Helping Teachers Transition

With all of the efforts and discussions on helping learners I thought it would be good to cover some of the ways to help teachers with the changes. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that the teachers and educators have a key role to play in the acceptance of the new resources.

This is a follow-up to some of the things that I covered in Object Oriented Education. This isn't objective oriented, but object oriented. The goal is to make the cool new stuff novice friendly.

Premade Blog Solutions

I'm not talking about things like Blogger, WordPress and other platforms, but completely premade blog code for teachers to just jump into using. Themes, layouts, style sheets, call them what you want, but make it so the teachers don't have to call for tech support to create a page. Though this may lead to some rather bland blogs, it is needed for blogging, and other solutions, to become widely used.

This could be done as general solutions, or specific solutions. A school or department might have some premade code for staff to quickly get started. It would even make life easier for the times tech support are needed.

Also, this doesn't just go for blogs, but anything with code. People unfamiliar with the basics of coding should be given the ability to make the basics work without learning code.

Dedicated Code Gurus

Tech support are only so good with all the different technology being used. So, having colleagues that are good with blogs, wikis, forums and other tools offer their help to the rest of the staff makes sense. There are department heads and webmasters, so why not a department blogmaster? It only takes one person who really knows their way around a technology in a group to make sure the rest can get it working. Mostly it's about informing the staff who can help them so they aren't afraid of depending on tech support.

Content Creation

One of the horrible things to making a distant learning course is compiling course content. Broken links, outdated materials and resource links are time consuming to collect and display correctly. That's something that would be nice to get rid of, because it makes online course building easier, and gives students a better set of resources to use.

However, creating page content is just the start to content creation. Making your own version, a school's version, a course version or some other adapted version should be easy. Doing this can be the difference between a great solution and a so-so solution.

There are other ways, but these are ways that those involved with open education, tech solutions and those who call themselves edupunks can help with transition.

Have fun, spread the word and tell me what you think,
Igen Oukan

Helping Teachers Transition

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