Online courses for staff development
Joe Wilson
Jean Henderson
The Scottish Further Education Unit
Scotland
Demonstration: 35 minutes
Empowerment, Enhancement, Enrichment
Over the last eighteen months the Scottish Further Education Unit has researched and developed three online courses for staff development. These courses are aimed at staff who have limited ICT skills, but do have experience in teaching and learning and want to develop online content for their students.
The three courses are
- Writing and developing online learning
- Project management for developing online learning online
- Developing a course website
The courses aim to build on the existing teaching skills of staff whilst developing the necessary ICT skills and knowledge to make their material pedagogically sound, interesting and entertaining. They have been developed using inexpensive or freely available tools and they examine issues such as learning and teaching styles, assessment, interactivity, design of the look and the learning, copyright, standards and specifications, team building, controlling work flow, making your site sticky and much much more.
The first course is currently being used and evaluated by college staff under an agreement whereby the Scottish Further Education Funding Council purchased licenses for each Scottish Further Education College.
The second and third courses have been completed and will be released in the Spring of 2003.
In addition the Scottish Qualifications Authority is currently developing a Professional Development Award that can be achieved on completion of these courses. This award is scheduled for released by August 2003.
These courses are an example of what can be achieved by college staff who understand how students learn as opposed to those produced by developers who understand the technology but not always the pedagogy.
So far the response from college staff has been extremely enthusiastic and we have received enquiries from Higher Education and commercial agencies to purchase these courses. We would therefore be delighted to be included in this event which would allow us to demonstrate this material.
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