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0:00
Hi, welcome to my talk on organising
modules for online learners.
My name is Sarah Jane Cashman and
I'm based at Waterford Institute
of Technology in Ireland.
0:15
I'm going to cover several different
topics over the course of this talk, and
they're all focussed upon setting up
your online environment to make it as
accessible and engaging for
learners as possible.
We're going to look at visuals,
how to structure your content, and
how to deal with materials and content.
0:31
Jumping straight in, why is it
important to organise your modules for
the online learner?
Why shouldn't we just pop up
a folder full of lecture notes?
It's probably already sitting there on
your computer and it's ready to go.
There are lots of reasons, but the main
reason is to help learners to successfully
navigate and
engage in the online space, and for
that, it's all about setting it up for
success on day one.
This means making your online space
engaging, easy to use, interactive,
accessible, and useful for revision.
In a standard face-to-face environment,
you set the sequence and
all of the activities, so
you have a plan going in,
the way through the module is shown to
the learner and it's easy for them to use.
It's shown to them in the correct order,
in useable formats,
the relative importance of
the topics becomes really clear, and
if they realise that they need help to
follow they can ask you in real time, so
they might just put their hand up, or
interrupt, or that kind of thing, or
they might wait till the end of
the section and then ask questions.
You might look at the class and realise
that they need more help on something and
you react directly to that.
The problem is that none of this is
at all obvious in the online space.
Even if you present the same information
purely linearly, it won't be
obvious how these things tie together or
how the learner should approach it, and
that's why it's so important to figure
out how to organise your online space.
In this unit, I'm going to
explain ways to approach this,
relatively easy ways in most cases.
How to organise your module online
to set it up for learner success.
You do all of this by looking at
your module from three perspectives,
