Finding your way into an open online learning community

Making educational materials freely available on the web is not only a noble enterprise, but also fits the call of helping people to become lifelong learners; a call which gets louder and louder every day. The world is rapidly changing, requiring us to continuously update our knowledge and skills. A problem with this approach to lifelong learning is that the materials that are made available are often both incomplete and unsuitable for independent learning in an online setting. The OpenER (Open Educational Resources) project at the Open Universiteit Nederland makes more than 20 short courses, originally developed for independent-study, freely available from the website www.opener.ou.nl. For our research we start from an envisioned online learning environment now under development. We use backcasting to select research topics that form steps from the current to the ultimate situation. The two experiments we report on here are an extension to standard forum software and the use of student notes to annotate learning materials: two small steps towards our ultimate open learning environment

Contemporary e-learning as panacea for large-scale software training

Large organizations renew their core business software with some regularity, resulting in serious challenges for in-company training officers. Especially when large numbers of employees need to be trained to use updated software on short notice, traditional face-to-face training methods fall short. Contemporary e-learning is regarded a solution for such short-term and large-scale training. This paper discusses the effect of a didactically sound e-learning solution on learning to use a new version of an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software package. This solution not only features generally recognized e-learning characteristics like any time, place, path, and pace, but also marks the element ‘just enough’ to emphasize that the e-learning content only covers knowledge (concepts and procedures) necessary to perform the daily professional tasks. Around 2000 healthcare workers of a mental healthcare institution were educated online to use a renewed version of an EMR software package within two months. Results (i.e., time on task, test results, and perceived effectiveness) indicate that contemporary online solutions can help large organizations to face short-term and large-scale training problems. (This paper was presented at CSEDU 2013 in Aachen, Germany; see http://www.csedu.org/?y=2013

ICT-rijk onderwijs

Van der Baaren, J., Walhout, J., & Rubens, W. (2009). ICT-rijk onderwijs. Workshop met docenten uit het middelbaar onderwijs over het toepassen van ICT in het onderwijs. Oktober, 1, 2009, Kampen, Nederland.Workshop met docenten uit het middelbaar onderwijs over het toepassen van ICT in het onderwijs. 1 okt.2009, Kampe

Efficiënte softwaretraining met taakgerichte e-learning

Dit paper beschrijft een onderzoek naar de effecten van een state-of-the-art online training die specifiek ontwikkeld is ten behoeve van de invoering van een nieuwe versie van een software applicatie voor de registratie van patiënt gegevens (EPD). De e-learning werd ontworpen op basis van een analyse van meest voorkomende taken. Deze analyse leidde tot het onderscheiden van vier gebruikersgroepen waarvoor een aangepaste training werd ontworpen. Een (hele) taakbenadering vormde het uitgangspunt voor het ontwerp van de training. In zes weken tijd volgden bijna 2000 werknemers van Mondriaan (een Nederlandse GGZ instelling) de training. De training bleek zowel efficiënt (gemiddelde doorlooptijd voldeed aan eisen) als effectief (op basis testresultaten en vragenlijstonderzoek vier weken na ingebruikname van de nieuwe software)

An Open Educational Resource for minimal online resuscitation training

Van der Baaren, J., Skorning, M., Kalz, M., Kicken, W., & Biermann, H. (2012). An Open Educational Resource for minimal online resuscitation training. Resuscitation, 83 (S1). e111.When a cardiac arrest occurs it is vital that bystanders act immediately. As a minimum bystanders should be able to check consciousness, call 112 and perform chest compression of sufficient depth and speed until an ambulance or other professional support arrives. The majority of people however do not have these skills. Courses in Basic Life Support are available in all European countries on average 2 hour including a practice session. Research shows (1) these courses are effective and both immediate and short-term (4-6 months) retention is high. These courses are however a too time-consuming and costly option when our aim is to train the vast majority of people and maintain their skill level. In this presentation we present a minimal online resuscitation training.This conference contribution is partly sponsored by the European Regional Development Funds, regions of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine and participating institutions of the project

Using ILIAS to develop large-scale software training

Van der Baaren, J., Wopereis, I., & Bos-Van den Reijen, M. (2013, 29 August). Using ILIAS to develop large-scale software training. Project presented at the Twelfth International ILIAS Conference, Munich, Germany.Around 2000 employees of Mondriaan, a large Dutch institution for mental healthcare, had to be trained within two months’ time to use an upgraded electronic medical record (EMR) software package. Since the training period was short and traditional training facilities were limited, it was decided to adopt an e-learning solution. Contemporary instructional design principles like the whole task approach were applied to create the learning tasks (Van Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2013). Task analyses revealed professional tasks for four distinct user groups, namely administrators, nurses, therapists, and doctors. For each user group an e-learning course was designed consisting of interactive exercises on how to use the new EMR software, For each professional task (e.g. Create a day care plan) exercises were arranged from easy (i.e., much instructional support like hints and direct feedback) to difficult (i.e., little instructional support). Each course included a 12 to 16 item test. The courses were developed as SCORM modules using the Ilias Scorm editor. Student course progress was stored so students could interrupt their learning at any time. The exercises were created with Adobe’s Captivate 5.5 software. The tests were created and implemented with the Ilias test tool. The results of the e-learning solution were very satisfactory. Within two months time the employees successfully completed the course with an average test score of 85%. On average they spend 90 minutes on the course and the test whereas it was expected it would take them on average 120 minutes to complete both. A questionnaire administered eighth weeks after introduction of the new EMR software shows that users had very little problems using the new software. It further indicates that this e-learning solution should be used for similar situations in the future