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A
Anonymous
February 24, 2010
Question

My question is this: Can good teaching be enhanced with new technology?

  • February 24, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 1030 views

Can good teaching be enhanced with new technology? Adobe eLearning Suites is certainly a high-end product with many users and a lot of finance and research behind it. My question is why? Where is eLearning going and, again, is face-to-face teaching going the way of the dodo as a result of this new type of technology?

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    1 reply

    Lilybiri
    Lilybiri
    Legend
    February 24, 2010

    Hello,

    Just to avoid any confusion: I'm not an Adobe employee, just a user of some Adobe products, such as Captivate and eLS.

    Do not have really much time, but cannot wait to give my personal view on your question. I'm an academic, have been teaching since may years (still do) in a college. Truely believe that our first priority is to provide our students with what they will need for their future. The environment they are living in is so different from the environment I grow up as a student, so teachers/trainers/coaches (do not call myself a pure 'teacher' anymore) have to take that into account. Students of this generation are called 'digital kids', but the truth is a lot more complex. But something is sure: they are learning more than ever not only in colleges, schools, but by many other channels. We have to accept that and try to use whatever is possible to realize our goal: provide them with what they will need for their future.

    I adore F2F-teaching, and am sure my students will confirm that I'm not so bad at it, but am conscious that the rentability of using only that kind of teaching is limited. Even if you use all kind of media in the classroom. So switched to sort of blended learning: classroom teaching combined with offering all kind of learning assets to be used for self-study (most of them created with eLS). In the last semester of the curriculum I even try to abandon classroom teaching, just offering assets and asking students to specialize (in small groups) about some subjects they will have to present, explain to their peers. I'm using social media, but without any obligation: forums, wiki, twitter.. Believe that it is not possible any more to teach using only one tool: to reach as many students as possible, one has to use a mix of tools so that every student can choose the ones that are most suited for his learning style.

    Some extra advantages of developing learning modules, assets: I can use them for online students (about 15% in our college), for Erasmus students (translation is a lot easier than for paper courses) and for post-graduate programs.

    I'd love to have a discussion about this topic (this is certainly not the right place), just wanted to offer my personal 2 cents,

    Lilybiri

    A
    Anonymous
    February 24, 2010

    Lilybiri, thank you so much (!) for your passionate and timely reply, as you're obviously very busy with school this time of year. It was captivating (no pun intended!).

    I do wish I could find a piece of research (quantitative/statistical) that would actually SHOW the difference multimedia makes now in educating. Such as, there were 60 students, 30 using f2f and 30 using modules for learning (or, say, 30 control and 30 test students, whatever) and from pretest to posttest, say, the test group learned 360% more over a 6-month period than the control group over the same period, blahblahblah, something like that. I am a freelancer working with an oil and natural gas company that uses multimedia modules for teaching employees in the business; and we are looking for a substantive answer to the question I asked above. I have been researching this for months and for the life of me, I cannot find anything that is clear. Do you know of anything or have you done these studies on your own perhaps?

    Surely you will have little time to respond, but I'd love to hear from you again with more of your ideas!

    best,

    lp

    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    February 25, 2010

    Hi there

    I'm not Lilybiri of course, but here are my own insights.

    The way I view it is that there is a LOT of training that is just mind numbingly rote. This is this and that is that and do you agree you have viewed the training? Then sign here. Basically it's nothing more than a series of "Cover your assets" PowerPoint slides that you need to present to the user. They have to agree they have seen them. And for this type of training, something like Captivate just rocks. It allows offloading the mind numbing stuff to the presentation and the presenter no longer has to travel to various locations to present. The end user can simply view the presentation and be done with it.

    One of the ways I earn my living is by facilitating Captivate classes. I say this because you were asking about users actually LEARNING material. Here's where I see something like Captivate winning out over a live instructor led class. With a recent class I was asked about something that I repeatedly said in class. I was shocked. I thought, were you not listening? How did you possibly manage to miss that? So this is where I could see something like Captivate excelling. By offering a way for the user to repeat a segment as many times as needed in order to allow it to sink in.

    Just some thoughts... Rick

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