Folks,
You should have an e-mail from my instance of Moodle inviting you to view the course.
http://www.rdheath.com/moodle/
Please login and have a look around. One lesson learned from teaching my last unit is to have only the welcome and the first lesson visible to students and to reveal the course as we work through it. I’m not doing that for you all simply to keep this straightforward. I look forward to your feedback.
Hey Bob,
I thought your opening paragraph setting expectations very interesting. I like how you say, basically, that learning how to do your job may require time out of work. I thought about this in light of student expectations regarding learning content. We are so used to negotiated effort agreements, I found your approach refreshing. “This is going to involved work on your part. This is life.”
Under Communications– Section 1, there’s a heading titled, “Assignments” I think these points might benefit from some type of organizational device other than what you have. Here’s your first item:
1: View Leading with Emotional Intelligence, Introduction, and section one and two, Understanding Emotional Intelligence, Developing Self-Awareness, and View Effective Listening, welcome and section one, Assessing your Listening Skills
This is workable but might reorganize somehow? Here’s a thought. (my formatting options are somewhat limited in this post).
View:
1. Leading with Emotional Intelligence:
Introduction, Understanding Emotional Intelligence, Developing Self-Awareness
2. Effective Listening:
Welcome and Assessing your Listening Skills
I really like your thoughtful inclusion of the Lynda.com videos. They’re great and should lead to some valuable conversations in your discussion forums. Running through the unit, I wished I’d had such a learning experience when I was younger – would have saved me a lot of wandering in the darkness.
Bob, overall, a great unit. There’s a few bits waiting to be completed, but your effort is hugely ambitious – which I give you credit for.
What are your thoughts? What are you most satisfied with? What are you least satisfied with? What next?
I appreciate also the Moodle hosting decision. Moodle can be a bit text-heavy and visually non-remarkable. That being said, there is a lot of content here and the visual simplicity helps keep the focus on just that.
-owen
Moodle-shmoodle can put you through scrolling hell! I have a love/hate (bordering on hate/hate) relationship with it. But I don’t hate it anymore than Blackboard (or any other LMS system). I actually found that you can design more visually stimulating and better organized course with Moodle than BB (which for me was a huge surprise), but it takes a lot of exploring and figuring out of tools in order to do it (learning curve is huge as Moodle is largely counter-intuitive and overwhelming — too many un-needed tools and options and too many gems buried underneath all these options). However, it is FREE ?
Bob, I did not receive the email ? Could you try and email it to tapi_______.edu? Thanks!
Owen,
Thanks as always for your generous comments.
I was struck profoundly by the differences between classroom teaching/teachers and the workplace and supervisor roles throughout this course. I mentioned this last class too, I miss my team. For example, I have an employee who is a genius with proofreading, grammar, and copy editing. It is my strategy to get her involved and invested in these kinds of projects by relying on her strengths. The young people who do the training will at the end of it tell me how to make it better, as another example. I wonder if I have a freedom to take risks with training/learning that others in this class cannot?
I have to admit that Kim blew me away with the video content that she created for her website. I worried about over relying on Lynda.com in this context. In my own context it is the obvious answer. Moreover, this summer I will pay a couple student employees to make training videos that will be used in these training’s. But, where does that get me in developing my skills, in learning something new? In my context these answers are appropriate. However, I do think there is an important insight about personal development that I wasn’t anticipating — so I will be spending more time with video and podcast creation this summer.
I think you are right Owen some of the assignments are still roughly phrased. I think some of my intentions with certain resources are underdeveloped (The Step up to Supervision book, for example) and so I can do some more work on integrating that resource to subsequent sections. I was surprised and satisfied with how the final project for this class turned into a section that I had no intention of developing. I wasn’t going to spend time on theory only on practice. I’m glad to stumble into a way to do better than that.
One of the most satisfying bits of feedback we hear from former employees is, “I learned to work in the libraries, thank you.” I guess I am trying to do this better with both the Professional Demeanor unit and this Step up to Supervision unit.
Tatiana, I sent you another invite on this new e-mail. And, I agree that Moodle can be an exercise in scrolling. My strategy for this course is progressive revealing and hiding of sections. So that the learner only sees the introduction and the current section, less scrolling. We will see what the feedback is from the young people on that. Obviously my employer owns this training and accordingly it will be behind user id/password, and firewalls, so creating it in Moodle here makes sense in my context. “Open learning” just isn’t a good fit for this purpose.
Hey Bob,
Sorry I’m a bit late chiming in. I really liked what you did here and appreciated what you are trying to do. I once ended a conversation with an employee “the problem isn’t that you were late, the problem is that I wasn’t’ surprised that you were late.” He got that, and the problem was solved. It takes enough of my time trying to teach new employees a position each semester that I don’t have much left to also teach them how to be good employees. And yet, I think that is what student employment is about in many ways. So, bravo! Taking on this aspect of employee training is huge and a place not many go.
Also, I kind of liked the ‘rough edges’. I felt like it wasn’t canned or rehearsed and edited to exclusion of all personality. As a matter of fact, I feel like your voice was very authentic throughout. Then you through in the Lynda stuff, which is super polished and edited, and it creates a kind of balance.
Hey Bob,
I hear you on the Lynda.com resources. I think you bring so much to the process via the frame of inquiry (essential questions) and the learning activities, (learning logs, discussions, etc…) that the course doesn’t have the feeling of simply a Lynda.com playlist. … And it does seem appropriate that there area few holes you find and fill in (the personal development piece) as you go.
Kudos to you and your team on the positive feedback from your former employees. As I said above, I wish I’d had some training like this early in life. It would have placed and contextualized much of my working experience… Even still, I find some of the content extremely valuable.
-owen
How do you log into?
http://www.rdheath.com/moodle/