Guest post by: Robin Neidorf

Win Teach Beyond Your Reach!

If you’re asking yourself, “Is running a distance learning program for me?” then read on. Use the following as a checklist while you’re evaluating online education tools. It’s an excerpt from the book Teach Beyond Your Reach by Robin Neidorf. The e-learning guide takes a practical, curriculum-focused approach to setting up and running successful online classes. The guide for new and experienced distance educators allows them to develop and deliver quality e-learning courses and training sessions.

Do:

Ask informed questions.

Demo a tool before you commit to using it.

Try freeware or open-source tools.

Go for low tech whenever possible.

Ask potential students for their input.

Network with other instructors; ask them what they use; compare notes, success stories, and battle scars.

Keep up with changing technology; treat yourself to an occasional seminar or conference.

Stay open, creative, and flexible about your teaching.

Assume that you will find the right solution (although it may not be the one you thought you’d find).

Don’t:

Use technology for its own sake; it must enhance the learning and instructing experience or it will be merely distracting (at best) or a barrier (at worst).

Change your requirements, objectives, or audiences without keeping your partners (especially your technology partners) informed.

Assume everything will work as promised; test and retest (preferably with members of the learner population) before the course begins.

Ignore the unwillingness of your students to use a tool; sometimes they’re not just ready and you may need to take smaller incremental steps than you’d like.

Let failure or challenges discourage you from believing in the possibilities of distance education.

“Get married” to a particular tool or solution; it might not be all things to all situations.

Use the tool as a substitute for good course design and delivery.

Migrate content from one tool to another in a cut-and-paste approach.

BY ROBIN NEIDORF

Robin Neidorf is the author of Teach Beyond Your Reach: An Instructor’s Guide to Developing and Running Successful Distance Learning Classes, Workshops, Training Sessions and More (Information Today, Inc., 2006), soon to be published in an updated second edition. She has taught communications and writing through the University of Phoenix Online and has co-taught creative writing online through the University of Gävle in Sweden.  As a consultant, she has helped organizations develop and implement successful distance learning and self-paced tutorial programs. Robin holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Teach Beyond Your Reach Free Book Contest

Contest time

[Update! Congratulations to David, who won the drawing for Teach Beyond Your Reach by Robin Neidorf. This contest may be over, but you're still welcome to keep sending ideas for picking a learning management system or exercise ideas.]

You could win a free copy of Teach Beyond Your Reach as part of Talance’s Customer Appreciation Month, courtesy of e-learning pro and author Robin Neidorf. How can you be entered to win? Just add your favorite training exercise, lesson idea or experience to the comments below, and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win.

Deadline for entries is Jan. 16, 2012. We’ll pick one winner at random from all entries on Jan. 17, 2012 and will notify the winner via e-mail. You must leave your name and a correct e-mail address to qualify.

This is an excellent question that I found while trolling through LinkedIn Answers, but it’s not unlike standard brainstorming questions I’m asked every time we launch an e-learning project.

Read the full discussion here, or check out these highlights:

The Machine is Us/ing Us. Very creative and compelling way to tell the story of Web 2.0 through imagery.

5 Tips for Success. Really funny video created by Articulate that shows the capabilities of their product and also outlines what doesn’t work with web presentations.

5 Tips for Success

Mortgage-Backed Securities. A good explanation of a complicated and possibly dry subject.

How about you? Seen any examples of e-learning videos lately that you particularly like? Add them in the comments below.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Ask on the comments form at the bottom of this page, on Twitter @talance, or on Facebook. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

Anyone who has facilitated an online course knows the biggest challenge isn’t grading assignments or figuring out how to use the discussion forums. It’s engaging learners. E-learning is a mixed bag of ages and learning styles, and the challenge for instructors is helping students get the most from a course as possible. Ability with technology has less to do with success in an online course as you may think. In Elizabeth Gruenbaum’s article, “Predictors of Success for Adult Online Learners: A Review of the Literature ,” students at the graduate or undergraduate level has more to do with it. Age doesn’t matter much either. Older learners work just as hard as younger ones. Gruenbaum’s lengthy article, which appeared in the February 2010 issue of eLearn Magazine , is rich with insight into how facilitators can anticipate how a learner will fare in a course. Read the whole thing for details, but here are a few takeaways on how to support all online learners:

• Provide reflective prompts – encourage them to stop and think about the material
• Make specific and clear syllabi and assignments with progressive calendar deadlines – seeing all the tasks laid out helps learners check them off the list
• Provide students specific performance feedback on a timely basis – respond asap on activities to keep the momentum of the course going
• Heavy participation in discussion boards – go beyond a short response: request clarification, reinforce students’ ideas, correct misunderstandings, and ask for consensus within areas of disagreement

Also make sure to read the comments section of Gruenbaum’s article, where online instructors share their experiences.

Please apply the following rules to discussion boards, comments entries, and Facebook and Twitter postings if you wish to raise collective blood pressure.

1. Use all caps. I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW MANY PEOPLE DO THIS EVEN THOUGH THEY’VE BEEN WARNED AGAINST IT FOR YEARS.
2. Stay off topic, perhaps discussing the demise of the semicolon, one of the most misunderstood pieces of punctuation. You can use the semicolon to join two independent clauses that bear a close relationship; a period is sometimes just too much. Independent clauses can stand on their own as sentences, but a semicolon can bring two of them together. Wait. Where was I?
3. Make it personal if you disagree with someone. As in, “You don’t like cilantro? You’re a pathetic and ugly sad sack.”
4. Jump to the end of a discussion without reading the whole thing. That way you can make clueless statements or ask obvious questions that cause everyone to write you off.
5. Slip little spammy messages into your postings.  (Seriously, though. Click here to read more about how you can be a better person for $9.99 per month.)
6. Curse like a **** sailor.
7. Make sure 2 use ur worst speling n grammar.
8. Post irrelevant personal messages to everyone. (Andrea: doesn’t this remind you of the time you threw that flaming marshmallow at Travis’s head?)
9. Be sarcastic. E.g., “Smooth move, ExLax.”
10. Hit Submit before you’ve finish

[Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page to submit it. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

PowerPoint presentations are in many ways excellent jumping-off points for an online course. Working with slides forces you to think in discreet thoughts, which is essential for online communication. Plus, if you’ve already got a PowerPoint, then you’ve probably already gone through the hard work of planning what you want to teach and how you’ll arrange your lessons.

The key issue to remember is that a PowerPoint presentation is not an online course. It’s just that: a presentation. That’s what webinars are for.  An online course addresses different goals and is administered differently; it’s not simply a way to deliver your presentation online. An online course is more akin to a classroom experience, except that it happens remotely.

If you’re looking to create a full online course, the best thing to do with your PowerPoint is to use it as a planning tool. Most e-learning programs begin with a storyboard (this site explains what they are and provides some helpful examples), which is an outline for your online course.

From there, you can start to flesh out your course into text (you’ll have to convert all the words you say during your slideshow presentation into written copy) and activities to deliver on your online platform.

If you want more advice on planning for an online course, check out this helpful article from The E-Learning Coach blog.

Come learn about ATutor, Blackboard and other learning management systems during a panel discussion at the Boston chapter of the American Society for Training & Development. The meeting is Jan. 18, 2011, from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. in Newton, MA.

Here’s the overview from the ASTD:

The first part [of the meeting] is Tech Talk, featuring Shawn Stiles, providing an overview of Lectora. In this presentation, Shawn will discuss Lectora, a popular development tool. His presentation will be an overview of the product including costs, competitors, why he likes this product as well as some pros and cons. He’ll also cover a brief how-to demonstration and end by showing the final product, live and on-line.

The second part of the evening will be an interactive panel discussion with several LMS expert, sharing and comparing their insights on specific LMS tools. LMS experts will be covering discussions on products from Learn.com (Shannon Courtney), Blackboard (David Rosenbaum), ATutor (Monique Cuvelier) as well as others.

Location: Rebecca’s Cafe 275 Grove Street, Auburndale, MA 02459, 617-969-3382. For those who have not been to this Rebecca’s location, it is very easy to miss as you will not see a sign for Rebecca’s from the street. 275 Grove St. is the Riverside Office Park, right next to the Riverside MBTA train and bus stop. Rebecca’s is located at the back of the building, by the parking garage.

See you there!

Overhauling the way Massachusetts’ medical practices deal with patients is no simple task. Not when you’re considering coordinating all of a patient’s health needs, including managing chronic conditions, handling visits to specialists, dealing with hospital admissions and reminding patients when they need check-ups and tests. Add to it archaic systems that involve stacks of paper medical records and rows of filing cabinets in doctors’ offices.

Many doctors deal with patients’ various medical issues by writing a referral and then maybe hearing about what happened at yearly check-up time.

The Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Health and Human Services hopes to fundamentally change the way medical practices work with the Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative. The 3-year demonstration project is part online and part in-person. Participants, which include 46 primary care medical practices, receive live coaching from facilitators, help establishing and maintaining patient registries and extensive training through a learning collaborative, managed by e-learning technical provider Talance, Inc. (http://talance.com/elearning).

The program involves all types of doctors in every corner of the state, including large, urban community health centers and small, rural group practices. Even in a state as small as Massachusetts, where it’s possible to drive from one end to the other – the long way – in a few hours, it’s still a challenge to train a broad range of practices at the same time. That’s why it’s vital for the project to incorporate online learning as a way to help manage the project.

In many cases, e-learning is the only way to effectively push health care management shifts. It’s an industry that naturally drifts toward in-person connection, where doctors talk to people face-to-face in examination rooms. When it comes to reforming office administration on such a large scale, that model won’t work. It’s the reason that 37 percent of training hours involved electronic technology in 2009, according to Alexandria, Va.-based American Society for Training and Development.

E-learning may be key in conforming to the Obama administration’s Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), which passed in 2009. Providers will have to adopt health information technology (HIT) starting in 2011, a requirement that includes more than $36 billion in incentive payments to reward providers whose electronic medical records (EMRS) meet the government’s test of “meaningful use”.

The end result is overall cost savings.

“At the heart of our effort to ensure access to care is a commitment to strengthening primary care and reforming how we pay for that care,” said Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. JudyAnn Bigby. “This new initiative is one of the key building blocks in our strategic work to make all primary care practices in Massachusetts transformed into advanced patient-centered medical homes by 2015.”

The Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative (PCMHI) was designed by the Executive Office of Health and Human Services in consultation with a multi-payer, multi-stakeholder council of consumer, physician, nurse practitioner, hospital, insurer, state agency and other interested stakeholder representatives. The Council is co-chaired by Secretary Bigby and Dr. John Fallon, Senior Vice President and Chief Physician Executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.

We’re covering the most important elements of taming your website copy in Keep, Cut or Kill: Writing for the Web webinar on September 2. We’ll reveal how to plan for a copy overhaul, how to be merciless with what you do have, and how to optimize what’s left. You’ll get practical techniques to purge and polish.

The 30-minute presentation is lead by our CEO Monique Cuvelier, who spent 20 years as a journalist and web editor. Here are a few ideas from the talk as a preview:

Know your audience first.

You need to be able to put yourself into your readers’ shoes before you know how to speak to them. Teens will respond to different language than Baby Boomers will.

Be merciless.

Website copy has a tendency to grow and expand, especially over time. Every once in a while, review your copy and be totally honest with yourself. Do you need it?

Clean up.

When you’ve cleared the website clutter and you’re left with the content that really should be there, make sure it reads well. Optimize for web reading, and people will respond better.

>> Sign up for the live event

September 2
2 p.m. Eastern
Online

You may have piles of experience presenting to live groups but are fuzzy on how to make the transition online. Particularly confusing is the difference between an online course and a webinar. While both formats let you present information to people from afar, they’re not the same, nor are they mutually exclusive.

If you’re considering opening up your training to include an online element, this matrix might help you find the best tool for the job.

Any veteran teacher will tell you that planning is the key to a successful course. Not all e-learning courses are taught by veteran teachers, however. Even if you don’t have years in the classroom, you can still follow some basic guidelines to develop a course that helps your learners get what they need. Here are five essential elements that benefit most online courses.

Technical Backgrounder

Some of your learners may be pros at navigating an online environment, but many won’t be. Even if they’re addicted to their iPad, they still may need help understanding your online learning environment. We build and host courses in ATutor, which is extremely intuitive, but we still provide a set of instructions that explains how everything works. Do this for any of your online courses, and make sure you cover any other kinds of technical requirements, such as a need for third-party software like Adobe Acrobat.

Syllabus or Overview

Set expectations early, and everyone will be more satisfied with the outcome. Tell your learners what you’ll be covering in the course, broken down by chapter or module. Include objectives and lend a preview into upcoming assignments or what you’re expecting from participants.

Chapters

This is the filling in your online learning sandwich. Be organized when you structure what your learners are to be learning. Some people call these modules.

Course Wrap-Up

When the course is over, summarize the key information covered. I think it’s effective to add a few bullet points that tell learners what steps they can take next to put what they learned into effect.

Final Survey

Always ask for feedback. What your learners say about the course will prove invaluable when you offer your course the next time. Also ask your instructors to provide an evaluation. This will help you make educated revisions from a different viewpoint.