Supporting Learning and Teaching Methods
Although current VLEs offer a significant step forward in terms of enabling the creation, management and sharing of learning resources, most current VLEs are limited in terms of the methods of learning and teaching they can adequately support. They do not have sufficient flexibility to allow students to take control of their own learning. For example, most VLEs do not allow students to set up their own discussion groups. To deal with this problem, researchers at the Open University of the Netherlands (Koper, 2003) analysed a range of different online course designs. They discovered that each of the course designs could be simply described as:
In other words, effective courses designed for use within VLEs will involve student and tutors carrying out learning tasks and accessing relevant materials and systems (discussion boards, etc). By focussing on each of the three key elements, people, activities and resources, VLE systems can be built and used in a flexible way. Tutors can develop course designs that:
are based around student activities (or tasks)
in which people (students and tutors) are assigned particular roles (for example group moderator, reporter etc.)
the students have access to resources (content and software systems) appropriate to each task.
The activities and resources can be reused across a range of courses. As outlined in the previous section, you can reuse activities and resources across a number of your own courses, or share them across your department or institution. A specific combination of activities and resources can be viewed as a mini lesson plan or 'learning design'. According to Oliver and McLoughlan (2003) a learning design is a 'set of learner activities and roles within a specific context whose completion is likely to bring about the development of particular forms of knowledge, skills and understanding'. Therefore, you may find it useful to look at the ways your colleagues have set up their courses within a VLE and may see an interesting learning design that you could reuse within a different teaching context. Your colleagues' design could be copied and you could repopulate the course with your own set of student activities and resource materials. Alternatively, you could integrate the same set of resources in different ways to suit varying teaching scenarios or the same lesson could incorporate different resources to suit students' special needs. Therefore, it is important to remember that learning designs can also be reused.
To help students learn effectively within the VLE, you need to plan tasks or activities that will help them gain knowledge and understanding of concepts. These activities will help your students in constructing their ideas about concepts through interactions with you (as their tutor), with other students and with learning materials: the students learn from the feedback they receive from you and their peers (Palinscar, 1998). Activities can range from something as short as reading an article and discussing core issues, to completing a group design project lasting several weeks. The former is likely to be composed of a single activity with an associated article, while the latter may integrate a range of activities and resources. Designing activities that can be reused or repurposed is of essential importance in ensuring that the design of your course can easily be updated or scaled up.
Until recently, online courses have been designed as large, monolithic blocks (Downes, 2000) , rather than as small chunks comprising activities and content resources that will allow courses to be much more easily scaled up, updated and repurposed for specific learning contexts. These chunks - reusable learning resources - are sometimes referred to as "Learning Objects".
