::eLearning Fundi::

James

In my many reflections, I have found myself looking back. In the looking back, am always very inquisitive. Asking the sort of questions that am unlikely to get answers, and even where I get the answers, am not sure of what to do with the answers. But, with time, I have learnt the most important part of reflections is moving foward. From the point where one possed to do the reflections, moving into the future.

Reflections in daily living always come when something have gone wrong. Rarely do we, as human beings, stop and reflect if everything moves smoothly or we expect it to. And therefore, as usual, my reflections is of two eLearning projects that I have worked on this year that to me have failed. I will report on one that has bothered me todate. It was on eLearning facilitation.

The eLearning course was for participants in Africa - working mainly in NGOs. It was only offered online. The reasons I documented for its failure are (with the actual feedback I got from some of the participants):

Lack of sufficient IT Skills

• “I have been trying to open and watch the video on xxx in Module 2. I have been trying for along time it cannot open”
• “Thanks again this is my yahoo mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it but i'm still learning how the chart part stands so you can continue to help me understand how it works then”.(rocketmail.com is not yahoo or ymail.com)
• “I am sorry that I have not progressed very well in the course. I had changed the password as advised. I found that I could not login with the new password. Yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to rectify this problem. I have finally been given another password by the administrator. I tried to login with the new given password I still cannot login.”

Lack of Internet Connectivity

• “Thank you James for the follow up I have had problems with our internet for the past week”
• “Indeed one rested well, however I am having challenges in getting thru, you can skype [me] on xxxxxx”

Lack of time to commit to the course

• “Thank you James for the follow up I have had problems with our internet for the past week but before that week I was doing training for the rest of the days otherwise am back to the office”.
• “Thanks for the message and the new option for the next chat. It is of great dismay to reveal that I will not be available for both chat sessions as per your proposal. I will be facilitating in a cooperative meeting in one of the rural communities here in [my country]”.
• “Dear James  ...I am well, but busy with outreach courses that I teach. I will come to the office and finish all my pending assignments”.
• One of the participants’ email addresses always had an “out of office” auto-responder.

My reflection questions were, what if all the participants in the course had the skills and access to resources required, would it have had an impact? What if they did not have the time but had all the resources and skills? What is a best match of skills and other requirements for an online learner?

Tags: eLearning | eLearning challenges | Online facilitation | Facilitation | Africa | James | eLearning Fundi | Connectivity | Internet | Lack of Skills | Time to Learn | Reflect | Reflections

James

I have been missing in action, rather my participation for the last few months in the blog has been low. Not that nothing eLearning has been happening with me, but just that too much was written about it and not posted here. Not also that whatever wasn’t posted here wasn’t important.
I have been thinking about what eLearning can be in Africa, if all the obstacles and barriers removed it can prosper. But wait a minute, we are always reminded and reminding ourselves of our weakness, our inadequacies, our insufficiencies, and more often of our past failures that we become pessimistic of the future, we become procrastinators or non-starters, and people who will always see and hear the back side of things. There is the usual rhetoric of seeing the opportunities, in every situation and context, where its said that a pessimist with see a glass as half-empty while an optimist will see it as half-full.
How often have we heard and read news of how Africa as a whole is no ready for the digital revolution and eLearning specifically? How often have we talked of the lack of access to digital resources in Africa, the bandwidth, the human capacity, the prohibitive and restrictive policies and regulations, the lack of ‘African’ content on the Internet, the poor electricity and related infrastructure; the lack of policy makers support; the limited or lack of financial resources; and of how our socio-cultural issues are very incompatible with what eLearning espouses? How often have we looked at closing debate on the questions of our weakness, inadequacies, insufficiencies, and past failures? Have we let these questions to blind us to the extent of seen an opportunity just because it is canvassed between illusional barriers? Have we attempted to turn this barriers (or identified Threats and Weakness in the SWOT analysis to Strengths and Opportunities)? I guess we are still seeing the glass as half full.
A story is told of how two shoes manufacturing companies in Europe sent there marketing gurus to an ancient country in the tropics to look for prospects of diversifying and extending their brands market. On reaching this country, where as it were, the natives did not wear shoes, the two gurus returned to their companies with two different verdicts. Representative of one of the companies (say Company A) reported: People in that country is so primitive that they do not, as it were, nor do they need shoes. Investing our brand in that country would be the worst thing (since the sinking of the Titanic). The marketer from the rival company (Company B) reports: The country has an explored market that is just waiting for us to venture into it. A market that we will have no competitors, and the only thing we need to do is to show the natives of the country the benefits of wearing shoes, and off we have the market for our shoes!
Incidentally, some of those doing the marketing for Africa, are seeing a market (which some would say is digitally unexplored) that has no potential or opportunity for eLearning as the case were with Company A’s representative. They fail to see how the simple possibilities, benefits, advantages, opportunities, potential and the future that come along with the use of eLearning are. It is sad, to know that most of these crusaders of inadequacies are Africans themselves. This is not to say that we do not have our shortcomings, or there aren’t any barriers or hindrances to the use of eLearning in Africa. Rather, we should first look at what we pose to benefit from in the use of eLearning, and the work on the barriers. We should not try and paint a gloomy picture of our wonderful continent just because we are looking for a collaborator or donor or development partner (or any such entity) without putting ourselves first, and knowing what we are seeking to achieve at the end. Unfortunately, this can only be achieved for the good of all if we, as a continent are devoid of the mentality of weakness, inadequacy, our insufficiency, and of fear past failures. To this end, I salute those of us who have soldiered in educating and advocating for the use of eLearning based on what we have, and what we can do – and we can reach heights only if we could use 10% of our current resources.
For one, we can achieve this by educating the masses and more importantly the policy makers of the benefits of eLearning: of the need of creating a workforce that is knowledge-economy ready that has special information- and knowledge-handling skills brought about by the use of ICTs; of the need create regional, continental and international networks that can deliver education and facilitate learning using ICTs; of the need to provide flexibility in content, delivery, pace, place and time of learning afforded to us by the use of eLearning; of the need to provide easy learning and learning process management using digital technologies like learning management systems; of the need to create repositories of intellectual and human capital that can be accessed and queried using ICTs; of the need to extend learning from the confines of a formal classroom; of the need to allow academic partnerships strengthened by the use of ICTs, and also of the need to encourage life-long learning.
Perhaps, when we do this (by showing first, then talking then letting them to do) all those who see a half-empty class will start seeing the potential of the half content of the glass, or even something that could fill the glass. Maybe this is possible, if when you all have read this; you don’t start questioning your weaknesses, our inadequacies, our insufficiencies, and your past failures BUT YOU SHOW AND TELL. You walk the talk, or simply put our money where our mouths are.

Tags: Africa | eLearning | eLearning Africa | elearning Benefits | eLearning challenges | eLearning failure | money | talk Loading

James

In doing this blog, I did not have the right title that would capture the message I need to convey. I started of with “E-learning Technology and Tools for the Medical Field” later to “Advances in e-learning tools for e-health” to “Advances in E-Learning tools for Online Health Profession and Education” and finally to the one appearing here. Although the papers discussed here are from the medical field, the tools and approaches can used in any discipline for an online learning experience. The quest to write this blog was triggered by two articles published recently, dealing particularly with e-learning tools and technologies for the medical field. Boulos, Maramba and Wheeler (2006) demonstrate a set of Web 2.0 tools available for use in the medical field while Clegg and Heap (2006) expounds on ways of dealing with the challenges of e-learning in the medical field. It is worth mentioning that both journal articles are available as “Open Access”.

Web 2.0 tools is a collection of website features that seek to take control of both their use and content to the end users and have certain characteristics like simplicity and flexibility, provision of rich user experience, compatibility with a variety of media and devices, Open to access, decentralized and using the web as a platform. These tools include but not limited to Wikis, Blogs, Podcasts, social software and RSS(Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication).

Boulos and colleagues (2006) argue that the Web 2.0 tools and specifically blogs, wikis and podcasts are easy, cheap and easily available especially because they are distributed as Open Source. They continue to say that “if effectively deployed, wikis, blogs and podcasts could offer a way to enhance students', clinicians’' and patients' learning experiences, and deepen levels of learners' engagement and collaboration within digital learning environments”. Podcasts “have the potential of offering superior support for auditory learners....and visual learners in case of vodcasts”. The authors note however, that these tools have their own disadvantages like being prone to vandalism because of their openness, copyright infringements, anonymity of wiki authors especially where such wikis are to be used for assessment purposes. To counter these disadvantages the authors recommend moderation and monitoring of open wikis and blogs which can be time consuming; using a closed scenario where the access to the tools is restricted to a certain group of people; and seeking copyright/patent approvals when posting copyrighted/patented information on the blogs and wikis. On the issue of pedagogy and teaching practices, the authors recommend that “research should be conducted to determine the best ways to integrate these tools into existing e-Learning programmes for students, health professionals and patients, taking into account the different, but also overlapping, needs of these three audience classes and the opportunities of virtual collaboration between them.”

Clegg and Heap (2006) shows innovative ways that can be used to deal with the challenges of elearning, especially e-moderation in contexts where learners are independent and the tutors take the roles of facilitators and resource persons. In their paper they address the questions raised by this approach:

• How do facilitators recognize the need to intervene in discussions?

• How successful are they at recognizing potential intervention points?

• What style of facilitation is appropriate in the context of e-learning?

• How do facilitators promote independent learning within the module?

• How do facilitators balance the need to give students space to solve their own problems with the need to address anxieties that students may feel in an e-learning environment?


To deal with these questions, they review three message boards that “can be considered to represent three levels of a hierarchy of abstraction in term of the cognitive skill required by the student.” At each level, they recommend a number of facilitator interventions:

Level 1 - presenting self, relating to each other, making sense of self in relation to others; In this level, the facilitator should be responsive, nonjudgmental, encouraging, promoting discussions and descriptions, validating feelings, acknowledging concerns, giving advice on resources, and acting with prudent inaction(purposefully doing nothing).

Level 2 - relating new concepts to practice, making sense of professional relationships and clinical environments.
In this level the facilitator should demonstrate that is available and listening to the learners, probe and tease out of professional issues, give online support, providing additional resources, give positive feedback and reinforcements, raise subjects for debates and link theory to practice.

Level 3 - relating new (statistical) concepts to challenging academic materials.
At this level the students have some level of control of their learning process and the role of the facilitator is to maintain positive relationships with students, giving clear and positive feedback aimed at developing professional and academic confidence, challenging misconceptions, questioning global statements and ambiguities, encouraging students – especially on intellectual risk-taking and interactivity in difficult concepts, encouraging students independence, clarifying expectations of academic work and encouraging accuracy of referencing.

To achieve this, the facilitator needs to be equipped with facilitation skills. If facilitators adopted the model by Clegg and Heap, some of the concerns raised by Boulos and colleagues would be dealt with making a very successful learning experience for both learners and facilitators.

References

Boulos, M., Maramba, I., & Wheeler, S. 2006,Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education, BMC Medical Education 2006, 6(41). Available from http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/41 (accessed September 3, 2006).

Clegg, P., and J. Heap. 2006. Facing the challenge of e-learning: Reflections on Teaching Evidence-Based Practice through Online Discussion Groups. Innovate 2 (6). Available from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=290 (accessed September 3, 2006).

Further Reading

O'Reilly, T,. 2005. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, self published on http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html [Accessed September 3, 2006]

Tags: active community | Blogs | eLearning | eLearning challenges | new generation | Online facilitation | Open Access | Podcasts | RSS | web 2.0 | web based tools