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

Personalization and the Type II Application of Technology
Evoking the Essence of the One-Room Schoolhouse
Liberty, cooperation, self-reliance, and choice

The following essay Rethinking the Student-Centered Classroom sets forth to describe how, through proper understanding of the nature of modern technologies, classrooms can become increasingly personalized for the student. This can be thought of in one small way as going back to the ways of the old one-room school house in rural communities: a model that, serving an assortment of ages and abilities was required by its very diverse nature to be personal.

I see the essence of the one-room schoolhouse as including, in part, liberty, cooperation, self-reliance, and choice.