ELITE Course: A Report

IIIT, Bangalore with support from DIT, GOI conducted a four week training program on Effective E-learning and E-Teaching during Jun29 to 24th July. 22 Faculty from across the nation and from different discipline were invited to attend the training. Prof. N J Rao, from IISC, was the coordinator for the ELITE program conducted the course in very effective and planned manner.The purpose of the training was multi-fold. Some of the important aspects covered in depth during the course were

• Course Design
• Assessment
• Instructional Design
• Learning Management systems(LMS) - MOODLE.

Course Design:

With more institutions going autonomous way, now they are responsible for designing their own curriculum. Course design is a process of designing a complete course given the program outcomes and competencies. It was stressed that a methodical course design process is very useful both from teacher and learner perspective. Useful tools such as concept maps were introduced and good examples were provided. Groups were formed among participants and each group was assigned the task of designing a course from scratch. It was a very education experience for each one of us.

Assessment:

Assessment is an important aspect of any course design process. However it is noticed that in a large system such as university, assessments get lower priority and examination methods usually end up asking more of a remembering and recalling types of questions. The training exposed us to a well structured and graded easement method known as Bloom's Taxonomy which consists of stages of learning starting from remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating and creating. Course designed by participants included a deliberate inclusion of Bloom's taxonomy as an integral part.

Instructional design

Lecture is a dominant form of teaching, it is not the only open for teaching. Instructional design is selection and applications of various combination of instructional strategy by the concerned faculty. It includes in addition to lecture, demonstration, Learning objects, practice session to name the few. Sufficient coverage of theoretical foundations of instructional design were taught to us during the training. Each of the group presented the course designed by the them to whole audience and critical feedback was provided by Prof. N J Rao and other participants

Learning Management Systems:

Learning management systems help faculty managing the entire process of teaching including content management- delivery and assessment. We were trained on one open source LMS called MOODEL. Ms Vani conducted a series of practical sessions explaining the features of MOODLE system and each candidate was asked to test those features.

A valedictory function was conducted in the presence of Dr. Sadagopan, Director and visiting UGC team. Participants were given a course completion certificate and a ipod

In all it was great learning occasion for all of us