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måndag 24 oktober 2016

CAKES - NO WIFI!

The course has now been going on for some time, and I have observed how openness and fluidity can be disctracting:
I wake up in the morning to check out what is on the agenda in the ONL -blog, but hours later I find myself having started off at the blog, discover and follow an interesting link someone posted, which in its turn links me to something new and interesting which I have been dying to read about for a long time...

So to write this blog post I have taken refuge to an old fashioned swedish konditori (more like a patisserie/tearoom than a coffe shop) WHERE THEY HAVE CAKE BUT NO WIFI!!!
Without wifi I am left alone for sometime with just the laptop offline and my thoughts, and time alone to put some more depth and focus into reading and writing....

No wifi. But an original jukebox from the fifties. 
by Lena Tembe. CC BY-NC

Hierarchical or content related course structure?

I also realise how much my previous experience of online courses influence my expectations of a course structure and how the course information is layed out.
Its like there is an internal mental course structure, that I search for when entering a new course.
Course-sites in LMS:s are usually  much more hierarchically structured. There is usually only one online course place, where the navigation relies heavily on a menu to the left of the interface. Usually the content is divided into one folder for administrative stuff, one folder for literature and resources,one with examination material and also a link to a discussion forum.

The ONL course does not follow this structure. Course information and functions are spread among several different platforms. This has created a sense of confusion, and also a considerable time spent looking around for information and upcoming tasks. The great advantage of this approach however, is that each tool used is much more adequate and fitting to the needs of each task and activity to be performed there.

It seems that the strategy when building a course in an LMS is more about squeezing the content into a predominant structure, while the ONL course is more about selecting and adjusting tools and course structure from the characteristics of the content and the needs of the intended learning activities...