Online Learning in a Social Media World

Intellagirl got a FT faculty gig so she's not here. :-(

The WGU experience is really parallel our AUCC, except they are completely online. Students need to be self-directed and independent and are mentored. They are assessed when they come in and as they proceed. BTW, they have a nice balance of academics, affinity, admin services, and accounts, and they strive to have the bulk on academics, driving down the time they have to spend on admin and money.

They also have students starting their program throughout the year, and a challenge is creating community with all their students starting at different times from different places. Plus, tutoring isn't scalable. If they can pull together a community and address something rather than answer a question 200 times, that's scalable. But communitiy can't be required, so they have to make them so interesting, students want to be there. Hmm, should we get career planning folded into our learning communities? Sound familiar?

The faculty needed to be trained to work with the communities because they kept wanting to be mentors. So WGU uses the GEM model: generate, evaluate, modify. Of course it's hard with student novices and experts together, and to switch from a learning management model to a social media model. They trained on blogs, weekly chats, discussion threads (students were used to them), email, documents, and IM.

But that was hard for their faculty and students because they couldn't quite get the model. So currently, they developed an in house system with focused learning activities, streesing networking rather than community. (Sounds like what our students have expressed.) Since mentors aren't available 24/7, message boards were very important. Mentor FAQs were the first place students went, but if nothing was there, they went to Google! They created a closed Ning network rather than communities.

Lots of parallels here! Let's watch this session together when I get access and discuss!