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| Structure of course within our virtual learning environment, MOLE |
Last
September ScHARR (School of Health and Related Research) here at the university offered a brand new programme for distance learning, online postgraduate
study: the MSc in International Health Technology Assessment, Pricing and Reimbursement. Catchy title! The course can be taken as a full MSc, Diploma,
Certificate or even single module options. It is delivered entirely online as a
part-time course for working students. The pedagogical model was derived from
the author’s own work for the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) evaluating
student experience within this population (Carroll 2011, 2009). One of the findings of this work was that
working students, under pressure from work and domestic responsibilities,
responded better, i.e. felt greater control of their learning, when the time
available for completing exercises and interacting was not always restricted to
a single week. Working students could find time within a 2-week period to work
through materials and interact, but struggled when faced with tighter
week-by-week deadlines. For this reason, all materials are delivered as 2-week
“blocks”. This was the basic structure adopted for delivering materials.
The
programme leaders created a model for all module leads to follow when
producing their materials (some converting existing materials, some creating
materials from scratch), taking them from their E1 forms (for new modules) to
the final version for the Virtual Learning Environment (known at the University of Sheffield as 'MOLE'). The last stages use the My Online Page Editor (MOPE) tool. The model is described in Figure 1 below...
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| Figure 1: ScHARR 6-stage model for developing materials |
As more
module leaders and tutors became involved in delivering on the programme, it
became necessary to provide more detail, to open the “black box” of Stage 3, to
describe the steps to be taken in combining lectures, guided reading and
exercises or tasks in a systematic and structured fashion in any 2-week
“block”.
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| Figure 2 - structure of a learning block |
A 2-week block can have up to 4 or 5 iterations of this model if the exercises are relatively small or a single iteration if the formative exercise is a single substantial piece of work. For example,
Weeks 1-2 might consist of:
1 or 2 screencast lectures (not more than 20 minutes each) + a Multiple Choice Questionnaire (MCQ); some guided reading + an online discussion; then guided reading + an individual wiki exercise with exemplar or personalised feedback;
Weeks 3-4 might then consist of :
4 or 5 lectures (not more than 20 minutes each) + some guided reading + 1 large piece of formatively assessed work
The key is
the application of variety in the delivery of materials, and the methods used
to test and explore students’ understanding of what they are being taught and what
they have learned. A student’s understanding of an idea, principle or concept
can be assessed in multiple ways, by MCQs, by completing either a short or
substantial exercise, by engaging in discussion or group work.
Variety of
tasks offers a means of providing students with problem-solving interaction
that is intended to be more challenging, stimulating and thought-provoking
than a “1 week, 1 task” or “read this,
write that” approach to online learning.
We have
found that such diversity in methods of interaction and collaboration enhances
the learning experience of students engaging online.
Although
designed with the 2-week “block” and online learning in mind, this conceptual
model offers a generic “toolkit” for structuring online content for education
purposes.
Chris Carroll and Luke Miller
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