We are still working on the development of learning objectives for the VITAE course. As a starting point I imagined what the ideal course would look like and extracted learning objectives from that vision but that gave a set of learning objectives which were too tied to the structure of the course that I had envisaged. It needed to be more flexible. So the next step was recognising that what we want our participants to learn consists of some technical mastery, some pedagogical insights and the need to apply lifelong learning through on-going professional development and mentoring.
The pedagogical objectives however were very woolly and imprecise. Meanwhile on the technical mastery side we wanted to get away from a prescribed list of tools which had to be mastered. The key in the end was linking tools to learning by starting with learning. In this way one can do away with the technical mastery section altogether and simply phrase the pedagogical objectives in terms of the benefits which may be derived from using digital/online tools. An example would be:
Pedagogical aim: Would the learning activity benefit from access to external persons? (eg students in another location, experts, eye witnesses):
VITAE learning objective:
I can help my students communicate synchronously and asynchronously through text, voice and video.
This is then open for course participants to learn how blogs, wikis, IP telephony, newsgroups or virtual meeting rooms can help to meet this need and which would be best for the given learning activity.
I still feel the need for some sort of model or procedure to guide teachers in choosing resources. In searching for this new holy grail what I have found, such as this from British Colombia, seems to take the tool as a starting point and seems to be far too detailed. So I conclude that these guidelines are written from the perspective of making a large investment in software licences when they go down into the detail of looking at the gender balance, the design and so on. Is there something, I wonder, which takes the learning first and helps a teacher assess which tool might be the most appropriate?
Keywords: euvitae, learning objectives, lifelong learning, professional development, VITAE, Web 2.0
