SEMINAR EVALUATION

Re: SEMINAR EVALUATION- Nick

by Bill Thimmesch -
Number of replies: 1

These are very thoughtful questions, so I'll be happy to respond to most of them:).

I have learned something from this seminar.  I have learned that the instructional process is more complicated, and that the worlds of education and formal training (instruction) have merged with the help of social media tools (wikis, blogs, sites like this).  I think  my main takeaway is that an automated tool needs to be tried out in a much narrower universe:  skill-based training.  When your training objectives can be precisely stated I think you can work backwards and ask the training design questions that will get you to the right training tools and instructional strategies.  But even then you have to take the learner into account  (do visual learners need different instructional techniques in order to learn how to fly an airplane, put out a fire, or cross-examine a witness)?  Anyway...I'm thinking smaller these days--but still am determined to find a way to automate the simple process that trainers go through every day--asking questions about the purpose of training to define if training is even needed, what training tools would be optimal, and what would the best ways be to evaluate skill transfer.  After all, There are a million books, articles, and research papers out there already prescribing the same training analysis process (ASTD.ORG)--If the steps are so redudant and predictable, then why not automate this part of the thinking process so the trainer can ge to the core of what is  needed to improve employee performance?

My thoughts on "running" this seminar (I'd say facilitating from afar) are that you never know where you'll end up when you'r e talking to instructional designers and experts from around the world.  One day I'll get a doctoral degree and put that all into a dissertation...but not now, when I'm broke and still paying college tuition for my own children...

Automating this process? No. Not as a facilitated result.  Perhaps just indexing the discussion threads so that future users would not have to read all the posts--but could search by the tags to get to an area or URL of interest.

This has been a great experience. Honored to have been a small part of it.

Bill (ROBOT)

In reply to Bill Thimmesch

Re: SEMINAR EVALUATION- Nick

by Nicholas Bowskill -

Bill, what struck me most was when you said that this is unpredictable. I think that's the nub of the thing in some ways. Although the seminar provides a framework and a broad topic the start and finishing point is completely open. This is not one of those courses or activities where the outcomes are already known by someone and its the job of the learners to guess what's in the tutor's mind. It's much more of a social enquiry.

If it was to continue and develop it *could* allow us to shape the thing further by structuring the environment to address our interests and as a response to the needs of the group etc.

I dare say the shell of the thing with an initial forum plus/minus some resources could be reproduced automatically. And it wouldn't make a lot of difference to the rest of what could happen. However, that would really be a fairly trivial thing and maybe the enrollment stuff could be automated too.

Even so the real deal is the openness - in disposition, in the process and in the dialogue etc. It's that open start and end that really marks out these seminars for me and the content is our participation which is also open in its nature. This is rather than having people 'do this and then do that' and do it 'until you are able to understand the other' which is sometimes useful but often very dull.

When we think about OER and openness I think these seminars show the depth of the concept that could be brought into play when compared with materials production being made for free and that kind of thing.