E-learning: More Than Meets the Eye

I am entering the last half of the last week of my course all about e-learning.  This was one of the few required courses I was blase about because of the content.  I work in a corporate environment and while we use online technologies, an actual online class is not what I do.  However, I am happy this course was required, have learned quite a bit, and could see myself facilitating online courses as a second job (I was told by someone he could see me doing that).  One of the most significant things I have learned is there is the same amount if not more preparation required for facilitating an online course as compared with a traditional face-to-face classroom or even a hybrid environment.  In a true e-classroom, there is no face to face interaction unless participants take advantage of collaboration through Skype or other applications for video chat.  This means instruction, activities, and assignments need to engage and motivate learners on their own.  This can be extremely difficult!  In my own experience, there have been courses that are more difficult to involve myself with whether it be the content (if it's required and I don't really have an interest, it can be hard for me to get motivated to complete my work) or the methods used (even with interesting content, discussion that is not developed to encourage research and support doesn't support engagement).  E-learning requires significant motivation for self-study and exploration and if there is not proper support from a facilitator, almost any learner can lose motivation to continue their learning.  Some major learning I have taken from my courses with this program are the different applications out there to aid in learning.  One of these is Piktochart.com.  Here is an example of my work that just so happens to be about the topic of this post:

My first Prezi

Please be kind.... and cross-posted at The Firebird Suite (under the Portfolio tab).

Cheap and easy infographic

The assignment this week was to create a graphic organizer or infographic -- I opted for the latter, doing so because I had recently discovered Piktochart and fell in love with what it allowed me to do.

Piktochart is an online program for creating spiffy looking infographics, with a free and paid versions of the application (the free version has a very limited selection of templates and capability). Before addressing the plusses and deltas of the program, I'll share what it allowed me to do for last week's project:

 

 

From this perspective, you see that they slap their logo on to the end of the infographic, as easy fix with any graphics manipulation program (just slice it off). That's not really a delta, just a minor annoyance. Some deltas are that (at least in the free version) the image library is awfully slim, some of the graphic elements are difficult to manipulate (I gave up trying to use the line tool) and there is no "flip" function for graphics or text. The final delta is that the paid version is really pricey for what you get, especially considering that one could achieve the same results with Illustrator or Photoshop.



 

The plusses are that the templates are obviously designed by professional graphics designers and, if you own Illustrator or Photoshop (or subscribe to the equally-as-pricey Adobe Creative Cloud), good luck getting the same results, you're more creative than me. And while I find the paid version a bit overpriced, subscription is monthly so there's no being locked into something that will only be used a few times. Finally, while the workspace could definitely use some tweaking (there are other issues than the ones I mentioned above), it is intuitive, with a relatively flat learning curve.

 

Having said that, it's worth a shot if you're stuck trying to put together a decent graphic organizer.