CLASSROOM 21 | by Greg Limperis
Let’s face it: great
blended, online, virtual digital public schools and courses will always
be few and far between. The problem with public education is that it is
habitually underfunded. For years, I remember being in a classroom and
struggling to get things such as paper to use in my class before going
paperless. Today, we want schools to build great online virtual lessons
and courses for our students. Before last year, my wife used to be one
of the best classroom teachers out there. She has the skills to come up
with great lessons, but lacks the technical prowess—and the time—to
bring those lessons to fruition.
Creating great online courses are a lot of work, and I know this from
personal experience. Last year, when I took on my new position as the
Supervisor of Instructional Technology and Media for my school district,
my wife left teaching in the classroom for multiple reasons. She became
an Instructional Designer consultant working with Elearning Innovation as a representative of Technology Integration in Education.
Their products are excellent. The company develops custom online
learning solutions for universities and other educational entities.
While the output they create is very professional and top quality, it
takes lots of hard work and planning. It’s literally a full-time,
blossoming company and there are simply not enough hours in the day.
They create great courses such as the one offered this month on TIE. If
you haven’t checked out the series of Balanced Literacy workshops
offered for free this month on TIE, check them out. They’re very professional, but they weren’t created by a single person. It took a team of people to create what you see.
According to Edudemic.com and one of their latest infographics,
creating effective e-learning takes at least five people and hundreds
of man hours. It requires a project manager, instructional designer,
multimedia designer, e-learning developer, and a quality assurance
manager. As the infographic states, “effective online learning requires
approximately 200 total man hours per instructional hour of enhanced
e-learning.” Two hundred man-hours per instructional hour for any
professional can get expensive real quick. Creating the courses offered
this month for free on TIE was not easy, nor was it cheap. It took lots
of planning, hard work and money in order to create these workshops.
Can today’s public education support this? Do they have the expertise
or the money to ensure the creation of excellent and effective online
digital learning? Can they go it alone? The answer is, it will take
companies such as Elearning Innovation to create mass amounts of content
that can be chosen from and accessed by schools and districts for a
fee. In the future, schools will provide the necessary teachers to
moderate these courses that were created by someone else, for them.
Various teachers throughout a district will use the courses. Cost of
creating these courses will be offset by the advertisement space that
will be sold within them. They’ll be created in such a way that the
course facilitator can customize them in order to meet both their
individual instructional needs and the needs of his or her students.
Who creates your e-learning courses for your
district? How dynamic are they? Could they be better if you had a staff
of professionals to dedicate to them? It’s time we start to work
together to bring great content together. Dynamic lessons can be created
and shared across districts and states. Thanks to the new Common Core
Standards, this is now possible. We can and must share the burden and
cost of creating these courses, but we can also share in the final
product. We can create a repository of courses to choose from with
online digital professional development created in the same way. We can
pay for it through advertising and company sponsorship.
Regardless of how we approach online e-learning in public education,
we have to think of doing it in a way that is not just cost effective,
engaging, and well planned; we have to do it in a way that doesn’t
overburden our already-strained public school educators. It’s time for
real, effective e-learning in public education.
___
Greg Limperis, Supervisor of Instructional Technology
for his district, was formerly the Middle School Technology Facilitator
in Lawrence, Mass.. He founded the very popular Technology Integration in Education professional
learning network, reaching thousands of educators worldwide. He has
shared with others what he knows and they have joined him in sharing
their insights as well. Join them in bringing about change using your 21st-century skills.
Source: http://edtechdigest.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/e-learning-and-public-education/
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment