I was recently presented with an
interesting situation, I have been tasked with adapting a blended
lecture course to make it accessible for students to take wholly as a
distance course. Part of this task is to film lectures which can then
be posted on the university VLE thus allowing distance students to
watch them and physical students to revisit them in their own time.
Due to a series of unfortunate events
two out of four speakers were unable to attend and the final speaker
not due until 3pm giving the students several hours to kill and no
lectures. Fortuitously both missing lectures had given their
presentations before and had been filmed so we could used the
recoding equipment in reverse to show the lectures from last year. In
addition to this, to create an element of interactivity I created
forums to go with each lecture to allow students to post questions
even though the lecturer was not there to answer them in person. I
encountered a little resistance from the academics at this as they
did not want to get drawn into a discussion in which they are
required to participate every day. Taking this on board as a very
valid point I went ahead and created the questions forum anyway (I
know – slap on the wrist) but prefixed it by telling the students
that the questions would be given single answers and were not open
for discussion.
In defence of my rather wilful
disobedience if the course is being opened up for total distance
learning there will need to be ways in which students can interact
with each other, with the materials and with the lecturers. So in
theory as part of delivering a lecture speakers may perhaps need to
add an additional hour into their schedules a few days after speaking
to log in to the forums and answer questions. If it is established
from the start what format the questions should be in and when and in
what form the speakers will respond all parties will know what to
expect. When moving into the world of distance learning, as my last
moodle post alludes to, communication is everything.
I was also given the opportunity to
observe students as they were watching the lectures in a way similar
to how they would if they were alone. However as there was not
lecturer present and talking was not quite so taboo the students
started a discussion mid lecture. It seems to me that this kind of
spontaneous discussion should, if possible, be captured without
disruption to the lecture. After the video had finished I encouraged
the students to go and start a discussion thread to see if they could
take the debate out of the classroom and into the VLE.
In an ideal world discussions could be
started and questions posted in real time via smartphones, ipads etc
and after the lecture from the comfort of home. As it stands at the
moment Blackboard does not load well on touch screen devices but that
is a battle for another day.
