5 septembre 2016

By Tony Bates. No institution can now afford to ignore demographics in its strategic planning, and in no area is this more true than in plans for online learning. Traditional distance education (print-based and until very recently, online distance education) has mainly attracted older students with already some experience of higher education. It has been seen as an ideal area for continuing professional education, and the growth of online professional masters degrees is evidence in support of this belief. More...

By Tony Bates. If you have read all previous nine posts in this series, you should now be aware of the following:

1. Online learning can be done well, or it can be done badly.
2. Online learning is a professional activity, with evidence-based best practices. You need to be aware of these best practices if you want to succeed in your online teaching.
3. There are certain conditions where online learning is likely to work, and others where it will be difficult to succeed.
4. You need then to choose the appropriate mix of online and face-to-face learning, dependent on the context in which you are working.
5. There are many different approaches and technologies that can be used in online learning. The best choices will depend on your specific learning context but you need to be aware of the choices.
6. Moving to online learning opens the opportunity to rethink the design of your teaching; indeed you will need to change from a lecture-type approach to a more interactive learning approach if you are to succeed online.
7. It is important to work with professional instructional designers and media producers if you want a high quality online course or program.
8. The technology, and to a lesser extent, the pedagogy of online learning continues to evolve.
9. Thus although, at least in the beginning, it is important to follow best past practices, you also need to be aware of new developments and the potential for innovation in your online teaching.
10. Really, in the future, online learning will not be considered different or separate from ‘teaching’. It will be an integrated, normal component of all teaching. So you might as well get to learn to use it well as soon as possible. More...

By Tony Bates. OK, now you’ve looked at most of the pros and cons of online learning, you’re now ready to start. But you want to make sure that if you are going to do online learning, you are going to do it well. What will that entail. More...

By Tony Bates. The short answer is, yes, of course, at least in the short term. This is because online teaching is the same as any other skill. When you first start, you have to learn a lot, and do things you haven’t done before. For instance, as I discussed in earlier posts, you have to think carefully about why you are using online learning, talk to colleagues and work with other professionals such as instructional and web designers, master the technology, such as video recording or a learning management system, and basically re-think and re-design your teaching. More...

By Tony Bates. I gave a short answer to ‘Why not just record my lectures?’ in the fourth post in this series, but it deserves a fuller answer. It is natural that faculty and instructors want to use an approach to teaching that is not only familiar and comfortable, but has been used for hundreds of years, so has passed the test of time. However, there are several reasons why recorded classroom lectures are not a good idea for online learning, at least not as the main form of delivering online courses. More...

By Tony Bates. If you have been following this series of blog posts, you have already started. It shows that you have an interest. However, you should see these blog posts more as a warm-up than the real game. Warm-ups are valuable. They save you getting hurt when you start playing, but they are not the real thing. So here are at least two quite different strategies for getting started into the real ‘game’ of teaching online. More...

By Tony Bates. This question ‘When should I use online learning?’ is difficult to answer in a short post because there are many possible reasons, and as always in education, the answers are absolutely dependent on the specific context in which you are working, but the reasons can be classified under three main headings: academic, market, and policy/administrative. More...

By Tony Bates. In the third post, I pointed out that MOOCs were just one of the many different types of online learning. In this post, I will provide more detail about the various approaches to online learning, and will also provide a personal evaluation of each approach in terms of quality. This post will be a little longer than normal, as there are not only many approaches to online learning, but the field is also rapidly changing and developing. More...

By Tony Bates. The global, cross-sector conference on technology supported learning and training (formerly Online Educa). OEB is organised by ICWE GmbH, an international events and communications company. More...

By Tony Bates. The Ninth EDEN Research Workshop in Oldenburg, Germany, will bring together researchers from all walks of life and provide a platform for engaging in discussion and debate, exchanging research ideas, and presenting new developments in ODL, with the goal of creating dialogues and forming opportunities for research collaboration. More...