thinking . designing >> experience: theory into practice

I was recently appointed as the chair of the e-learning workgroup for the School of InfoComm Technology of Ngee Ann Polytechnic. The goals of the workgroup were rather simple and could be summarised as follows:

To facilitate e-learning implementation in our School; i.e. ensuring all our modules were hosted in Blackboard, our polytechnic campus-wide Course Management System;
To meet the polytechnic's Type 1, 2 & 3 Interactivity requirements.

Believe me, it is an easy job. Or would you? I will shout out a loud YES to you. But this answer is valid only if we're focusing on the pedagogical design and do what we're told.

No, the job becomes stressful and complicated when it comes to change management. To this end I will say no more but to simply recommend you to read this article written by Mark Hurst (June, 2003) entitled The Most Important User Experience Method.

Let's talk about the easy part - effective teaching and learning using Blackboard - notice that I stress on effectiveness rather than Blackboard.

Blackboard, the Course Management System (CMS), has been chosen as our campus-wide e-learning delivery platform. By itself and just like any other LMS (Learning Management System), it is just an online shell providing some standard features commonly found in e-teaching, e-learning and e-performance.

It is amazing how quickly we rushed into using it. It was our concern that if the use was not planned carefully, it might become another content dump - just like the good old days!

Carmean and Haefner (Nov/Dec 2002) agreed long ago in their paper entitled Mind Over Matter: Transforming Course Management Systems into Effective Learning Environments.

Well said in the paper: CMS is like any physical classroom environment where chalks, tables, and chairs are abound. It is the tutor, who is the conductor in the classroom, and the intellectual contents delivered to the students that make learning happens, that enrich the learning experience of the students. In other words, deep learning is still the focal point.

What you will be reading in this post is a short story of our efforts in enriching our students' learning experience via Blackboard.

If you've only one minute, read these two points to learn what we had done:

We produce a skeletal structural module delivery template that consists of the instructional sequence and provide the mechanism on how to create it.
The outcome was a pedagogical suite which was expandable and could be unplugged and adopted by staff in their delivery of lessons online.

The story started with with these two goals in mind:

Enriching the learning experience of our students was the key to a successful implementation of e-learning.
Enhancing the teaching experience of the teaching staff was the key to adoption and use of e-learning in teaching & learning.

And with that, the e-learning workgroup proposed two simple e-learning development guidelines :

Module structure must be pedagogical sound.
Terminologies, naming convention & access sequence must be standardised.

The guidelines were purposely made simple to attract e-learning adoption and to avoid added workload for staff. At the same time we also wanted our students to have good learning experience. Therefore, we paid due attention to consistency, usability and predictability (Figure 1) in the learning flow sequence.

We also observe the following principle in the development of the template guidelines:

"Learning will be better achieved in progressive, continual and bite-size manner with frequent practices and meaningful, rewarding and timely feedback."

The learning activities designed for each week is a good reflection of what we believe in (Figure 2 & 3). It contains the following items which can be unplugged or extended:

About this lesson
Lecture slide
Tutorial sheet
Practical sheet
Learning resources
Reflect & ask a question!
Test your understanding
Poll lesson understanding

Item (2) - (4) are the current teaching practices of our staff. As it is, staff will upload the files to the server.

In this implementation, we do not encourage our teaching staff to adopt the bite-size e-activities approach in their e-teaching due to the amount of works involved in doing so.

We feel that at the initial adoption stage of a CMS, it is paramount important to let the teaching staff feel at ease, and for them to discover that e-teaching and the traditional classroom teaching are in fact not much different. And only so, we can then introduce pedagogical-sound e-learning activities, which require more efforts and time of the teaching staff.

Items (6) – (8) is the pedagogical suite. The teaching team can freely select all or any combination of the features.

We can proudly say that the design of these features takes into consideration of both the constraints imposed to staff and the goodness of the instructional design principles.

For example, we proposed that only one question should be set in Test Your Understanding and Snap Poll features to make things easy for staff and students. These features are also able to foster good teaching and effective learning.

Another example is this: staff are concern of the inappropriate use of discussion board by students of this age. Hence, we deactivate the access of the discussion board directly at the global navigation link at the left of the window pane. Instead, a discussion snippet is incorporated directly into each week lesson, which required three clicks to reach. Moreover, students are prevented to go to another discussion topic unless they navigate to it via the weekly lesson.

A quick summary of each learning activity within the week is as follows:

About this lesson – The learning objectives for the week. In a sophisticated used, vignette or problem scenario for that lesson can be provided to further entice students.
Lecture Slide – Microsoft PowerPoint slide will be uploaded here. The descriptor shows the theme or focus in the lecture
Tutorial Sheet – Tutorial questions created in Microsoft Word document. The descriptor shows the theme or focus in the tutorial.
Practical Sheet – The weekly practical activities. The descriptor shows the theme or focus in the practical.
Learning Resources – This folder will contain all off- or on-line reference materials for that week.
Reflect & Ask a Question! – Students’ weekly self-reflection and raise a question activity in the discussion snippet. A student moderator may be appointed to prompt, ignite, moderate the discussion and summarise the students’ reflection and answer students’ questions in consultation with the tutor - peer teaching approach.
Test your Understanding – Only one question will be posted. The question will be randomly selected from a pool of questions. The purpose is for feedback and self-monitoring of own learning progression.
Poll Lesson Understanding – This snap poll is used to gather feedback from students on the lesson they've learnt in the week. The purpose is improve teaching delivery immediately. The key is to initially post one true/false question and only if clarification is needed, a survey can be conducted to collect more feedback.

I hope that by now you're able to see our e-learning implementation strategies. The diagrams that follow (Figure 1, 2, 3 & 4), which you may have seen earlier, will give you some ideas.

We are currently providing only a basic pedagogical template as shown in these diagrams. This is just a start.

When staff are accumulating more experiences in e-learning using Blackboard, they may raise some interesting ideas to us.

We welcome their suggestions and involvement. We want staff to tell us what they want to do in Blackboard. And in turn, we will facilitate their use by designing the pedagogical elements for their module structure identified by them.

FIGURE 1: The guideline provides a consistent structure with regard to the navigational links on the left panel and its interface flow.

FIGURE 2: In the Learning Materials page, the guideline stipulates the structure of the lesson topic, which start with the week number, followed by the title of the topic and end with a brief description of the topic.