publishing – Human Jungle

I finally discovered Moodle. I had been waiting for it for weeks, checking the Weekly Updates discussion board for some sign of Moodle’s arrival. Then, yesterday, I happened to scroll wa-a-ay down the Discussions page and discovered a board devoted to Moodle. There, Franc had posted the address of the Moodle server — weeks ago.

Terry Anderson concludes his Chapter 14 with “three sets of qualities that define an excellent e-teacher” — passion and subject knowledge; technical skills; and “resilience, innovativeness, and perseverance” (p. 360). Franc certainly has these qualities.

I would like to add a fourth set, however, which I will loosely label organizational-publishing skills. I’ve carped on this before, but I think it bears repeating because it gets continually overlooked in the literature, and I can’t recall it ever being mentioned in any of the MET courses I have taken. This is no surprise — these skills are somewhat lacking in many of the MET courses I have taken. Finding basic — really basic — course information should not be an Easter egg hunt. Looking for such information, and feeling lost and frustrated, draws the students’ mental resources away from the course content and learning activities.

I would even venture to say that organizational-publishing skills are another important form of teacher presence — they enable the instructor to support the students while demonstrating that the instructor has been thoughtful, caring and in tune with his students’ needs.

I hope the name organizational-publishing, by the way, is self-explanatory. This skill set is simply the ability to organize information in ways that make it easy to find, and to publish the information in ways that are intuitive and clear. One learns organizational skills in library school, and publishing skills in journalism school, among other places.

But our LMSs could do more to assist course developers in these areas, by providing templates that are clear and consistent. For example, I find it interesting that no convention or consistent format has emerged among the various LMSs for a course updates folder, board, medium, what-have-you. Thus these updates have been handled by various instructors in disparate ways. One instructor sends them by email; another by pop-ups when you log into the course site; and Franc uses the Weekly Updates board and other boards besides.

I find this lack of consistency very unfortunate. I see a lot of comments and queries from my fellow students that indicate that I am not the only person who is finding this course confusing.

I’ll take the following sentence, extracted from the “Set up your WordPress e-portfolio” course page, as an invitation to comment on aspects of the course (and e-learning in general):

And appreciated Your opinions are valuable—important, in fact.

This wonderfully garbled sentence illustrates something that confounds me — that editorial standards are so lax in the realm of e-learning.

True, these pages aren’t ‘published’ in the normal sense — only those taking a course can see them. Yet standards still matter — for clarity, of course, but also for credibility. Do sentences like the one above inspire confidence in a course?

Moreover, some branches of learning theory hold that the instructor should model the expected behaviour, for the students’ benefit. Indeed, Chickering & Gamson, no less, include “communicates high expectations” among their “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.”

Here’s an “expectation,” although I wouldn’t think it’s terribly high: Since students in this course are expected to write with clarity (as is anyone with a bachelor’s degree), I expect the course material to walk the talk.

In a previous life, I worked as a copy editor for a magazine — exacting and demanding work. Perhaps I could teach the folks at External Programs and Learning Technology, or whoever puts these Vista courses together, something about proofreading — its importance, for starters.