Challenges of Implementation
By Prof.
Jonathan Acuña Solano
Saturday,
May 2, 2015
Twitter:
@jonacuso
Post 160
Antecedents
·
As the quotation explains, good design does
not necessarily ensure a successful course; there are other factors that must
also be considered to ensure success.
·
As one’s online course transitions to the
implementation phase, it is essential to consider which tools and resources
need to be in place for students to successfully experience one’s course. If
the pieces are not in their place, it is better to wait for a while and
straighten up details to ensure a favorable outcome.
·
In this post, I intend to explore how online
courses are delivered at my institution. My experience, along with other
professor’s experience that can be traced on the web, can help the new
instructor to consider potential issues that can arise along course
implementation.
·
I also intend to identify resources that will
support students’ preparation to take the online course I was developing at the
university where I work.
·
I also analyze challenges that any instructor
or content designer may face when implementing the online course being
developed.
At
Universidad Latina in Costa Rica, most of –if not all- courses are taught F2F
with some hybrid learning twists that some of us, faculty members, have done to
be fully working with digital learners, who need to be learning not only inside
the classroom but autonomously outside the classroom as well.
At
Ulatina, as we commonly call our university, we are provided with a Moodle
platform that has most of the plentiful features that can be used to empower
students with their learning. From my personal point of view, I think Moodle is
a great tool that not many of the faculty members are exploiting at its full
potential. I also think there is some sort of reluctance towards its use by
many professors who are slightly behind the use of education technologies. But
in my personal case, nn my language courses at Ulatina, I tend to always
furnish my virtual space with lots of information, prezis, pdfs, links to
webpages, learning tasks, research and paper submission, discussion forums,
etc. to help students learn what it is required from them [based on the course
objectives and content].
Considering
my English School partners, the very first challenge that will be encountered
is training these other prospective instructors for a Materials Design course
like the one I used to teach before. Based on what was explained above, I do
not have to worry about having students take the course since most of them are
digital learners, but what about other teachers? Can teaching personnel in any
higher education institution be labelled as digital learners? If I were to
train a body of language teachers, I would definitely need the assistance of
the IT Department to train them on what to do while using our Moodle LMS.
Additionally, our faculty members will need to be trained on the philosophy of
VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) to comprehend the scope of action for them
(the instructors) and for our students. But if these two issues were taken care
of from the very beginning, nothing would guarantee the success of some sort of
virtual learning for pupils.
The
second big challenge that I visualize is getting real assistance from our
Education Technologies Department to really implement a virtual course. Though
I am certain that they work hard on this area by trying to take teaching
personal into attending training sessions, not all professors show up for
training adducing all kinds of excuses. I have talked about this several times
with university authorities, and although Laureate endorses this kind of virtual
and hybrid education, it looks like at our university the idea is not well-accepted
yet by peers. That is probably why most of our courses –if not all- are F2F and
our Moodle platform is not fully exploited. But if I got their help, I am sure
that we could start some sort of “revolution” in the way we have been providing
instruction to our students in Costa Rica and at Ulatina.
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