What I am wondering is how one compensates for this when facilitating online? Does it become as intuitive as it does face-to-face? I imagine it must be much harder to get the feel of a bunch of voices, most of which belong to people one has never even met! I'm looking forward to trying out some online facilitation and getting the 'feel' for the virtual classroom.
On a completely different note, Heather Lamond, the librarian in charge of distance students at Massey University was at Ucol this morning, showing us some of the independent learning packages the Massey library staff have developed to assist students learning how to access information in the library databases, and so on. They work mainly in Captivate and Presenter, and they've produced some really useful, interactive stuff. Heather clearly ran a very well-organised and planned project to get these learning objects created, and it was good to hear her talking about how she went about things. She was also talking about the value of creating a virtual repository for learning objects, where these sorts of things could be stored, in an editable format, for people from other organisations to access and download.
I know many tertiary institutions are moving towards the Creative Commons approach and sharing materials, but wouldn't it be amazing if there were an organised library of these learning objects? A sort of one-stop-shop where materials developers went first, instead of reinventing wheels! The Open University, UK, is already doing something along these lines... check it out here.
Image downloaded from Sthacker's photostream,http://www.flickr.com/photos/sthacker/13622219/sizes/m/in/photostream/CC-BY-SA
