After a couple of weeks of writing, rewriting, proofreading and more of the same, I have finally completed a 3,300 word blog post. Should this strike you as somewhat hypocritical, given that I have just been singing the praises of a book called How to write short, I’m afraid you’re quite right.
However, a blog post should be as long — or as short — as it needs to be, and I felt I needed a lot of words to convey the trials and tribulations, and successes, involved in converting a course from an offline one to an online one.
The course was for adults. A recent research report from Ofsted into what it calls “Remote Learning” states:
“A lot of the research literature on remote or online education focuses on its use in higher education,
which, before the pandemic, was the area of education in which remote education was most used in
England. Therefore, a lot of this literature is less relevant as it covers success characteristics in
online education environments that are typically associated with adult learners”
I’m not convinced that there is very much that is “less relevant”. Adult learners may have different characteristics from younger ones (at least theoretically), but decisions like matching the technology to ones pedagogy, how to assess progress, what resources to use, how to conduct discussions — all these, surely, are pretty much the same challenge in both cases?
Anyway, the the article is available in the Digital Education Supplement area of this website, for subscribers to Digital Education, which is free. It’s called “Converting An Offline Course To An Online One” — snappy title, no? I might make it available more widely in the fullness of time, but for now it’s for subscribers only.
Here’s what it contains:
Introduction
The nature of the course
The potential of an online-only course
Pre-course questionnaire
Homework assignment(s)
An opportunity for workshopping
Time to think and consolidate between sessions
Digital handouts rather than paper ones
More ways of preserving class discussions
Training
Understanding adult education
Self-concept
Life experiences
Readiness to learn
Orientation towards learning
How much technology?
Evaluation: what worked, what didn’t?
Student feedback
Visitor’s key messages
What worked well
What didn’t work so well
Conclusions
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