Saturday, March 27, 2010

Cognitive Tea Breaks In E-learning Courses!

Tea breaks for an e-learning course! Wacky? Why not? Most of us must be familiar with Cognitive Overloading while learning. We include quick checks in courses to break the monotony every 15 minutes or so. But what if drag-and-drop also becomes monotonous for an experienced e-learner?

I was thinking if we could have jazz and song breaks every 15 minutes. Of course, the song, T-shirts, and tattoo marks on the dancing avatars will carry learning schemas relevant to the course! The jazz breaks can have meditation and simple yoga poses too.

Browsed the Youtube and found two song cum learning videos!




Apart from dancexercises, you can keep a separate tab named "Jazz Learning" that is visible throughout the course. And the learner can participate in these fun-learning sessions whenever they are bored! The jazz sessions can also contain motivation movies for completing the course - like good performance on the job, better appraisals and more. Thus, e-learning dropouts can be reduced. Aha, an ambitious short-cut for a genuine problem. Nevertheless, there is no harm in experimenting!

PS: When I was in college, we had a similar jam session for our management course in final year engineering stream. Each one of us had to present a syllabus topic depending upon our talents – games, puzzles, plays, seminar, and I was asked to write a limerick. I did write an incorrect limerick and sing it in class too ;)

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Is Education Complete Without Practice?

I read in a newspaper that travel, watching programs in TV, or attending a seminar can be considered as education. But is the learner or watcher really educated at the end of this knowledge sharing or viewing episode? Let us first look at a formal definition of Education and Practice from Wikipedia.

Education in the broadest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another. Etymologically the word education contains educare (Latin) "bring up", which is related to educere "bring out", "bring forth what is within", "bring out potential" and ducere, "to lead".

Practice or practise (verb form in Standard English) is the act of rehearsing a behavior over and over, or engaging in an activity again and again, for the purpose of improving or mastering it, as in the phrase "practice makes perfect". Playing a musical instrument well takes a lot of practice. It is a method of learning and of acquiring experience.

Coming back to the example of Travel as education, travel or a picnic is an exciting cultural experience. But travel is an informal education process that does not include practice. The tourist guide is not going to ask you to narrate the history of the fabulous monument he/she just described to you.Or to make a pot! Unless you are a charismatic host for a reality travel show, you will not be journalling, blogging, or you-tubing your travel experiences!

So, is informal education complete without practice? What is the syllabus for you to get an informal degree or diploma?  Have you retained the information from a seminar? Can you take a seminar i.e transfer the talk you heard to another crowd?

So, the lack of practice or repeating, brainstorming, and analyzing what you have learnt is missing in informal education. So, is informal education complete or incomplete? Or is it that you are educated but not learned?

Would like to hear from U! Put in your comments and feedback :)

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Instructional Design(ID) Review Checklist

Instructional Design Review of a storyboard or any educational content is based on many parameters. I have designed an ID review checklist that can be used as a quick reference when you want to review/analyze any content instructionally.

The checklist in Excel file format has 7 sections/sheets, namely:
  1. Objectives
  2. Flow and Language
  3. Instructional Strategy
  4. Presentation
  5. Practice-feedback
  6. Accessibility
  7. Points to consider for Analysis and Design 
Each section has various parameters that you test the content on. The reasons for each instructional check and examples are listed. Few interesting websites with relevant content are also listed.

Click here to view the Instructional Design (ID) review checklist.