CALMet Online 2014
Topic outline
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This session will end the CALMet Online 2014.
Roger Deslandes and Bodo Zeschke (Bureau of Meteorology, Australia).
A key challenge in delivering successful on-line learning and development activities is to employ strategies that promote learner engagement through interactions. Although constructivist learning and interactivity are well-established in a pedagogical sense, creating such environments in the virtual world can be challenging.
During this CALmet session useful strategies will be articulated by way of two case studies that the Bureau of Meteorology Training Centre have recently engaged in: The EumetCAL radar course, conducted in 2013, was delivered as a blended course consisting of several online presentations and a face to face five day workshop conducted at the Deutscher Wetterdienst in Langen, Germany. The first case study will focus on a half-day session delivered online into the workshop at Langen; As a Centre of Excellence in the WMO-CGMS Virtual Laboratory for Education and Training in Satellite Meteorology BMTC conduct monthly Regional Focus Group online weather discussions and training sessions to a cohort of international stakeholders. The second case study will overview techniques utilised in this forum to engage stakeholders.
The key objective of this session is that participants will be able to utilise these and similar strategies to enhance their own training events.
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Welcome
Colleagues,
Welcome to this component of the CALmet online course entitled "Successful online learning: What strategies do we need?"
We will be stepping through a number of Activities and using the Forums for discussion. We are really interested to hear your thoughts on what strategies enhance learning and especially how we might create interactive, dynamic, online learning environments.
Most importantly we hope this learning experience is a fun one :)
Cheers - Roger & Bodo (BMTC, Melbourne)
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Activity 1: 19-21 Nov
Allow a minimum of 20 minutes but more if you want to explore this resource further
How learning is achieved is complex and a function of many things including culture.
One area of research that has developed strongly over recent years is neuroscience and our increased understanding of how our brains function. Dr John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist who has written a book called "Brain Rules". A "Brain Rule" is one thing scientists now know for sure about how our brains work.View the "Brain Rules" page at: http://www.brainrules.net/about-brain-rules
View the short video and step through the summaries of each "Brain rule" at the bottom of the page (you may want to explore this resource further).Our forum discussion question is:
Given these 12 brain rules what are the implications for learning? What strategies might you employ to enhance (online) learning in light of this information? -
Activity 2
Furthering our investigation of "Successful online learning - what strategies do we need?" please find two short resources for you to view. The first is rather direct in terms of the 8 Lessons learned from teaching online, the second is a short case-study:
Activity 2a: View https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp4BG4Me7TU
Q: What are the 8 lessons learned from online learning presented here? Do you agree? What others have you personally learned in delivering learning activities on-line? Can you share experiences that reinforce or add to these?
Activity 2b: Is a short TED talk
View: http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_norvig_the_100_000_student_classroom
What type of lessons and strategies did Peter Norvig apply when taking a traditional face to face course and delivering it online?
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Activity 2c
As a trainer you have just been given the task of conducting an online half-day workshop to 20 trainee forecasters. What types of strategies might you employ to do this?
Based on the resources to date and my own personal experience here are strategies that I employed when I presented a half day workshop online as part of the EumetCAL radar course.
Please feel free to add or edit this wiki of strategies.
A useful resource is the WMO "Guidelines For Trainers in Meteorological. hydrological and Climate Services https://2a9e94bc607930c3d739becc3293b562f744406b.googledrive.com/host/0BwdvoC9AeWjUazhkNTdXRXUzOEU/wmo_1114_en.pdf
Cheers - Roger
Online strategies to enhance learning
- An over-arching paradigm that is always useful is the ADDIE model (Analysis, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate)
- Explicitly define learning outcomes (and curriculum) based on a training needs analysis. The later can be constructed by surveying the target audience, or meeting with high-order organisational stakeholders, or by looking through strategic and operational plans. The requirements may come from specific project plans. In the case of meteorological training the learning outcomes can or should be based on job competencies.
- Design your training course and activities based on the training needs, the numbers of people to be trained and whether they are located locally or geographically dispersed. Your approach will strongly be guided by the resources at your disposal, the timelines in which to conduct the training and the quality benchmark you are aiming to achieve - e.g formal competency assessment. Develop the criteria that you will utilise to evaluate the course's success and effectiveness.
- Develop the course learning activities based on your design. Explicitly design and define course timelines and deadlines for viewing the online material and/or submitting assessment items asynchronously before any synchronous online sessions.
- Always develop a back-up delivery strategy in case something goes wrong. Organise alternative communication and delivery methods should the online connection drop.
- In designing the course consider "Flipping the classroom" so that online content is accessible asynchronously through a learning guide. Develop and Record any online lecture –style presentations so that learners can review the information at any time (asynchronously) before you conduct the workshop
- Break the online information sessions into short information pieces dispersed with quiz questions and/or exercises to test understanding.
- Actively manage online forums to facilitate tutorials or allow learners to become teachers. Peers can become the best teachers.
- If you are delivering online to a f2f workshop with several trainees together in one or a few locations nominate a local diplomat at each remote location to help you organise the trainees into teams, pass the microphone around and help co-ordinate exercises, discussion and feedback;
- Form teams of people and create authentic, team-based exercises.
- For theoretical concepts: Create team-based activities where trainees have to discuss, develop and construct the knowledge incrementally together. Guide and facilitate the teams to a consensus result based on the best science and understanding of the concept under discussion. As the teams discuss their results you might assemble their information: complete a schematic diagram or table of information or annotate a chart or satellite image displayed online in front of the trainees whilst you listen to each team’s feedback;
- For practical exercises utilise online tools and methods that support interactive learning: Organise and present the information and data in a way that supports real interaction and decision making with multiple data sources (for example, radar data, satellite data and products, NWP and observational data) and encourages higher order cognitive skills: analysis (what), diagnosis (why), interpretation and enquiry. Encourage discussions around the “what” and “why”, ambiguity in the data, uncertainty and alternate scenarios. Discuss what makes the exercise or forecast decision difficult. Discuss potential impacts on clients.
- Create “the burning platform” and a sense of urgency by time-framing the activities. Have a count –down clock and let them know how they are progressing. I had an alarm sound when the time was up.
- Employ repetition to enhance learning through multiple scenarios or exercises.
- Have the trainees construct authentic outputs (e.g forecasts or warnings) and evaluate and discuss these as a group online as part of the assessment strategy.
- Evaluate the course against criteria and feedback from trainees
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Activity 3
Here we examine techniques that have been employed by the staff of the Australian VLab Centre of Excellence to engage stakeholders during our remote and blended remote / classroom training sessions. This activity is presented in three parts. Each part has a short recording with related questions. There is also an exercise that you may wish to participate in. The three parts will be put online sequentially so there is some time for participants to reflect and give feedback on one part before moving onto the next. :
Activity 3a: Introduction and preparation for training sessions.
Please download and listen to the recording CALMET2014part1 below (.wmv file, 11mb, mp4 file 24mb, 11 minutes duration)
Question 1: why might there be a problem effectively advertising a training session if you have only one contact per country.
Question 2: please download the pre-course exercise (Exercise 1) (.ppt file, 13mb). By playing this PowerPoint presentation as a slideshow, please examine the animations on the first slide and answer the question on the second slide. Please answer this question before commencing activity 3b
Question 3: Please provide feedback regarding the preparation for training sessions at the Australian VLab Centre of Excellence. Comments and constructive criticism is welcome
Activity 3b: Enhancing Stakeholder engagement during the training session.
Please download and listen to the recording CALMET2014part2part1 below (.wmv file, 17mb, mp4 file 29mb, 13 minutes duration)
Please download and listen to the recording CALMET2014part2part2 below (.wmv file, 4mb, mp4 file 9mb, 4 minutes duration)
Question 4: Please list the pro's and con's of each kind of remote session mentioned during the recording (Type 1; remote audience only, Type 2: blended classroom / remote audience with local coordinator in the classroom, Type 3: blended classroom/remote audience with presenter in the classroom).
Question 5: How effective was Exercise 1 (in Question 2) in encouraging your participation during Activity 3b ?. Can you think of a better way of presenting this exercise ?
Question 6: Please give feedback on ways you can improve interaction with the audience during the training session
Activity 3c: Encouraging ongoing Stakeholder involvement after the training session.
Please download and listen to the recording CALMET2014part3 below (.wmv file, 9mb, mp4 file 17mb, 7 minutes duration)
Question 7: Please provide feedback regarding our post-session follow up activities. Comments and constructive criticism is welcome
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File
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Summary of Activity 3 - from Bodo Zeschke, Australian VLab Centre of Excellence
Overall it was an enjoyable experience, though it took quite a while to construct the video's. The video's required PowerPoint content and script files. In addition some editing of the video's was still required prior to releasing these onto the CALMET web page. The questions and exercises were relatively easy to construct.
It was good to share my experiences in engaging the remote audiences and receiving feedback. The feedback from Patrick, Roro, Vesa, Izolda and Larissa was appreciated.
I have received valuable feedback about:
Possibility of offering training in remote presentation of nowcasting applications to RTC's in the neighboring region.:
- The importance of developing a distance approach to the "roving seminar" strategy for reaching more stakeholders around the world.
- The importance of having a minimum of two contacts per country involved in training correspondence..
- The importance of conducting pre-training trial session with guest presenters.
- Short PowerPoint presentations and matching video recordings are popular as "asynchronous" training resources. Training material that involves lots of reading and / or long recordings are not so popular
- The usefulness of multiple choice questions in encouraging shy remote stakeholders or stakeholders from a more passive student-teacher culture.
- Evaluation of Regional Focus Group meetings needs to be developed to include qualitative data about impacts on the participants forecasting practise. This will need close collaboration with relevant national and international training coordinators / assessors
Finally, I would welcome further discussion on Activity 3 on CALMet Commons