translating a face to face course online

The next task is to select a topic or key concept from a course you are currently teaching face-to-face and spend a a few minutes thinking about how this might translate into standalone interactive learning materials. Also to do this in relation to the following guidelines on good quality material:

• Help the learners find their way into and around your subject -- by by-passing or repeating sections where appropriate.
• Tell them what they need to be able to do before tackling the material.
• Make clear what they should be able to do on completion of the material -- e.g. in terms of objectives.
• Advise them on how to tackle the work -- e.g. how much time to allow for different sections, how to plan for an assignment, etc.
• Explain the subject matter in such a way that learners can relate it to what they know already.
• Encourage them sufficiently to make whatever effor is needed in coming to grips with the subject.
• Engage them in exercises and activities that cause them to work with the subject-matter -- rather than merely reading about it.
• Give the learners feedback on these exercises and activities -- enabling them to judge for themselves whether they are learning successfully.
• Help them to sum up and perhaps reflect on their learning at the end of the lesson.

(Rowntree 1990, pp. 82-83)


Some things come to mind around the topic of online privacy, which relates quite nicely to teaching in an online environment (although ideally one that is not so locked down that you can't access Facebook, Twitter or similar. You could run a number of interesting exercises that, for example including a google search by the student for their own online profile - to see how much information is available about them online - follower by discussion or possible (careful, edited if they like) group comparison.

There's plenty of material out there that can be straightforwardly read or acessed, so that's not a limitation.

My concern with this is frontloading - as I said previously, its very important that everybody knows what they are doing, but also you can easily loose an initital 'keenness' to participate if you have to read and remember a whole course's worth of instructions at the start. A good model to draw upon might be the early levels of many contemporary video games. Nobody learns how to play these by reading the manual, but rather the early levels are set up to teach you how to play the game - in line with a lot of education theory - they get you to perform small tasks that building up to more complex ones, there's lots of obvious feeback if actions work or not.

Structure's important - I've had to jump around a little bit to find the next task in this module today. And I think I'm spending more time on things than I might need to - that said, I'm getting something out of writing.