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Session 4 Encouraging further study
4 Encouraging further study
A lot of learners may not be aware of the range of academic qualifications and courses that their institution offers, let alone the vast amount of free study resources available on various platforms.
As a facilitator, it is extremely important that you encourage learners – not only with the study of their chosen course, but also to promote other areas of study within your institution/platform that they might find interesting or beneficial.
4.1 Learner experience and identifying relevant resources
As discussed previously, learners on online courses will have a wide range of study experiences. Some will be supplementing their study, or have an academic background. Others will have no experience of higher education, or may not have embarked on any study for an extremely long time.
It is vital to try and gauge the level or type of study that learners would be comfortable with. You may have been able to deduce from conversations and introductions outlined in Section 3.1 what their experience is, which will help enable you to make suggestions.
Even a brief conversation with a learner about their learning experience should enable you to gauge a basic view, and monitoring their patterns of participation (Section 3.4) may underline confidence issues or lack of understanding of the internet.
For instance, a learner who mentions that they have a BSc in chemistry may not find a course on essay and report writing particularly useful, but might be interested in seeing the range of Science academic modules and qualifications available to them.
Conversely, a learner who reveals that they are nervous as they haven’t studied since they were 16 may run a mile if you direct them towards academic modules. However, they could benefit from a suggestion of trying an entry level course on getting back into education.
Making informed choices
The important thing is to be able to make an informed choice when directing learners to further study and promoting resources:
- If you are not familiar with the range of content on your platform, have a good look through and note different sections that you feel may be useful to some of the learners.
- Make sure that you are up to date with the qualifications and modules available to them via their institution or platform.
- Promote other resources to help learners on other platforms and channels such as:
- Bibblio (free audio and video content)
- Audioboo (free audio downloads for many different devices)
- iTunesU (free audio downloads for Apple devices)
- YouTube (free video content)
- Googleplay (free ebooks for download)
- Ministry of Education Online Library (online books and publications)
- Facebook (for chat sessions and many other things)
- eTekkatho (for English and Myanmar language content accessible offline)
- Wikipedia (for free access to an online encyclopedia covering a broad range of subject material)
- Twitter – encourage them to follow relevant accounts where they can search for conversations about any courses they are interested in and be kept up to date with news and links about other content.
4.2 Suggesting resources
In the following activity, you will explore how to suggest resources to learners.
Activity 10
Have a look at the following example:
Tin Win hasn’t studied for 20 years since he left school, and feels he hasn’t had any experience with note-taking. He is worried that he won’t know which parts he should be concentrating on.
Discussion
Initially, it would be useful for Tin Win to try courses with titles such as Reading and note-taking or Learning to learn to help with what he should be looking for when taking notes, and also to give him confidence in starting to think of himself as a learner again.
Now, take a look at the following three scenarios, and from looking through courses you know about, think of a suggestion(s) for further learning for each of the people in these scenarios.
You may wish to record this response in your learning log.
- Scenario 1: Htat Htay worries that her digital literacy skills are a barrier to her gaining more responsibility at work as she will increasingly need to use and understand computers and the Internet. She does not want to spend months on a course but would like to have some credit for any learning she does. Which resources do you think would benefit Htay Htay at this stage?
- Scenario 2: Than Oo has an interest in environmental issues and but has found studying in English language challenging. Which resources do you think would benefit Than Oo at this stage?
- Scenario 3: Aye Aye Maw’s qualifications and much of her experience have been gained abroad, so she feels that she does not always represent herself very well on CVs. She would like a way to identify for potential future employers what her skills are and how relevant they are to the workplace. Which resources do you think would benefit Aye Aye Maw at this stage?
Now continue to Session 5 Developing an action plan.