New Skills - Radio Production and Teaching

The other day I blogged about the 'new skills radio producers require'... and today, I'm thinking lecturers and educators need to limber up with an additional skills set too.

While students are essentially a 'captive audience' - by stint of paying quite a bit of money to do a course - we still need to work a bit to keep them interested, engaged and feeling like they are part of something big, important and worthwhile - a supportive learning community. We also need to take student's hectic schedules into consideration and exploit/run with their familiarity with online environments.

One way to do this is for educators to design effective online communication forums using blogs, groups and facebook... an extension of the learning environment we already craft through face-to-face course delivery and design structure. (and obviously, to do this effectively we need to acquire a bunch of online skills)

One of the benefits of setting up these these sort of communication forums is that it equalises the inherent hierarchy of the classroom dynamic - where teacher sprouts wisdom - so that all participants in the class feel empowered to give advice and feedback to their peers outside the classroom. The idea is that the group blog or forum generates its own momentum through student use - so that students can help each other learn - and so that all the energy pushing the class forward doesn't have to come from me.

Recently, I've been setting up closed teaching blogs for my courses/students - the response has been positive and students seem to be getting into it - I gave them admin rights too, and they are moulding it to their needs and doing some quite fun things with it...