Another Perspective

This week I have been looking at online learning from a student's perspective. This was brought on by the fact that I was facilitating a workshop for a group of students, many of them are studying fully online and having difficulties with different aspects. I find there is little literature written from the student's perspective that give insights into the difficulties they have moving from face-to-face to online although there is much written on teaching online. The first insight I had was when I was unable to be online for the last facilitated session I decided to watch on the recording but my attention kept wandering and I found myself tuning out as I tidied my desk and moved paper around my office. The second insight was when I tried to find my way through and read the large number of blogs in this paper. It came to me that I needed to think about how I learn best, my favoured learning style(s). I would not expect to sit through a face-to-face lecture on campus without taking notes and the reason I take notes is to keep myself engaged. Nor would expect to cope with the quantity of information in the blogs without a system for sorting those that I wished to read more deeply and those that were less relevant to my interests.

The relevance of all this to the students I work with is that they have difficulty managing their contributions and the amount of information in the discussion forums in Moodle and they have difficulty studying effectively and avoiding the pitfalls of poor time management and procrastination etc. The upshot of all this is that when preparing students to study online in an environment which they have previously used more as a play ground it is important to encourage them to think about how they learn best and ways they can transfer that to the online environment. While I still see development of online opportunities is - pedagogy + content + technology increasingly I am becoming aware of the challenges that face online learners. Also, when sharing information about different applications I was made aware of a site called Diigo which I have begun to explore. However I am beginning to feel that all these online opportunities are overwhelming and feel I am fast losing control. How do I pull the different online threads together and management them effectively in relation to time and content? Again I suspect this is a similar problem the learners I work with have.