A Flash of Brilliance

Success takes hard work, and very rarely will it happen on a whim.

Hence is my work with online learning. 

I am not successful, far from it. I am but a beginner, scrambling my way through all this.

HOW DO I DO IT AND MAKE IT WORK?

I am ALL FOR free education and sharing. However the online learning platforms ARE NOT FREE.

What is the best way to develop and teach a structured module?

The only way that I can see how is informal, the youtube way.

The simplest way possible is to prepare a presentation slide, or a whiteboard & teach away... AND after that organise the lessons in a playlist.

Another possible old-fashioned way is via blog... BUT their pages may not be too organised.

How to be more structured? Maybe use proper naming techniques: topics 1, 2, 3?

Moodle is cumbersome because it creates multiple intakes/ pages and we have to import content EVERY TIME we have a new class.

Openlearning is probably one of the best platforms (if not the best), modules are reasonably easy to develop & as a learner, the platform is easy to use too. Just follow the blocks one by one & get on with the lessons. Progress bar helps too, to follow through & identify missed parts. 

Personally I am more for the openlearning style. Repeating myself 4-5 times in a year gets to me. After a few intakes I DON'T FEEL LIKE I WANT TO DO IT ANYMORE!

Understandably the openlearning pages cannot be free for the content developers, because they have a whole lot of sophisticated machinery running in the background to manage the modules: content development, classroom management, chat functions. All these takes excellent coding to get them running, and they cannot be free for obvious reasons.

The next question is: will I be able to afford giving away free education?

In that lies a conundrum. Free education is not free 🤔

Maybe this is another potential research. The thinking behind learning: structured (Lessons in academic context) vs unstructured (ODL). Arguably ODL also needs some structure because learning happens in such a way sometimes. However the learner may follow the lessons in any order they like. Is there a conflict between the TRADITIONALISTS and the ODL-lists? Interesting to explore, indeed.