e-bites

Mike Keppell – “Engaging learners in transformative learning: educational principles and strategies for eLearning.

Mike gave some good examples of work he is currently doing at Charles Sturt Uni – his main focus in this session was theoretical frameworks that can be used to inform elearning design to achieve real, contextual, relevant content that facilitates learning.

- Theories and models : make sure we have good theory informing our practice.

- Designing authentic learning environments: real world relevance, complex tasks to be investigated, opportunity to reflect, competing outcomes – He uses all these as a framework when designing learning.

- Enhancing integration for application in real life: problem based learning. change paradigm to problem – coach – problem solver. In problem based learning we don’t have all the info to solve the problem – we need to activate prior learning.

- Transformative learning: Meizrow – getting people to question what they;re doing. He used the example of project at uni he is at – getting teaching fellows to re-design courses using flexible/blended learning.

- Conclusion: authenticity is essential, using feedback and feedforward – improve what people know and keep them moving forward.

Debbie Kerrins – Making the shift from traditional learning to eLearning tools at Austrade.

Debbie gave an overview of the learning strategy in place at Austrade and where e-learning fits in.

Some of her key points where:

- linked e-learning to business strategy from the outset – they didn’t start with compliance, instead they went straight into the business and linked it to what people do and skills they needed to do their jobs.

- e-learning is linked to building staff’s core capabilities (export facilitation, strategic leadership, people and business mgmt, partnership and relationship building).

- online training is not the only form of training – it’s one of many ways to reach the business.

- e-learning lets them manage content relevancy and accuracy. paper based material gets outdated quickly.

- their SME’s update the content – L&D provides the instructional design advice.

- they use simple designs due to bandwidth issues etc.

- their e-learning had strong promotion behind it – It’s called “My learning’ – they wanted that connection, self directedness, onus on staff managing their learning.

- they have created internal “certificates” tied in to their core capabilities -this is a way of overcoming resistance and increase buy in.