Activity 2c - Online learning strategies Wiki

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