Social & Collaborative Learning
The interactions between people and groups where information, knowledge and insight are shared to collectively improve performance and build contextual understanding.
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Marc My Words: End User- and SME-created Content—Good Strategy, but Risky
Delegation is a key skill for instructional designers, especially when turning content development over to end users and subject matter experts. However, just as in any other management effort, it is vital to delegate with control. Here are some key errors you want to avoid.
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Supporting Critical Thinking in eLearning
eLearning design (and many authoring tools) may often support rote learning, recall of information, and acquisition of discrete skills, but not use of the information or skills to solve difficult problems, evaluate ideas, or settle arguments. Is there a way to use eLearning to develop or sharpen critical thinking skills? This article explores the question and suggests some answers.
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How to Create a Dynamic Social Learning Space with High Engagement
Building a healthy social learning community takes a lot of time and effort, and it requires thoughtful strategy and implementation in four key areas. Do the job right and you enable a dynamic environment for learning—but one that you do not own. Here is some expert guidance on this somewhat paradoxical idea.
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Ten Tips: Keep Learners Motivated in Your Open Online Cloud Course or MOOC (Part 6)
In an online course, running for several weeks with many participants who have different personal styles, come from different backgrounds, and speak different languages, keeping participants motivated is a significant challenge. Here are some tips from an experienced MOOC designer that will maintain the engagement and sense of fun.
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The Next Step for Learning: Practical Contextualization
Computing devices—especially mobile ones—continue to add sensors, to store and process more and more personal information (contacts, schedules, tasks, goals), and to connect more widely to other devices and to the Web. This context awareness opens huge learning opportunities. Are you ready? Here are some things to think about.
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eLearning Guild Research: What Are the Benefits of Social Learning?
Many people think social learning is new, but it isn’t. What’s new is the ability of instructional designers to leverage online social media as a strategy to support learning. Research can help you make better use of the new social channel in your practice. Patti summarizes the benefits and points the way to recent research you can use!
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Adding Learning Analytics to Your Open Online Cloud Course or MOOC (Part 5)
How do you analyze what happens in a MOOC? For such things as the behavior of the participants, where interactions between participants take place, what the quality of those interactions was, or how can the content improve? Learning analytics will tell you! This installment of the series on StartToMOOC focuses on the online resources you can use to evaluate your MOOC.
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How to Succeed in a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC)
Massive online open courses (MOOCs) are attracting a great deal of attention, but they require effort on the part of participants who want to be successful in them. Here is a guide to success in a MOOC. You may find it useful for yourself if you try a MOOC out, or you may want to provide these guidelines to learners if you are using MOOCs as part of your organizational strategy for learning.
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Nuts and Bolts: Assessing the Value of Online Interactions
There is no magic formula for assessing the value of social interactions; no formula like “two hours on LinkedIn + four comments in groups = tangible outcomes for the organization.” So how do you know time spent using social media isn’t wasted? Jane has some ideas you can use.
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Research for Practitioners: Social Interaction, Belief, and Learning
Do you learn more by interacting with a live person, or by interacting with a computer? Does the belief that you are interacting with another person (as opposed to a computer) affect learning? In this first installment of our new research review series, a study looks beyond the Turing Test. This article summarizes the findings and offers some implications for instructional design.