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Climbing Bloom’s Taxonomy in Online Learning |
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Written by Robert Bilyk
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Friday, 08 June 2012 15:50 |
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In support of online learning, we often write about climbing Bloom’s taxonomy with the help of learning objects created from templates. Bloom’s taxonomy refers to the work of Dr. Benjamin Bloom who wrote his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in 1956. Since then the taxonomy has been widely used in curriculum and instructional design to classify the types of educational activities that require students to think. Those activities engage students in remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating. Instructors understand that a curriculum should not only engage students in recalling facts, but should involve students in understanding principles and concepts, applying their knowledge in novel situations, analyzing information with their new understanding, making critical choices and creating something. ‘Creating something’ requires knowledge of the facts, understanding of the concepts and, possibly, an analysis of a problem situation and judgment about what solutions might best apply. ‘Creating something’ is a synthesis of all these things and an observable outcome of what the student has learned. Climbing Bloom’s taxonomy means helping students progress through the recall of information to higher orders of thinking such as understanding, applying, analyzing, etc. As online learning instructors, we look for opportunities to help students ‘climb the ladder’. In pathophysiology, we might create activities that help students recall the various toxins produced by bacteria or the normal ranges expected from blood tests, but that wouldn’t be enough unless students understood how that information should be applied. |
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Student-Centric eLearning |
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Written by Robert Bilyk
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Monday, 20 June 2011 01:56 |
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In March 2010, Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), in a study entitled Elearning: Separating Fact from Fiction, quoted an anonymous eLearning professional on what kept him up at night. “My greatest concern is that the courses I produce will be as dull as the courses I take.” The concern was warranted. Dull eLearning courses abound. It's easy to produce them. Ironically, the point of ADL's study was that learner satisfaction was fairly high when learners chose their courses, had strong instructor presence and interacted with the content at a level that included assessments and low-level simulations. Notwithstanding the ADL study, the facts are apparent. Match a boring course to a learner who is not independent, not goal oriented and whose locus of control is far removed from him and you have an all-too-common result: attrition and learner dissatisfaction. The remedy to boring courses is student-centric design. It's not a model or theory -- it's an attitude. Just as in a dramatic production, every beat considers the audience, so too in eLearning, every chunk considers the student. It is concerned with relevance, motivation, emotion, curiosity, and action well before the innate qualities of the content. |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 26 June 2011 22:53 )
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Reaching ‘Hard To Reach’ Children |
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Written by Andy Hannaford
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Friday, 13 March 2009 17:30 |
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There are groups of children that do not attend school for a variety of reasons. Some may have medical conditions that make it difficult or impossible to attend school. Others might be teetering on the brink of exclusion, while some students just cannot face leaving the house to attend school. For some, many avenues and strategies have been attempted to engage them in the learning process, but sadly these have stalled or failed. It was for these students that in September 2003, ConnectEd Online Learning was established, to find another way to engage and educate those students not able to attend school for whatever reason. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 13 March 2009 17:53 )
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eLearning Strategies That Work |
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Written by Robert Bilyk
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Wednesday, 03 March 2010 18:06 |
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About the challenge Whether it makes sense or not, people with no instructional design background are being asked to create boatloads of eLearning. College teachers generate learning objects and post them to learning management systems. Human resource personnel use tools like Captivate and pump out content in support of one thing or another. Technical writers are called upon to create interactive media. I've had occasion to review a lot of college eLearning and recently I looked at eLearning resources produced in companies by people unschooled or inexperienced in interactive design. The stuff was dreadful. On the flip side, I've worked for design companies that engaged writers, graphic designers, media producers and programmers in the production of eLearning. The results were wonderful; the cost was dreadful. Obviously, it is not always feasible to take every learning objective and turn it into a six figure project. Sometimes we are called upon to produce a resource on a shoestring budget. But it doesn't always have to be dreadful. In fact we can learn a few things from the pros and make our eLearning interactive, engaging and, above all, effective. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 03 March 2010 19:26 )
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Getting Started with eLearning |
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Written by Robert Bilyk
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Sunday, 11 January 2009 18:10 |
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Getting started with eLearning can be daunting. You are a college professor or a high school teacher or a corporate trainer. For years you’ve heard about online learning and learning management systems like Blackboard and Moodle. You recognize that these are just tools. The tools are made to be simple to use – so the learning curve can’t be that great, or else few people would do it. But what about the instruction? What about what this whole business of eLearning is really about: teaching and learning. In the classroom, you know how to build rapport with students, how to get them excited about a topic and how to engage them. But what happens in the online world? You have text and graphics. How can you use text and graphics to motivate students – to engage them? I’ve prepared a tutorial that introduces you to the greatest asset you have in preparing for eLearning. (That’s right. I’m keeping it a secret.) I’ve also included examples of instructional strategies that can be used in teaching a subject. The instructional strategies are supported by the LodeStar Authoring tool. The examples are built around the topic of Electronic Health Records. The topic could have been on anything and in any discipline. The main point is that we see how different learning objectives can be supported by different strategies. One of the important skills in designing instruction – for the classroom or the online learning environment – is to understand the type of learning and to match instructional strategies that will increase the probability that learning will take place. That’s the point of the discussion in the Intro to Effective eLearning and the numbered tiles that follow. So please join us on this excursion. Just click on the link below. http://www.engagelearner.org/lodestar/ehr/EHR_showcase |
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