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In diesem Artikel wollen wir uns einmal zurücklehnen und über Pädagogik nachdenken, die den Kern unserer Arbeit als online-Trainer betrifft.

Definition der Pädagogik

Eine Definition des Wiktionary lautet:

  1. Pädagogik als Profession
  2. Alle Aktivitäten, die erziehen, lehren oder anleiten beinhalten.

Die deutsche Wikipedia befasst sich ebenfalls in einem ausführlichen Artikel mit Pädagogik. Hier wird einleitend ausgeführt, dass Pädagogik sowohl als

  • forschende Disziplin Bildungs- und Erziehungszusammenhänge erforscht,
  • als auch als handlungsorientierte Wissenschaft Bildungsprozesse gestaltet und optimiert.

Ethymologisch leitet sich der Begriff aus dem Griechischen an und beinhaltet in seinen Silben die Aspekte

  • paideia = Erziehung, Bildung
  • pais = Knabe, Kind

und

  • agein = führen. (Quelle: Wikipedia Stand:23.02.2009)

Moodle, in drei kurzen Absätzen erläutert

Sozusagen das Herz von Moodle sind Kurse, welche wiederum (Lern-)Aktivitäten und Ressourcen beinhalten. Es stehen über 20 hichkonfigurierbare Aktivitäten zur Verfügung - bspw. Foren, Glossare, Wikis, Aufgaben, Tests, Datnebanken und dergleichen mehr. Interessant an diesem Aktivitäten-orientierten Ansatz ist die Möglichkeit, diese Aktivitäten hinsichtlich der Zusammenstellung und des Ablaufs frei zu konfigurieren. Somit kann der Lernpfad der Teilnehmer anhand der Lernziele frei gestaltet werden. Ebenso können die Ergebnisse der vorherigen Aktivität für die nächste herangezogen werden.

Es gibt darüberhinaus eine Vielzahl an Werkzeugen, die gemeinschaftliches Lernen und Arbeiten unterstützen - Blogs, Mitteilungssystem, Teilnehmerlisten. Ebenso stehen ausführliche Bewertungs- und Berichtswerkzeuge zur Verfügung, welche die Weiterverarbeitung in anderen Systemen durch standardisierte Ausgabeformate unterstützen.

Erfahren Sie mehr über Moodle unter moodle org, insbesonders im zentralen "Kurs" der Community, genannt Using Moodle. Dieser Ort ist sehr belebt, aber schauen Sie einfach vorbei - Sie finden sicherlich für Sie interessante Aspekte. Moodle-Kompetenz auf höchstem Niveau finden Sie in den Foren, in welchen sich Moodle-Entwickler, professionelle Moodle Anwender und alle Interessierten sich zum offenen fachlichen Austausch treffen. Ein ebenfalls sehr empfehlenswerter Ort für ausführliche Moodle-Informationen ist diese Dokumentation, welche ebenfalls durch die Community mittels eines Wikis bereitgestellt wird.

Social Constructionism as a Referent

I have these five points on a slide which I use in every presentation I do. They are useful referents taken from research that apply to education in general, boiled down into a simple list that I carry around under the moniker of "social constructionism".

  1. All of us are potential teachers as well as learners - in a true collaborative environment we are both.

    It's so important to recognise and remember this.

    I think this perspective helps us retain some humility as teachers and fight the (very natural!) tendency to consolidate all your history and assume the revered position of “wise source of knowledge”.

    It helps us keep our eyes open for opportunities to allow the other participants in our learning situation to share their ideas with us and to remind us to listen carefully and ask good questions that elicit more from others.

    I find I need to constantly remind myself of this point, especially when the culture of a situation pushes me into a central role (like now!)

  2. We learn particularly well from the act of creating or expressing something for others to see.

    For most of us this is basically “learning by doing”, and is fairly obvious, yet it's worth reminding ourselves of it.

    It's surprising how much online learning is still just presenting static information, giving students little opportunity to practice the activities they are learning about. I often see online teachers spending a great deal of time constructing perfect resources for their course, which no doubt is a terrific learning experience for them, but then they deny their students that same learning experience. Even textbooks often do a better job, with exercises after every chapter and so on.

    Most importantly, such learning is best when you are expressing and presenting posts, projects, assignments, constructions etc for others to see. In this situation your personal “stakes” are a lot higher, and a lot of self-checking and reflection takes place that increases learning. Seymour Papert (the inventor of logo) famously described the process of constructing something for others to see as a very powerful learning experience, and really this sort of thinking goes right back to Socrates and beyond.

  3. We learn a lot by just observing the activity of our peers.

    Basically this is about “classroom culture”, or learning by osmosis. Humans are good at watching each other and learning what to do in a given situation though cues from others.

    For example, if you walk into a lecture theatre where everyone is sitting in seats, facing the front, listening quietly to the teacher at the front and taking notes, then that's most likely what you are going to do too, right?

    If you are in a less rigid class where people are asking questions all the time, then it's likely you'll feel freer to do so too. By doing so you'll be learning about both the subject itself and the meta-subject of how learning occurs from overhearing the discussions of your peers and the kinds of questions that get asked, leading to a richer multi-dimensional immersion in learning.

  4. By understanding the contexts of others, we can teach in a more transformational way (constructivism)

    As you probably know from experience, advice from a mentor or friend can provide better, more timely and customised learning experience than with someone who doesn't know you and is speaking to a hundred people.

    If we understand the background of the people we are speaking to then we can customise our language and our expression of concepts in ways that are best suited to the audience. You can choose metaphors that you know the audience will relate to. You can use jargon where it helps or avoid jargon when it gets in the way.

    Again this is a pretty basic idea - every guide to public speaking talks about knowing your audience - but in online learning we need to be particular mindful of this because we often have not met these people in person and don't have access to many visual and auditory cues.

  5. A learning environment needs to be flexible and adaptable, so that it can quickly respond to the needs of the participants within it.

    Combining all the above, if you as a learning facilitator want to take advantage of your growing knowledge about your participants, giving them tailored opportunities to share ideas, ask questions and express their knowledge, then you need an environment which is flexible, both in time and space.

    If you discover that you need to throw your schedule out the window because your participants know a lot less than you'd expected when you first designed the course, you should be able to readjust the schedule, and easily add new activities to help everyone (or just one group) catch up. Likewise, some great ideas for a simulation or something may have come up during discussions, so you should be able to add those later in the course.

    Timewise, your participants may be spread over different timezones, or maybe they live in the same timezone but have differing free time, so you should be able to offer asynchronous activities where people can work together but at different times.

Jason Cole from Open University recently referred to these as “Martin's five laws” (ha!) but really they are referents: guiding concepts that I personally find useful to refer to whenever I need to make a decision in any given educational situation. In particular I find them useful for building communities of learners.

I guess you probably find a lot of this familiar, even if you use different terms. If not there is a lot of research about constructionism, constructivism and social Constructionism which you can find out more about in some of my more formal papers.

How Moodle tries to support a Social Constructionist view

I'm going to go through the earlier list again, this time pointing out existing features in Moodle. Pedagogy and software design are closely intertwined in online learning - the "shape" of the software can help or hinder the teacher in what they are trying to do.

  1. All of us are potential teachers as well as learners - in a true collaborative environment we are both

    Many of the activities in Moodle are designed to allow students to control common content, such as forums, wikis, glossaries, databases, messaging and so on. This encourages students to add to the total course experience for others.

    In Moodle 1.7 we've made a huge step of a whole new Roles implementation which further breaks down the distinction of teachers and students, allowing Moodle system administrators and teachers to create new roles with any mix of capabilities they like. If you want students to be allowed to facilitate forums, create quiz questions or even control the course layout then you can. There is a very fine degree of control – for example you can allow students the ability to delete posts in just one single forum if you like.

    I hope that people will take these new features and experiment with control in their courses, allowing students more flexibility to do things that were previously thought of as something teachers should do.

  2. We learn particularly well from the act of creating or expressing something for others to see

    Moodle has a wide range of ways in which people can create representations of their knowledge and share them.

    • The course structure itself is terrific way to construct a shared and active representation of the learning journey that everyone is going through.
    • Forums of course are the core of this, providing spaces for discussion and sharing of media and documents (using the media plugin filters, attachments or simply links).
    • Wikis are collaboratively-built pages useful for group work and other negotiations.
    • Glossaries are collaboratively-built lists of definitions that can then appear throughout the course.
    • Databases are an extension of this idea allowing participants to enter structured media of any type (for example a collection of digital photos or a library of references).


  3. We learn a lot by just observing the activity of our peers

    The participants page is the main place where you can see everyone in your course. It shows a lot of information about your participants and how recently they've been there.

    An Online Users block is the best way to see everyone else who might be on right now.

    The Recent Activity block shows a great deal of information about what has happened recently, and via link you can see reports with more detail. Things that happened not only include changes to the course and forum posts, etc, but also things like assignment submissions and quiz attempts. Students can't see the results that other students got from these activities, but they do get some sense that everyone is submitting Assignment 1 now and this peer pressure hopefully helps those who need it.

    Finally, almost all the modules will "tag" an entry or change with the name of the user, so that you can see who did what and when. For example, wiki pages all have a history link with full details on every edit.

  4. By understanding the contexts of others, we can teach in a more transformational way (constructivism)

    There are many different ways to find out about people. Access to these can be decided on a site basis (different sites have different privacy policies):

    • The user profile contains several fields where people can provide information about their background, etc. In particular there is a user profile photograph, which appears throughout Moodle whenever that person writes something. The photo links back to the profile page.
    • A compendium of forum posts (and discussion starters) by that person in that course (or across the site).
    • Individual blogs allow people to express things in a public but reflective way, often providing access to thinking that might not normally expressed in, say, a forum.
    • Overall activity reports show all the contributions from a user in a course, including assignment submissions, glossary entries, etc.
    • User log reports show detailed logs of every action taken by a person in Moodle, as well as graphs showing overall activity statistics.
    • The survey module provides a variety of proven questionnaire instruments for discovering interesting information about the state of mind of the group.

  5. A learning environment needs to be flexible and adaptable, so that it can quickly respond to the needs of the participants within it

    • The course page itself is the main tool for a teacher, allowing them to add/remove and structure activities as necessary. Changing the course is one button click away at any time, so the teacher can change it on a whim. In Moodle 1.7 we have now added AJAX features, so that activities, sections and blocks can all be simply dragged-and-dropped.
    • The roles in Moodle 1.7 can be applied individually in every context across the site, and can be further tweaked with overrides. So if you want to create one single quiz where everyone has access to everybody's results, or allow parents of students to see parts of your course, then you can.
    • Navigation around the course and site is automatically generated.
    • The gradebook is automatically maintained, and reflects the activities in the course at any given time.
    • There are preferences for many aspects of appearance and behaviour, at site, course and activity levels, allowing educators to fine-tune the behaviour of Moodle in many ways.
    • External systems can be integrated easily, to maintain authentication, enrolments and other things, allowing Moodle to react smoothly as data in other systems is modified.

Das Gleichgewicht finden

Bevor zukünftige Entwicklungen beschrieben werden sollen, muss zunächst kurz überlegt werden, zwischen welchen Extremen ein Kurs-/Lernmanagementsystem wie Moodle zu verorten ist. Erfahrungsgemäß gibt es breit gestreute Erwartungshaltungen an das Lernen online in offenen Gesellschaften wie der unseren.

Ein eher ordnungsorientierter Ansatz sieht die Lernenden gern unter einem Höchstmaß an Kontrolle: Inhalte zu definierten Zeitpunkten aufnehmen und durch Tests den Lernerfolg nachweisen.

Ein eher gegenläufiger antiautoritärer Ansatz verfolgt in keinster Weise eine Steuerung des Lernprozesses, jeder Teilnehmer arbeitet mit seinem portfolio, liest Blogs und Dateien, die er nach eigenem Gutdünken durch RSS-Feeds und Verlaufslisten in Blogs auswählt. Dies mag ein interessanter Ansatz sein, der auch in der Lage ist, eine Diskussion über Erziehung und Unterricht im allgemeinen anzustossen. Jedoch scheinen die mit diesem Ansatz verbundenen Probleme zu zahlreich zu sein - wie Sicherheitsaspekte, institutionale Hürden usw.

Es scheint aber, dass die Mehrzahl der Anwender irgendwo zwischen diesen beiden Extremen zu verorten sind. Viele Trainer und Teilnehmer haben erstmalig Kontakt zum online-Lernen und sind vorsichtig gespannt, was sich wohl hinter dieser Methode verbirgt. Viele darunter erweitern dabei ihre Methodenkompetenz hinsichtlich des online-Lernens. Gerade diese Personen befinden sich auf einer steilen Lernkurve mit vielerlei Facetten.

Fortschritt in der Anwendung

Moodle muss flexibel genug sein, eine große Vielzahl an Bedürfnissen abzudecken - wobei es andererseits einfach genug sein muss, um dem "gewöhnlichen" Trainer/Lehrer einen leichten Einstieg in den Aufbau einer Lerngemeinschaft und dem kollaborativen Lernen zu ermöglichen. Moodle kann als Werkzeugkasten aufgefasst werden, womit sowohl ein einfacher Einstieg als auch eine im Zeitverlauf mehr und mehr ausgereifte Betreuung einer Lerncommunity möglich sein soll. Letztendlich wäre es auch wünschenswert, wenn Trainer und Lehrer selbst mit Moodle lernen, im Sinne einer Lerngemeinschaft mit anderen Trainern und Lehrern.

Was könnte nun ein typischer Anwendungsverlauf eines Trainers sein, der völlig unbedarft beginnt, seine Trainings und Unterrichte mit Moodle zu unterstützen?

  1. Handouts werden nun über Moodle bereitgestellt (Als Ressourcen oder SCORM)
  2. Ein Forum zur Nachrichtenverbreitung (passiv)
  3. Tests und Aufgaben über Moodle abwickeln
  4. Wikis, Glossare und Datenbanken zur interaktiven Entwicklung von Inhalten
  5. Foren konsequent und aktiv zum gegenseitig Austausch nutzen
  6. Aktivitäten sinnvoll gruppieren und mit den Resultaten in späteren Aktivitäten weiter arbeiten.
  7. Jede Aktivität tiefer gehend reflektieren - Grundidee, fortgeschrittene und ungewöhliche Anwendung
  8. Mittels Erhebungen die Lernaktivität im Kurs ermitteln und reflektieren
  9. Peer-Reviews mittels Aktivitäten wie dem Workshop umsetzen
  10. Die eigene Lehrtätigkeit reflektieren und innerhalb des Kollegenkreises Ideen und Kritik austauschen.

Where Moodle can do better and what we're doing about it

Keeping in mind the theme of this paper and the conference stream, here are a few of the upcoming plans for things that are more related to pedagogy:

Repositories and Portfolios

Currently only teachers can upload and manage collections of files into Moodle, using the Files tool in each course. There is no easy way to share files between courses, and no way for ordinary users to keep a portfolio, say.

This is changing in Moodle 2.0 with the addition of a Repository API (which allows any external repository to be used as a source of files and data) and a Portfolio API (which will allow all users to capture things in Moodle and store them in any external repository of their choice).

Special-purpose repositories are a growing area, and it means institutions can keep their valuable data where they want to, even if they switch front-end systems like VLEs.

Most importantly, this will allow the development of e-Portfolios to explode, and these are something I think a lot of us really want to see as a very positive pedagogical enhancement.

Community Hubs

We want to improve the way teachers and users of Moodle communicate with each other, not only about e-learning and Moodle, but also in their subject areas. For example, imagine a Biology 101 teacher finding a "community" button in their course, taking them straight to a place where their peers are all discussing best practice for teaching Biology 101, sharing and browsing repositories of course materials and learning designs.

A major focus for Moodle 2.0 is the creation of networking between Moodles, allowing anyone to turn their Moodle site into a Moodle Community Hub. Login between Moodles will be transparent but secure and fully controlled by site administrators. The peer-to-peer nature of the design will allow all sorts of interesting scenarios to develop.

Better interaction between tools

Currently Moodle already sends an email as notification of a lot of different types of events, but it can be difficult to manage. By piping all the messaging from throughout the system via the Messaging module that we already have, users will have a much finer control over exactly what sorts of messages they want to see. We can also allow email to come back into Moodle.

Similarly, we'll be integrating the existing blogging much more tightly with the whole system, by adding "blog this" buttons everywhere that allow users to capture and comment on items of interest.

Metadata and outcome statements

Currently Moodle courses need to be manually connected to state learning standards. In many places of the world such reporting is mandatory, so it can take a lot of time.

Moodle 1.9 introduced a mechanism so that:

  1. admins can import a long list of outcome statements (as tags)
  2. teachers can relate a subset of these to their course
  3. teachers can connect each activity to an even smaller subset

This helps course design by providing teachers with a tool to ensure the requirements for the course are being met, while also providing much better reporting for admins and students on what has been achieved.

Moodle 2.0 will build on this with Progress Tracking which allows these things to be guided by individual learning plans for each student.

Role-playing and scenario simulations

A popular and effective technique in face-to-face teaching is that of role-playing in scenarios, and this can be difficult to do online. You could imagine an Environmental Science course running a role-playing simulation where some students play the government, some as Greenpeace, some as industry for a particular scenario.

The plans for this have been around for a long time, but I hope it can be developed soon. It would be a module where people can be assigned roles within a simulated situation and appear to others anonymously in those roles, interacting in forums, wikis, and all the other tools in Moodle according to the rules of the simulation.

What else would you like to see?

I hope this has stimulated some thoughts about the sorts of things you would like to see in your ideal online learning environment. If so, please join in with the discussions on http://moodle.org and let's brainstorm them a bit. I hope we can come up with some new ideas to put in the Moodle Tracker, or at least some support or modifications for old ones.ru:Педагогика