Best thing about Ikarus 2004

Best thing about Ikarus 2004
      Diversity of different activities to suit different learning styles and preferences
 
      Some of the activities included 

• Reading articles and posting reflections in a small group
• Discussing reflections in a small group 
• Self-organized group research project (same discipline)
• Course-organized group research project (different disciplines)
• Opportunities for visual learners: concept maps at end
• Quizzes every week to get people interested in areas not covered in the course   

     There are different definitions of learning styles
·        The model used in this analysis is one of the information-processing models by Fedler (http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Learning_Styles.html) which categorizes learners as either:

• Active/Reflective;
• Intuitive/Sensing;
• Visual/Verbal and
• Sequential/Global

For more on this model, see Appendix 3

• For a good listing of some other theories see http://web.indstate.edu/ctl/styles/model.html
• A common learning styles model is: Visual, auditory and kinesthetic (using  http://www.chaminade.org/inspire/learnstl.htm and www.howtolearn.com/personal.html) 
• A similar one is VARK Visual, Aural, Read/Write, Kinesthetic (from http://www.vark-learn.com/english/index.asp  – I am multimodal meaning I have a balance in preference in using all 4 kinds – tips for multi-modal students here http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=multimodal)

Formal and informal learning: 

There were "formal" designed activities that were part of the course e.g.:

• Discussions on certain assigned articles 
• Disciplinary research 
• Interdisciplinary research 
• Quizzes 

There were "informal" activities possible, e.g.: 

•  Café for participants to discuss whatever they liked (these topics ranged from eLearning pedagogy, to discussions of learning styles, to political discussions!)
• Chat facility for anyone who wanted to use it. You could tell who was online and if they were on the chat facility, you could "ring" them to let them know you want to talk.
• Each person's profile was posted up (edited by the participant upon joining the course) and included, with their background, were also their ICQ and their email (to allow informal contact). Many participants (upon my prompt hehe) also shared MSN logins and started interacting there.
• There was an area for discussing the quiz
• There were general disciplinary discussion areas where mostly no activities were assigned but some members used the areas for general discussion on their discipline (e.g. pedagogy) 

Addressing Different Learning Styles

 For reflective learners: 

• Mostly asynchronous activities which suit reflective learners (as well as to fit time zone differences because we had people from all over: Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa and the Americas) 
• Reading articles and post your reflection. When an article is first posed, everyone is discouraged from commenting on others' postings. This allows each person time to reflect before they write, and time to read the reflections of others before posting their own. 
• After the time allotted to post original reflections, the tutor summarizes all views said, and discussion is opened up to discuss back and forth among group. This also allows for reflective interactions (as well as active ones – see below) 
• Quizzes gave reflective learners a chance to get a glimpse of an uncovered topic, and no rush to find everything out about it in a short time 
• There was time (and assignments) to reflect after each phase of Ikarus

For active learners: 

• The second phase of article discussions allows short, quick interactions to take place 
• The quizzes were an opportunity for active learners to "dig into" new areas there wasn't enough time in Ikarus to go into details about. Also, the chance to go and do a "search" online gave some active learners (like this author) a kind of "rush of pleasure" J 
•  Chat facility (as well as ability to exchange ICQ and MSN) for synchronous communication which suits active learners 
• Moodle has Wiki workspaces whereby more than one person could edit the same document collaboratively 
• Many collaborative activities which active learners generally favor. 

 For verbal learners: 

• Almost everything required some level of researching, reading assigned articles, or online discussion – it was all dialogue 

For visual learners: 

• Emoticons on Moodle are very friendly and more MSN-like than on e.g. WebCT
• The way we were told about activities and deadlines was in several ways (one is a graph on the front page and another is a document linked from the front page, and another is an email, the text of which is also in the "news" forum)
• One of the last activities was to collaboratively produce a concept map
• One of the VLEs we were assigned to evaluate in one of the group projects was BSCL – which is very suited to visual learners (to the extent that it is difficult to navigate if your not a visual person!) 

For global learners: 

• Other than the assigned forums, there were several others that those interested could dig into 
• There was interdisciplinary group work, and informal discussions in the café and quiz forums 

For sequential learners: 

• There were usually only 2-3 assigned discussion forums at a time, so there was no need to be distracted by several parallel discussions 
• There was discipline-specific group work and discussions 

For sensing learners: 

• Some activities were well-structured such as the quizzes (multiple choice question) and the disciplinary group work (especially the research phase where specific questions were to be answered) 

For intuitive learners: 

• Some activities were less-structured such as informal areas and some of the group work