Peer tutor training course - progress and collaboration :-)

Since my last post the Peer tutor training course in wikieducator has taken on a new look. Leigh spoke to Willie Campbell and asked her if she knew of any NZQA unit standards which may be appropriate for peer tutor training. Willie suggested two, one of which lead us to a very good third. They are units:
7095, Facilitate adult learners' individualised learning
7114 Coach adult learners
7093 Design learning sessions for adult education and learning.
These have been reformatted in the wiki and other content has been moved around to fit with these assessments. The Peer tutoring course is a five credit paper and these unit standards add to at least 15 credits so I won't be expecting students to complete every element of all three standards to achieve the peer tutor training course. However the Peer tutor training will staircase into further teacher training courses taught here at otago Polytechnic. The unit for Time management 12349
is also in the wiki under "Develop skills for tertiary study". I have started creating iDevices like readings, activities and assignments.
Leigh and I spent a bit of time this morning refining the structure of the course bearing in mind the bigger picture for the rest of the Polytechnic and how all our courses can link together. The structure follows Leigh's diagram with the addition of an index page for the activities. I'm very happy to discover that two new people are now interested in the wiki: Peer tutoring (Jim Tittsler and Brent Simpson) and their ideas are discussed on the Discussion page.
(Thanks, I will be trying out some of these ideas soon). Oh and we're going to try to have a skype conversation with Jim and Brent.

Wiki is coming along but still a solo effort :-(

I am making some progress on the wiki with adding content but I am becoming a bit disappointed that the collaborative nature of the wiki is yet to reveal itself to me. Despite advertising to my colleagues all around NZ that I am working on a project that could be of use to them I am still the only editor. I suppose it takes time for things like this to catch on. Also I have discovered that most people are reluctant to publish draft material for all the world to see. (Note to myself: Remember to ask Leigh for those names he thought I should contact to get some collaboration going). This week I went through some of my del.icious sites and created links to them from the wiki. I also had a look for useful YouTube videos but the speed of downloading was infuriatingly slow tonight. Serves me right for being so boring and staying home on a Friday night!

Investigations of Elluminate

Well I have made some progress investigating Elluminate. Thanks to Gary Dietz for sending me this link http://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/event/playback
and Terry, Bronwyn and Leigh for further discussions and demonstrations of this software. I can certainly see a use for it in the Learning Centre to support our distant students. An example of how we may use it would be in working one to one with a student helping them with the proof reading of their essay. The essay can be on the white board for both of us to view and we can speak to each other and talk about things that need changing or correcting. Another use would be to talk to a power point presentation. This presentation could be on any topic at all - say referencing, using a library catalogue, study skills. I would like to practise using it with another teacher at the Polytechnic who also wants (should) learn to use it.
Terry, Bronwyn and I thought it would be a good idea to invite all the teachers here at Otago Polytechnic using Blackboard to come to a meeting on a Friday afternoon (we will entice them with wine) and demonstrate Elluminate. Following this we would like to form a User's /Learners /support group which meets regularly. I am especially keen to do this with staff who are teaching open entry courses where there are higher numbers of Foundation level learners. I see Elluminate as one way of working (almost) f2f and 1:1 with these learners.

To do list...

Over the weekend I've been thinking about how to support students enrolled in distance science based courses. Some of these courses are moving to open entry next year so there will be an increasing number of students who do not have year 11 science (School Certificate Science). The Learning Centre could offer Elluminate tutorials on relevant topics such as chemistry and the cell to give these students the foundation knowledge they will need to succeed in these level 4 course. These tutorials could be run from the LC website and advertised through the various Blackboard courses operating.
I must investigate the use of Elluminate and similar software more fully. What are the other interactive synchronous tools available?
Comments as always welcome...

Revelations from wiki meeting

I hosted a meeting in my office for any staff here at Otago Polytechnic interested in wikieducator and about eight or nine turned up. Leigh has documented this thoroughly in his blog
I will go back and read it sometime. As for what I got out of the meeting, the thing that finally sunk in for me is how Blogs can be used as the interface with students and the wiki is really just the repository for the activities, readings, etc for the course. The Blog will be where I communicate with the students and direct them to specific pages in the wiki for the learning activities etc. I will also use the blog to direct them to other resources on the internet and embed vidoes etc into the blog. So its the BLOG that is the central tool here and everything else flows from that! (most of you probably knew that already - what do they say about learning? - it takes seven times hearing something repeated before you learn it!)

Progress with the "Virtual Learning Centre"

I am not making much progress with this part of the project at the moment because I am waiting for the Otago Polytechnic(OP) web site to be redeveloped. I have been told I will be given training in the new software so I can build our site. I have the vision of what I want to do and I have resources tagged and ready to go in - all I need is the platform! My vision of the site is to have nine or ten buttons which will represent the major "schools" at OP. A student who is studying say Automotive Engineering will click on the button named "automotive, mechanical and electrical eingineering" (this will be a picture of a machine or something visual and the name will appear when you scroll over it). When they click on this button they will go into the site for this "school" and see a range of support resources. These will include maths tutorials, study skills, writing skills etc - whatever is deemed appropriate for these students. This will require some input from the staff in this school.
If you are reading this please comment - do you think this vision will work, can you think of a better one?

Reflections at 3am in the morning

Having created my blog, uploading a couple of photos and playing around with the layout and colour scheme it is now time to get down and think about what I am really supposed to be doing. I essentially have two tasks;
1. Create an online presence for the Learning Centre and develop support mechanisms for our distant students.
2. Develop on-line short courses.

I will address the issues in no.1 first.

• What is Learning Support at a distance? It could be: synchronous tutorials with Elluminate, phone calls, email, voice message boards, text message boards, net meetings, video conferencing, CD Roms, an input into Blackboard courses and a Learning Centre website which is a repository of resources such as web sites, PDF notes, youtube videos...what else could it be?
• What sort of students are they? - In open-entry certificates taught on-line like Certificate in Health or Certificate in Animal Care what proportion are "re-entry" students and Foundation Learners? (i.e., "second- chance" learners with lots of gaps in their knowledge and possibly low literacy and numeracy skills). How digitally literate are they?
• What technology barriers will there be at the student end?
  
• What is the student's perception of being full-time - What do they think they should be getting for their money? How much access to teachers? How many printed notes and workbooks if any?
• David in his Blog http://massage-online.blogspot.com discusses the appropriateness of on-line delivery for kineasthetic learners and explores this more fully in wikieducator. I am going to try to expand on this and explore the specific needs of Foundation Learners and the minimum basic elements that should be found in the design of on-line or flexibly delivered courses. Do our courses here at Otago Polytechnic measure up? How can we improve them?
  

2. Develop on-line short courses

• I've created the outline of a Peer tutor training course on wikieducator
• This course will link to other short courses on Skills for Tertiary Learners (Who will be enrolling in these short courses?)
  

Both these tasks will require many hours of searching the internet for photo's, video's, web sites etc. Understanding all the licensing of the multimedia used and attributing authorship etc. Also, writing content and developing activities.
Final comment: I think Otago Polytechnic has about two hundred distant students which are all entitled to the same level of learning support as our on-campus students.

First Posting: Introduction

Hi everyone. I have finally taken the plunge and started my very own blog. In this blog I will be posting discussions around my work here at Otago Polytechnic as a Learning Advisor. I am attempting to up-skill in the area of Digital Information Literacy, so after some debate (with myself mainly) I have decided to journal my work - particularly the part which is to do with developing online academic support for Otago Polytechnic students. I have kicked off my foray into social networking with a Peer Tutor Training Course on wikieducator. You can find this at http://www.wikieducator.org/Peer_tutoring. So far I have only sketched an outline of the contents of the course and will create pages as I learn more and get the time. I am ever hopeful that some of you out there might contribute. It's very easy!