Evangelising eLearning, Flipped Classroom

This week is when  I get the chance to evangelise to staff the benefits if adopting an eLearning – Online learning, Blended learning – Flipped learning component to courses. Being able to find testimonies from far and wide that support a range of improvements that may include aspects that range across achievement, attendance, student behaviour and even  staff teaching profiles are not difficult to find and often in the highly accessible from of an info-graphic. Of course when we look at any change / increase to working practice, there emerges understandably a sense of having the time available to implement the recommendations in order to realise the benefits in the first place, as would have been experienced by many of us I feel certain with the introduction of any new technology, take the vle for instance. But then as with now, you try to leverage the advantages, and if time is an issue, then it becomes time saving that you call in as the sweetener.

And so I find myself thinking, OK, the data seems to be there and makes this really worth looking into, but how do these changes manifest themselves in the daily running of classes? Take improved results for instance, would these translate into assignments being of a higher quality at first hand-in, so requiring a reduction in resubmissions; that would be a clear bonus. There are studies that report clear reductions in official disciplinary measures, some by two-thirds! Think of the corresponding reduction in class disruption and board meetings that this could save. Improvements to attendance and the likely impact that this could among other things such as your teaching observation grade; easilly impacted by a poor attendance ratio. Of course these are just speculations on my part, and to get down to the actual drivers in the data, I clearly need to actually meet and talk with practitioners, which hopefully will be taking place in the coming weeks.

 

As part of my presentation on this, I felt it was important establish a clear link or if you like continuity between historical and current practice and our future ambitions with eLearning. so to this end I created  slide that displayed in a phased style animation how the demands of an eLearning programme were in fact already supported by our vle training. A nice connection this one as it turned out that which has proved very useful during the week.

All in all the week has progressed really well so far, I have three more sessions to run and looking forward to bookings for training across the summer.
Please feel free to reply with your own experiences and ideas.

Bye for now.