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Here’s a way to streamline an online course. Coursekit brings the learning management system [LMS] directly to the instructor and student-i.e. The Users-all for free.  The experience is focused on simple and elegant and includes the basics: a calender, file sharing, submitting assignments, and grading work.  One noticeable difference, compared to other LMS interfaces, is how Coursekit brings the user directly into ‘the classroom’ and not to the typical dashboard…which makes it more like a real classroom experience.

Just as a student would walk into a physical classroom, online students first appear in The Stream of the your online classroom and it has the feel of Facebook.  Unlike Facebook, within The Stream, students can upload; text, images, video, and audio.  Each element in The Stream brings up a side panel when you click on it. As Coursekit’s creator Joseph Cohen explains, “The result is that it turns short stuff into long stuff.”  This allows the ability to have a space to discuss in length and works much like a Twitter feed.

As for textbooks, Coursekit is pursuing an online free system for textbooks as well. “The textbooks of the future will not be textbooks,” Cohen says. But there will be a need for educational content, and much of that will be bought (remember, direct-to-instructor is already at the heart of that businesses). If all goes well, Coursekit is the seed of the storefront of the future for educational products, with a ready-made group of customers who are already logging in. All this might look something like Inkling.

In my humble opinion, it is all driving towards a more personalized experience for learning and it’s all quite exciting.

 

 

 

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Since August, I have been on a journey working with some fabulous educators, instructional designers and just all-round wonderful women drafting outlines and creating the content for a chapter that will be published in a book which is being published by the International Association for K-12 Online Learning [also known as iNACOL]. We just completed our draft of our chapter and are so excited.

This chapter will present a student-centered model for online teacher mentoring. The one-to-many online model is designed to be scalable, self-directed, and leverages social learning. The program, Self-Directed Learning [SDL] Support Model: Training Educators for Online Learning, introduces teachers to ideas of self-directed learning, partnering pedagogy, and metacognition while orienting new and prospective virtual teachers to the online learning environment. To maximize impact and sustainability, this program employs the Cognitive Coaching model through a social learning community.

Without giving away all our secrets -you’ll have to wait until the whole book Lessons Learned in Teacher Mentoring: Supporting Educators in K-12 Online Learning Environments is published [due out in the fall of 2012]- we explain ‘how’ we developed and taught an online course which has helped many educators-across Massachusetts- become better learners and in turn better educators.

Our chapter goes into great detail explaining how we used self-directed learning techniques and skills to teach educators how-to understand and use essential self-directed learning skills such as: goal setting, metacognition, motivation, critical thinking and time management.  We also discuss how we designed our online course, how we delivered it and how we improved it.

I can tell you that by implementing the use of social learning, collaboration and ePortfolios we have had a very good success rate with this online course. Here is what a few of our participants said about our course:

“This was a new way to approach teaching.”

“The course really helped me understand how to encourage and coach students not just around content but around linking content to their own goals in life.”

“It’s cool to watch students change over the course of the year. They start talking about what their goals are and what skills they’ve learned. Online learning puts their education in their own hands—it’s wonderful!”