social pharmacy d-pharm 1st year by Pragati K. Mahajan
A Different Kind of E-Learning
1. A different kind of e-learning
KAIDO KIKKAS
associate professor
IT College, TUT
kaido@itcollege.ee
18.05.2018
2. For introduction: the mighty technology
Things that earlier required ‘rocket science’ and a lot of
money, are now available to everyone. Examples:
− Today’s home computer vs top tech 40 years ago
− Today’s smartphones vs old-time supercomputers
− Social media (blogs, wikis, social networks) vs
traditional media
− Music or video/movie studio at home vs earlier
dedicated facilities
BOTTOM LINE: people can do great things if they do not
have to face stupid obstacles from business, government
and antiquated legislation
3. A timeline of technology-assisted learning
Up to the 80s: contact learning or pre-Internet tech
measures (TV, radio, cassettes, videotapes etc)
80s and early 90s: computer-based learning (computers as
a glorified, interactive VCR - CD-ROMs, multimedia,
educational software
Later 90s: e-learning 1.0 – e-mail, Web (1.0), scripts and
applets
First years of 00s: e-learning 2.0 – learning management
systems (WebCT/Blackboard, Ilias, Moodle)
10s: e-learning 3.0 – Web 2.0 and distributed learning
environments, MOOCs
4. Wikiversity
A project under Wikimedia Commons (probaby the most
common of those is Wikipedia)
Similarly to Wikipedia, all content is distributed under free
licenses, mostly
− Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
− GNU Free Documentation License
5. Components of the course
Main page at Wikiversity (the central hub):
Short intro and main data (credits, supervisor etc)
Detailed guide for the course
Participant list
Team list (if used)
Exam registration (if using traditional exam)
Link to forum
Plus outside resources:
Forum (Nabble.com; monitored over RSS)
Team wikis
Personal blogs (monitored over RSS)
Skype and/or e-mail
6. Weekly workflow
Read the ’lecture’ at Wikiversity
Weekly blogging tasks
Wiki-based team paper (4-5 people)
Reviewing another team’s work (blogged)
Topical discussions in forum
In some courses: weekly text chat (approx. 1 hour, part
consulting, part informal discussion of weekly topics)
7. Grading the works
Grades are often considered private information
How to keep them private in an open course?
Options include
●
Using the hosting institution study information system
(feasible if no/little outsiders)
●
Public grade table, password protected (easy to do with
Excel or LibreOffice Calc)
●
Public grade table, coded (numbers or pseudonyms)
●
On-demand: everyone can ask over e-mail, Skype etc
(feasible in smaller courses)
8. Three levels of participation
For credits, formal enrolment – need to register through
the faculty (similarly to other courses)
For credits, from outside – need to register through the
complementary learning/training faculty
Free listeners, want just the information rather than credits
– free to come and go as they please
9. Typical question: why teach outsiders?
For-credit students are sponsored by state, the course load
increase gets formally recognized (and paid)
Free listeners (in sensible amounts) act as valuable
marketers of the course – provided that the content is
good. Workload increase can be optimized (e.g. more
stress on peer reviews etc)
The course type needs careful planning of tasks and
structure, so that 10 x increase in students does not mean
10 x increase of workload
Example: continuous points-gathering (with some choice)
and basing the grade on the final sum rather than doing a
traditional exam
10. What is different
Fits well for more narrative type of courses
Analytical rather than purely fact-oriented tasks (analyze,
describe, give examples, compare...). Means that
Different solutions can be equally valid
Good old cheating does not work well, especially with
more experienced supervisor