Week 1 Being an online learner

Introduction

Welcome to Get started with online learning. The aim of this 6-hour course is to explain how you can study online without putting the rest of your life on hold. The course contains engaging activities and videos about what it’s like to study online.

In Week 1, you will think about the extent to which you are already an informal online learner. You will then consider how your experience of informal learning might provide a starting point for formal online learning.

Finally, you’ll carry out an online activity which you might be expected to do as a learner at any university.

Before you start, we would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to answer three simple questions in this short survey  to enable us to understand who is interested in this course. There will be a further survey for you to complete after you finish the course, which will need to be completed in order to gain a Statement of participation. Your input will help to further improve the online learning experience.

1.1 Living online

Increasingly, there seems to be very little that it’s not possible to do online, whether that’s ordering food from online food delivery services such as Food Panda or Grab, booking a holiday or comparing the cost of insurance.

It would be easy to assume that everyone in the UK uses the internet. However, a 2015 report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that this is not the case.

In Myanmar, back in 2019, the percentage of the population who accessed the internet was less than 0.3%, amounting toa mere 130,000 users. By 2019, Hootsuite reported this number had grown to 243 million internet users: a growing rate of 200 times within nine years. It is expected this number will continue to grow.

The following short activity will get you thinking about internet usage in the UK. Answer the following questions by selecting the closest percentage to what you think the ONS survey found.

1.1.1 What do you do online?

The statistics from Activity 1 provide an interesting snapshot of the Internet in Myanmar, with most users accessing the Internet on their mobile phones. We also need to understand what they are doing when they use the Internet. We don’t have data on this yet for Myanmar, but as an example, Figure 1 breaks down activities carried out online in the UK and how they changed between 2007 and 2014.

Figure 1 Household internet activities

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Figure 1 shows a series of bar charts comparing the percentage of people carrying out different household internet activities in 2007 and 2014. Between 2007 and 2014 the percentage of people playing or downloading games, images, films or music has risen from 24% to 44%; the percentage of people internet banking has gone from 30% to 53%; the percentage of people using services related to travel or travel accommodation has risen from 42% to 43%; the percentage of people reading or downloading online news, newspapers or magazines has risen from 20% to 55%; the percentage of people finding information abour goods and services has risen from 58% to 73%; and the percentage of people sending and/or receiving emails has risen from 57% to 75%.

Household internet activities

Activity	2007	2014
Playing or downloading games, images, films or music	24	44
Internet banking	30	53
Using services related to travel or travel accommodation	42	43
Reading or downloading online news, newspapers or magazines	20	55
Finding information about goods and services	58	73
Sending/receiving emails	57	75

Figure 1 Household internet activities

1.1.2 From going online to learning online

The previous section asked you to think about what you do online. Most of the types of activities that you would have thought about involve learning of one sort or another. For example, if you were to book a holiday online, you may have already used the skills you’ve acquired to:

• research destinations for the time of year you want to travel
• evaluate how much you trust reviews of hotels
• shop around for the lowest priced flights and hotels
• download maps to your smartphone in advance.

Your online learning experiences

Hopefully you will agree that you are an online learner – this is because it is impossible to be online without being a learner.

In Section 1.1.1, you thought about what activities you carry out online. Using one of the activities you carry out online from the previous section, answer these questions:

• What was my activity?
• Why did I do this?
• What did I learn about?
• What other activity did it lead onto?
• What skills did I develop?

An example is provided below in Table 1.

If you have the time, you might like to repeat this exercise for another example of your online activity.

But what does this tell you about your online learning? You may be surprised by the range of things you do online or to see this in terms of learning. If you are, remember that we are always learning, it’s the only way to make sense of the world around us, of which the internet is playing an increasingly important part.

1.1.3 The informal–formal spectrum

Even if you spend a lot of time online, it is probably the case that most of your online learning is informal.

Informal learning is the learning that goes on in daily life. We may want to plant the vegetable, for example, and start looking for a place to buy seedlings, reading the articles, searching and joining a group on social media to get the information to plant.

As parents or carers we may show children how to write different words or tie their laces (adapted from Jeffs and Smith, 1997, 2005, 2012). Informal learning is therefore a lifelong process through which learners acquire attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from daily experience (adapted from Conner, 1997–2013). This can be seen from the previous section.

Formal learning refers to hierarchically structured school systems; it runs from primary school through to university and organised school-like programs created on the job for technical and professional training (adapted from Conner, 1997–2013). It is therefore learning that other people, such as teachers and lecturers, plan and deliver, which the individual learner has little control over.

In reality, the distinction between informal and formal learning isn’t as strict as it might at first appear. Take the example of this course, which you’re studying right now.

It has been planned by educators and delivered in a fairly formal online environment but you, as the learner, are free to dip in and out of the learning process in a way you couldn’t if this was a formal course.

You can gain recognition for the learning you have done on this course but, again, it is not formal, and you can decide how much effort you want to put in. As a result, formal and informal learning are best seen as part of a continuum.

Think about some of your previous learning experience and consider to what extent it was formal or informal. Does your experience fit neatly into one of these two descriptions described in Figure 2? Or does it fall somewhere in-between?

Figure 2 Get started with online learning

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Figure 2 shows a spectrum of formal and informal learning. On the formal learning end of the spectrum, there are the descriptions: fomal learning provided by an educational establishment, a set curriculum, a set timetable and assessed. On the informal learning end of the spectrum, there are the descriptions provided by individuals or groups, no set curriculum, no set timetable and no assessment.

Figure 2 Get started with online learning

You will probably find that even some of your informal learning experiences come somewhere along this spectrum. You will have the opportunity to explore further what is meant by formal online learning in the next section.

1.2 The elements of online study

As with any form of university study, there are three key elements to how you study online:

1. the teaching materials and activities
2. the assessment
3. your motivations for study.

However, the ways these elements are delivered is different from what might be experienced at a traditional university.

1.2.1 Online teaching materials

All universities, whether online or at a campus, provide learning and teaching materials/resources for students online, for example, through a virtual learning environment or learning management system. The difference with online universities is that these online resources become the focus for your studies, and it is likely that the core materials for your course will be presented online. You should be able to access course materials on your smartphone or tablet, as well as on your laptop or PC. This makes it easier to study wherever you are.

Some online libraries you might want to try out are:

• Ministry of Education Student & Teacher e-Library
• Burma/ Myanmar library
• Ministry of Education online library.

In addition, you should have access to online resources such as podcasts, videos, computer software and interactive teaching materials; and many courses will have a dedicated website. You can also communicate with your tutor and other students through forums, email and online conferencing. Online libraries can make thousands of online journals, ebooks, databases and multimedia resources available for you to tap into, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whenever you need them and wherever you are.

Think about the way you search and use information online and the learning that you already do. How much information do you read online and how do you communicate with your friends? When you are learning formally online, you will need to consider how best to engage with the materials you are provided with, and how you should look up information and communicate with others. Look at the following examples of activities associated with formal online learning. What type of hardware (laptop/computer, tablet, smartphone) do you think will best suit the type of learning you might be doing?

• reading and engaging with course material
• reading a journal article
• looking up definitions and technical terms
• keeping up with your study timetable
• chatting with other students online
• contacting your tutor
• posting ideas to an online tutorial.

1.2.2 Online assessment

All accredited study requires some form of assessment and online learning is no exception. Assessment is an opportunity to provide guidance to you and your tutors about how you are coping with the course, and also to demonstrate you have the required knowledge and understanding needed to pass a university level course.

Online assessment can be in two main formats: short-form such as interactive quizzes to check your knowledge and understanding as you progress through a course, and long-form such as assignments submitted electronically to a tutor or teacher. But the key point about assessment is that there should be careful guidance given in assignment books which can be reinforced by your tutor, and you should receive extensive and constructive feedback.

The aim of assessment is not to discover your weaknesses, but to provide you with opportunities to consolidate your learning and understanding.

Think about feedback you might have received, either on your work or previous study:

• How comfortable are you in receiving feedback?
• What sort of feedback do you find most helpful?
• What sort of feedback do you find least helpful?
• Does the format in which you receive that feedback (in person, electronically, etc.) make a difference?

1.2.3 Nothing to be scared of

Perhaps ‘scared’ is not the most helpful word here. Being scared of something makes it quite difficult to do much about whatever is scaring you.

However, it’s an understandable reaction if your experiences of being online and your experiences of learning have not been positive.

It is more helpful to see any form of study (whether online or not) as being demanding and challenging. This is nicely captured in the Open University’s short video, ‘What are you capable of?’ (2015).

1.2.4 Your study motivations

Before you move on to the next sections of the course, it is worth considering your own motivations for study. Students of both distance and day campus universities share many motivations for study. They may study to:

• improve their career prospects
• follow a personal interest
• get ready for a new career
• try a topic they knew nothing about
• get the qualification they always wanted
• continue their professional development
• see if they can do it.

How many of these reasons apply to you? Do you have a particular reason for studying online?

Figure 3 Study motivations

1.3 Online study skills

For the remainder of this week, you are going to get a taste of the sort of skills you would require as an online learner at university which in turn can help you to support other online learners.

If you study at a university level, you will be required to do research independently and present your findings, usually in the form of essays or presentations.

The internet can be a vast and wonderful resource for finding information about a subject and if you are studying formally with a university, you may have access to an array of electronic journals that the institution is subscribed to.

The internet can also be a terrible place to try and find information. Anyone can set up a website or write a blog and there is no guarantee that what they’ve published is true.

In the next section, you will watch Dr Annika Mombauer, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at The Open University, and Vincent Trott, a PhD student, carrying out a task which may help you when searching for information on the internet. You will then attempt some research of your own.

The following section is adapted from The Open University course World War 1: trauma and memory (available soon).

1.3.1 Finding and interrogating historical data

In this video, Annika and Vincent do some ‘desk research’. Their task is to find out how many people died in the First World War.

As you watch, make a note of some of the ways in which you can find out for yourself about casualty rates, and think about some of the problems that you might face when doing this research. This will be your task after you have finished watching. Here are the casualty tables from Brill’s Encyclopedia of the First World War (Hirschfeld et al., 2012) and The Cambridge History of the First World War (Winter, 2014).

Download this video clip.Video player: ou_futurelearn_cicp_vid_1004.mp4

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Transcript

Annika

So Vince, our task today is to try and find out just how many people died in the First World War. That's not an easy task, is it?

Vincent

It's not an easy task because first of all, we have to be careful how we define our terms. We're talking about casualty statistics here today, but 'casualties' doesn't just mean those who died in the war. It means all men who weren't fit to fight, so we need to take into account injuries, men who were maybe taken prisoner, and those who went missing. So we need to be careful not to confuse casualties with simply deaths.

Annika

So here you're talking about military casualties, then, but what about civilian casualties? Are they included in the statistics that we have?

Vincent

Well, often they're not. That's the problem. Of course, civilians were affected by the war as well, but it's quite difficult to get accurate figures for civilian casualties because we need to think about whether these civilians were directly affected by the war, so perhaps by bombing or so on, or whether they were maybe indirectly affected by starvation because of lack of food as a result of the war, for example.

Annika

And I guess also giving statistics for different countries must be difficult for all sorts of reasons. For example, borders changed between the beginning of the war and after the end of the war, so a country with its borders of 1914 might have different borders in 1918. For example, Austria, Hungary, which has a unified army consisting of several different nationalities, but in order to understand how many Czech soldiers, say, died, or how many Hungarian soldiers died, it's very difficult. So best to look at armies rather than nations, and then the records that armies keep, how reliable are they?

Vincent

Well, this is the other problem. Obviously, armies did keep records, and these are very useful to historians, but the main problem that we have is, of course, armies weren't so concerned with exactly how many men had died. Obviously, armies were mainly concerned with how many men would be available to fight the next battle. Some soldiers might have died of illness or diseases and so on, which again, might not be counted by the army as a death in battle, for example. Another thing to bear in mind is that if soldiers were severely injured, they might be discharged from the army.

Of course, they may have died of very severe wounds a year or two afterwards when they were no longer in the army, and these men would not be included in the death statistics.

Annika

Historians over the years have really come to revise the figures that we've all taken for granted, and it seems that there really was serious underestimates, and that the casualty rates were even higher than previously suspected.

Vincent

Absolutely, yeah.

Annika

So if we wanted to find out, for example, about British casualties, how would we go about finding out how many British soldiers died?

Vincent

Well, a natural starting point, of course, is to go on the internet, and if we type in to a search engine, 'First World War casualties,' we can see what the first few matches are. Of course, one of the many sites that we can look at is Wikipedia, for example.

Annika

And so what does it say, then, for the United Kingdom?

Vincent

The first major statistic that we see is that of military deaths. We can see that those was a range between nearly 703,000 through to about 888,000.

Annika

That's a very large discrepancy there, isn't it? Does that refer to what we just talked about, that the estimates used to be lower and now they are higher?

Vincent

It does, yeah. The fact that there's clearly a range here alerts us to the fact that we can't give an accurate figure. If we take into account the entire British Empire, we've got figures for Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and South Africa as well, and if they're added to the United Kingdom, we get a subtotal, which is between around 908,000 and 1.1 million.

Annika

These are the military deaths as opposed to overall casualties.

Vincent

These are just the military deaths listed here, yeah. So every statistic here has a footnote, and if we click down, we see that it usually references a book. So we know that these figures haven't just been plucked out of thin air. Ideally, they do relate to some academic work somewhere. So this looks like a fairly good starting point.

Annika

And actually looking at those footnotes, I recognise a lot of names from very reputable First World War experts, so that would be another clue that this is a reliable source.

Vincent

Exactly. If we go to another one of our hits from the search engine, and we look at this website here, which is PBS.org.

Annika

Is that the American public broadcaster?

Vincent

It is, yes. This is a table, obviously, that originates from America. If we try and look up British deaths during the war, that figure isn't listed. What we have here is the figure for the British Empire.

Annika

So where does the information on PBS come from? Do we know?

Vincent

Well, there isn't actually any reference listed here. There's no footnotes. There's no reference to any actual other sources, any history books or anything. So we do need to be careful when using a site like this to make sure that we know where these figures are coming from.

Annika

So this would be useful for cross referencing, but you wouldn't necessarily use it as your only source of information.

Vincent

Exactly. I'd be wary of just looking at one table like this without any references and then going away and not looking at other sites.

Annika

Is there another website we can look at?

Vincent

Sure. One other website I looked up was the Western Front Association website. And as the name suggests, the focus here is only on British soldiers who died on the Western Front. Of course, the vast majority of soldiers who served in the First World War for Britain did fight on the Western Front. Of course, not all of them did. Some of them fought in the Middle East and some of them fought in Africa, for example. So figures we get here are slightly different to those that we've been looking at on other sites like Wikipedia, for example.

Annika

Yeah. These figures are right, but they're only giving you a little snapshot.

Vincent

Exactly. We can't always compare like for like. These are some useful statistics, but we can't compare this table and the table we've just been looking at because we're comparing two different things here.

Annika

What about other sources? Historians like printed sources. We like books.

Vincent

Books would certainly be useful, and I think that's the perfect next step after looking at the internet, yes.

Annika

Right. Should we go and find some?

Vincent

Let's go and have a look.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Annika

Well, there's no shortage of books on the First World War, is there? I picked up this one, which is an encyclopaedia of the First World War, and it's a relatively recent one, so let's have a look.

Vincent

Great Britain and Ireland.

Annika

Military deaths, 750,000, so a little bit higher than what we found earlier, I think. And British colonies are listed separately, 180,000, so the total is 930,000, which is, again, slightly higher than what we found before.

Vincent

Slightly higher than the lower range given, but within the range that we saw on Wikipedia, for example.

Annika

We also have figures here for civilian deaths. It's quite difficult to get at those, and I think you can see that from these figures because they're so rounded – 300,000, 700,000. Lots of question marks as well, which show you that we just simply do not have the information. So if I were to direct somebody to a very recent publication on the First World War that might include some of this information, I'd probably send them to Jay Winter's Cambridge History of the First World War, and I've got here the table that's included in that book.

What's useful about this one is that it compares what different authors have given as casualty figures over the years, starting in 1972 and ending with an up to date estimate.

Vincent

This is really interesting because we gain a sense of just how difficult it is to give accurate figures, and just how estimates can vary.

Annika

It lists 761,000 for the losses for Great Britain, which is higher than what we've encountered. And what about the Empire?

Vincent

And again, we see we've got a breakdown of the Empire here, and it gives us a total figure, which is 959,000 listed there. So again, slightly higher than some of the figures we've seen on the internet.

Annika

Yes, absolutely. So would you say, then, in conclusion that it's better to use books, it's better to use the internet? What is the best way to try and do this sort of research?

Vincent

Well, that's a tricky question. I mean, I think it's good to use a variety of sources. Of course, with a book, it's had to go through the publishing process, so that means it's usually been peer reviewed, which means other historians have checked the facts and figures and so on. So generally, books are likely to be more reliable than a site plucked off the internet, but that doesn't mean to say that the internet can't be useful for doing this research. I think the key thing is to use a variety of sources, look at a variety of websites, and preferably look at some printed books as well.

Annika

It's just overwhelming how vast these figures are. I mean, we looked today mainly at British casualties, but some 10 million soldiers, it is estimated, died, and some 6 million civilians were victims of this war. And I think these numbers are so vast, it's almost impossible to comprehend.

Vincent

Exactly. I think sometimes looking at all these figures and statistics, we can become a little bit numb to the actual real pain and suffering that just one of these deaths might have caused.

Annika

Absolutely. And I also think it's pretty much incomprehensible that we simply do not know just how many people died.

Vincent

Absolutely, yeah. But I think hopefully today, we've proven the we can get a little bit closer to getting some idea of maybe just how many people were affected by the First World War.

Annika

Well, thanks for doing this research with me.

Vincent

Thank you very much.

End transcript

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1.3.2 Search for yourself

As you’ve just seen, finding accurate casualty figures is no easy task.

You have been given several estimates of how many military losses Britain and the Empire sustained during the war. As you saw in the previous section, estimates are that around 10 million soldiers and up to 6 million civilians died as a result of the war. You have seen that it is impossible to get exact figures for the casualties of the First World War – many soldiers may have died in captivity or after being discharged from the army, and would not have been included in official estimates. We therefore need to be cautious when approaching statistics of this kind.

Now that you’ve seen Annika and Vincent carry out this research, it’s time for you to do your own historical research, and learn how to find and interrogate historical data.

Summary of Week 1

Well done for reaching the end of Week 1.

This week, you have:

• thought about what activities you already carry out online, such as shopping and banking
• explored how you already learn online informally
• considered what it means to become a formal online learner
• carried out a small research task where you considered the validity of internet sources.

Next week, you will learn more about:

• the technological innovations which will support your online learning
• how you can manage your own study and get support from tutors and other students
• how you can plan for your long-term study and career goals.

You can now continue to Week 2 Studying online.