Title: Using eLearning to teach eLearning – an eLearning design workshop

Project Video Channel - Click here

Project Coordinators: TCD

Subject coverage: generic ‘elearning design workshops’ for the professional development of Academic staff in designing, developing and delivering eLearning as part of teaching and learning.

Partners: TCD, NUIG, IT Carlow

Current economic cutbacks are forcing those of us who work in eLearning centers to rethink how we can best use the resources available to us. Across institutions workshops are being delivered that have much in common but are being developed and delivered individually for each institution. Also these workshops are often delivered to small classes and using precious resources such as man power, rooms and equipment. Academic teaching staff is feeling the pinch now too with many new demands on their time and making themselves available for training sessions on particular days and in designated locations is all becoming more difficult.

This project looks at developing generic training materials – delivered in an online environment thus making better use of human resources in institutions, reducing the amount of investment required for training rooms and locations and allowing the academic to take part in the training in their own time and from their own place. In other words ‘using eLearning to teach eLearning’.

It is envisaged that these workshops will not be static web pages but will include online activities, mentoring and feedback thus allowing the instructor also to teach from their office and from their individual institutions.

The original output from this proposal will be an online workshop on Designing eLearning. It will be based on sound Instructional Design methodologies such as ADDIE and will instruct the academic on how to carry out the different stages of a project. Currently this work is done through face-to-face workshops in all three institutions and through consultancies with individual academics.

Academics who take part in this workshop will have completed their Analyses stage of their own eLearning project and have identified what the learning outcomes are and be ready to start developing content and activities to achieve their outcomes.

Constructive alignment of the learning outcomes, content and activities will be promoted (Biggs, 2003)

It is proposed to achieve this by combining resources for the 3 partner institutions and building an online course using Articulate.

Online mentoring will be achieved using Google forms, discussions, blogs and wikis. It is intended to examine the Google applications in full to evaluate how these can be used to support mentoring and feedback on the course.