In this presentation I will look at how concepts used in public speaking and communication models can be combined with instructional design theories and distance teaching tools to improve the quality of learning that takes place in an online course.
The first portion of this presentation will look at how public speaking practices can be used to enhance the delivery of online material. Public speaking and the presentation of online materials share many commonalities. Successful public speaking requires the ability to engage an audience by making information interesting and relevant by crafting the message to the particular audience being engaged. Public speaking is also planned; material often undergoing multiple drafts prior to a speech, indicative of the forethought required, analogous to a course development process. Similarly both are formal; as both public speakers and instructors are presenting from a position of authority, and have a level of distance between themselves and their audience. Based on this, I will be looking at what can be learned by merging processes for audience centered public speaking developed by Seven and Susan Beebe with Instructional Design ADDIE models when developing courses.
The second portion of this presentation will be focused on communication models relating to conversation. Specifically I will be looking at current models that view communication as a transaction, focusing on the way in people send and receive information simultaneously in a face to face conversation. In online courses this often becomes limited to a one way interaction, with an instructor providing information but not actively accepting information in return. While information is gathered from students to reflect their comprehension of materials, this has no immediacy to the material as it is being reviewed, and rarely actively changes the way in which information is presented by the instructor. This part of the presentation will cover ways in which the presentation of material can become more like a conversation that will actively engage students and allow instructors to have a greater presence in their online courses. This will also have implications for Blended Learning enviroments where online tools can be used to enhance the instructors ability to converse with a face to face class.
At the end of this presentation I will go into examples that do not rely on any particular LMS of how these aspects of communication can combined with Instructional Design Models and online teaching tools to improve the quality of online education.
The overall goals of this presentation are to:
-Apply Public Speaking and Communication Models to Course Development.
-Walkthrough the course design process using tools developed from these models.
-Illustrate methods for using the concepts in the running of a course.
