Introducing Chapters from the TEC-VARIETY Book One Day at a Time:
Noted: Listed at the bottom of this blog post is a recap of the Bonk book blogging of "Adding Some TEC-VARIETY" so far.
This is Day Three of Blogging (Chapter Two: Online Attrition and Retention: Theory to Practice")
As I announced back on July 24, 2014 (2 months ago), my new book, written with Dr. Elaine Khoo
from the University of Waikato, was published in May 2014 (though a
prepublication version was posted online 3 months earlier). It is
titled: "Adding Some TEC-VARIETY: 100+ Activities for Motivating and Retaining Learners Online."
More than a decade in the making, I am delighted to bring it to
you for free! It is open access.When done, I got lucky to get the http://tec-variety.com/ homepage for the book.
This is the third straight day of blogging on the book, one snippet per day for several week. I encourage you to download it and also to share the free e-book with friends, students, colleagues, etc. It is now available for free as a PDF document at the book homepage and so are each of the 15 chapters.
More than 22,000 people have done so, perhaps we can get to 30,000 downloads of the entire book in the coming week. Having problems finding it? Ok, just go to my homepage and you can find it (personal homepage).
This is an experiment in self-publishing. I used Amazon CreateSpace. I also used my book publishing website OpenWorldBooks.com which I forgot that I owned. My amazing son Alex did the book cover. If interested, you can purchase paperback or softcover versions of this book for under $15 USD in Amazon and for the Kindle for under $10 USD via Amazon.
See
below for a opening part of Chapter Two: Online Attrition and Retention: Theory to Practice . Elaine and I hope that you
enjoy the book. Below is the section of the book that I am sharing
today. I hope to share a portion of Chapter 3 on four perspectives on online motivation tomorrow and the 10 application chapters will com after that. There are 10 activities or ideas related to online learner motivation and retention in each of those 10 chapters or 100 total ideas. So stay tuned.
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Chapter Two Online Learning Attrition and Retention; Theory to Practice (Note: this is just the first four+ paragraphs as another a teaser or tickler).
I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.
—Benjamin Franklin
Background
We remember growing up in the 1970s and
1980s when the norm was to try to get into college or university after high
school so you could find a good job and eventually attain a productive and
well-respected career. Competition to get the best grades was fierce. Many of
our friends wanted to attend the most prestigious universities. “Correspondence
courses” (as distance learning was called back then) were viewed as the poor
cousin to the more traditional campus-based courses. Fueling such attitudes,
the correspondence courses offered were often clerical, administrative, or
semivocational in nature.
This situation did not deter the millions
of correspondence learners brave enough to give it a go, including Bonk, who
enrolled in a couple of television and correspondence courses in the mid-1980s
prior to entering graduate school. Bonk formed a personal bond with his
designated course instructor, Dr. Robert Clasen of the University of Wisconsin,
and as a result, he fairly quickly completed each of these courses. A few
months later, Professor Clasen hired him to help with a new television course
on critical thinking shortly after he arrived at the University of Wisconsin
for graduate school.
Near the end of that decade, Khoo’s good
friend, Jamie, took up the challenge of learning through correspondence after
she and Khoo had completed high school. Not being academically inclined, Jamie
signed up for a clerical course via correspondence. Within a few weeks, she was
sent her first few packages of manuals, instructions, and assignments via the
postal service. She would complete her assigned tasks, mail them back, and get
the next lot of assignments. This went on for about 10 months. Early enthusiasm
with the course and materials eventually turned to despair.
Her lament? Jamie felt that she was
mostly on her own throughout this course. Unlike Bonk’s experience, there was
no one to support or help her when she had questions. She received written
feedback every couple of months upon submitting her work. In between, she was
basically in isolation. And as the material became more difficult, Jamie’s
anxieties increased. Soon she quit. The process was just too hard. Jamie’s
story is typical of the early distance learning scenario. Of course, there were
many highly visible success stories like Bonk’s who, coincidentally, would
likely not have authored this book had he not had access to such distance learning
courses. Nevertheless, a majority of folks found it too frustrating to sustain
the motivation to chug on alone in such courses.
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century.
Today’s distance educators have a multitude of choices when it comes to
selecting from available communicative technological tools to enhance their
teaching or training practices and support their students’ learning. Unlike
Jamie’s learning options, technology resources have expanded to include
podcasted lectures, mobile flashcards, expert blog posts, wiki-based multimedia
course glossaries, YouTube video lectures and expert demonstrations, course
announcements and reminders in Twitter, and other vast information networks
contributed by people around the planet (e.g., Wikipedia). With these new means
to foster learner interaction, collaboration, engagement, and personal study,
schools, universities, and corporate training departments worldwide have
embraced the culture and fervor surrounding Web-based distance learning. There
is now wide recognition and elevated status accorded to online courses and
programs in a range of academic disciplines that are either offered entirely
online or use different forms of blended learning to supplement current F2F
programs.
Consider
current statistics. We increasingly hear reports on how the number of students
and corporate employees attracted to the potential of open, flexible, and
distance learning options continues...(see free book for more...)
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Note: for the rest of Chapter One and the entire Adding Some TEC-VARIETY book, you can find it FREELY available (and the entire book as well at the book homepage or you can purchase it via Amazon. Comments
and questions are always welcome as are stories and examples of how you
use the ideas in the book (just write to: curt at worldisopen.com).
Bonk book blogging so far:
1. Announcing the Adding Some TEC-VARIETY book, Posted: July 24, 2014.
2. Introducing the Preface, Posted September 18, 2014.
3. Introducing Chapter One: TEC-VARIETY, Posted: September 19, 2014
4. Introducing Chapter Two: Online Learning Attrition and Retention, Posted: September 20, 2014 (today)
So, how do you say "free"??? I say FREE!!!Labels: blended learning, online learning, online motivation, online retention, online retention strategies, TEC-VARIETY |
