to learn to use something like VoiceThread (our courses focus on learning to use new technologies), then the content in the partipants’ individual VTs is personalised. Btw, we find that VT is a little too complex for most of our participants to cope with in an initial socialisation task (especially in terrms of time they need to invest to produce something vs task aim), so prefer something Glogster, which is very straightforward, in the early stages of an online ocurse at least.
Thanks for your comments!
Hi everybody:
Thanks Nicky for these activities for online courses. In the E-courses and e-forums I have taken part, participants usually introduce themselves using pictures, videos and writing about their personal and academic interests. I think glogs are a good way to integrate everything just in one shot. I did enjoy designing my first glog.
Hi Teadira, thanks for your comment. Please feel free to share the link to your Glog here as well, if you’d like to (no pressure) 🙂
Actually, commenting on my own comment to Nergiz above (how sad is that??), today via Twitter I came across a great blog posting listing 7 alternative video sharing sites to YouTube. This will hopefully be helpful to any of you in countries where YouTube is blocked: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-12-sites-watch-videos-youtube
I also highly recommend subscribing to this blog…
Nicky,
What a great post! I love how students are able to be creative. How funny that this is more creative than many face-to-face lessons. Moreover, the teacher gets to know the students which is difficult to do online if you never meet face-to-face. The students also get to know about each other and can put a real face to the student. I took my Masters online and never knew what any of my classmates looked like. I believe some of the online students acted horrifically because they only knew others as a name and not a face. I knew some students who would tell others off, call people names, stereotype, and more. I think activities like this help people to visualize the person.
Thank you Nicky.All the ideas are very good to use.