The important element for online students is to realize that technology skills are required. Therefore, the student must approach the online learning environment with an open mind to learn new or improve current technology skills to be proficient in learning through demonstrating with the technology provided their mastering of the subject. The demonstration of the mastery level of online curriculum by a student requires the student to learn from experience. Learning from experience requires the strengthening of critical thinking skills to revise knowledge precept as in reconstructivism.
LE,
You make a great point. Yes, the LMS can be an alien environment. Do you or does your institution have a LMS orientation? If not, you can do one yourself. It may be wort your time.
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
The technical skills that I believe are important are:
1) General PC Literacy
2) An ability to quickly adapt to new online environments. The LMS is an alien environment for most the first time they see it.
3) Uploading and Downloading files and experience sharing content online is really important.
4) Students with experience with MS Office Programs and the typical user interface seem to be more successful.
5) Students who use the technology daily to communicate for social and work generally adapt well to online classes. Since, they have a high comfort level with online, asynchronous communication.
LaBoore,
I think that is a smart move. You provide the guidance and the resources and they put the effort.
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
LaBoore,
Does your university provide a technical orientation for your online students? You may want to develop your own if they don't.
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
Andrea, I usually do not do a computer refresher course for my students but I do refer them to the labs designed to help students who need some technical tutoring.
Turning on computer, downloading applications, navigating thru the virtual campus, running spell checks, Having a web browser, chat online, uploading files, converting files, and researching the web for questions are the technical skills.
Michael,
Do you provide orientations or tutorials to help get students up to speed? The recovery of deleted documents is an interesting skills. Apparently you have had some experiences?
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
Francis ,
You make a great point. Students must acquire these skills quickly. If it is a five week course, that doesn't leave much wiggle room. There has to be strategies to do it.
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
ROBERT,
Yes, these skills may be important to your course. Do you or your institution have an orientation to help students acquire these skills?
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
Natalie,
Great post. There are skills that have to be used to be successful in an online course and students HAVE to be able to navigate the LMS and work several different types of software. We have to be upfront with students about these skills. We can help, guide, advise, but they have to learn them before learning starts.
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
Albert,
Great strategies. Your use of first contact email is a great idea to get students that are not familiar with the LMS.
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
Annabel,
How do you provide help to achieve these technology skills?
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
Lindsey,
Great observation. For many instructors, there is no luxury of time in many courses for students to get up to speed technology wise. This must be done quickly.
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
Kathleen,
You are right. Learning the LMS is so important. We as instructors need to know the tutorials and really support students using them.
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
Christine,
Sadly, I wouldn't know how to do that. You recognized the deficiency and fixed it with a tutorial. This is the beauty of knowing what you can do with technology to help students use the technology.
Dr. Kelly Wilkinson
They need to be able to upload content. They need to be able to work inside discussion threads and see how those can help in the learning environment. They need to be able to download content as well. I think one of the forgotten things is the language. They need to be able to speak the technology language (hyperlinks, url's, etc.) If they don't understand what we are saying to them, they will get lost very quickly.
The most basic tech skills for my students are the ones that you mentioned with the ability to upload and download files and troubleshoot file transfer problems.
I would expand to add typing skills, the ability to recover deleted documents and the use of system navigation skills for file sharing and file saving.
There are some basic technical skills that are important or online students;
1. Copy, cut, and paste text in a document
2. Save a Microsoft Word file as a .pdf file
3. Use the spell checker and thesaurus
4. Search the Internet effectively
5. Attach a file to an email
6. Save and retrieve files using a USB drive
7. Download plug-ins such as Flash, Adobe Reader, etc.
8. Login and use the school's online library system
9. Login and use the school's Learning Management System (LMS)
10. Download and unzip files
11. Determine if you have a MAC or PC and your operating system
The above have been suggested in the CEE course material and I would certainly use these as a guideline for my students too. In addition to these being able to navigate through the school website and knowing how to use each of the icons on the website are important technical skills. Being able to work with Microsoft office comfortably is something which is crucial to given that assignments are submitted using word document.
the assignments my students are asked to submit are either in MS Word or PowerPoint. Many seem to struggle with those, so I try and do a rather thorough tutorial of both before the session begins.
They also need to be able to research topics and look at credible sites. I know that's not exactly a technical skill, but learning how to do a proper search to get the results you need is a skill my students need. But the technical skill of using Internet Explorer and other Search Engines is a necessity.
Students even struggle with Outlook sometimes and I can tell by how their emails are structured they don't completely understand the layout and the formatting.
The LMS is absolutely something they need to know how to maneuver well. Again, I go through a long tutorial of the classroom before the first chat begins; showing students how to load documents to the drop box, how to post to the Discussion Board, how to use spellcheck within the system, etc.
Those are the ones my students have had to use in the classes I have taught these past several years, though I am sure technology will change soon enough and there will be more to know. We don't have the capacity to offer our classes via mobile phones yet, or for them to be able to use video conferencing, so that is not something they need to know now, but will in the near future, I would imagine.
