Barbara Bourdelles - How I adapted face to face students training to online vocational training
Hello everyone,
I am Barbara Bourdelles, working in Météo-France ENM as a training scientific officer and teaching part-time. Today, I would like to share with you my recent experience on designing and delivering an online course to colleagues of MeteoFrance, I mean life-long online training. Usually, I usually train students in a classroom, during their first weeks in ENM, on the same topics (producing office documents, which covers note-taking, plans, argumentation, and using LibreOffice software).The change in the delivery mode was not related to the pandemic, even if, at last, it was a good choice, as we started the training during a forced homeworking period and then we faced our third lock-down.
My choice of organizing this training online was related to added values I believe online training can have: I made hypothesis that it allows differentiation of training, collaboration between trainees and promotes the transfer of practices between training and real professional life.
To design and deliver this course, I worked using methods and models I found in research papers, and I think they have been of great help to me. This is why I wanted to share them with you.
As a top level working method, I followed 5 successive steps:
– Design a coherent training framework that meets trainees’ needs
− Implement the designed learning structure and activities (resources, tools, technologies...)
− Facilitate learning or training
− Assess the trainees and give them some feedback
− Regulate training to improve quality through a documented reflective process.
During the Design phase, I wrote a course plan, a document I shared with me trainees, where I gave them all information about the training and its assessment.
To models have been of help at this stage. To write my course learning outcomes, I used the Anderson and Krathwohl (2001)’s taxonomy, which is often called the Revised Bloom taxonomy. They advise to use verbs to write learning outcomes and also added categories of knowledge to refine the learning outcomes. In addition, they offer to use this two dimensional approach to check that learning outcomes, assessment strategies and training activities are coherent.
I also used another model called the eight learning-teaching events model (8LEM) from Leclercq and Poumay (2005). They split all kind of training activities they could find in 8 categories of learning-teaching, using well-established psychological theories. They called them «Learning-teaching», because in each activity, teacher and student have roles that complement each other like the two sides of a shell.
This classification can help trainers describe, analyse and design their teaching sequences and strategies. I analysed my existing resources and face-to-face activities, and based on 8 LEM model, I adapted some of them to online delivery and also, for categories I did not used before, I created new activities for my online training. For example, I wanted my colleagues to feel confident at the end of the training, so I added a number of meta-cognition activities to make them aware of their weekly achievements.
After Facilitating and Assessing the training came the Regulation phase.
As I said before, I believe that Distance Learning has benefits that can balance its drawbacks, and I wanted to check those hypothesis I made during the design phase, namely: Differentiation of learning paths, Collaboration and Transfer of Knowledge. Thanks to Moodle, I had bunch of data, about Participation, Performance and Perception of my trainees.
So I was able to study these different types of data in detail and concluded that my hypothesis were confirmed. I could also find areas of improvement for the next instance of this training.
I really wanted to share with you, CalMET participants, more details on this approach (DIFAR method, Anderson & Krathwohl taxonomy, 8LEM and so on), as those models could help you analysing and designing your courses and feel even more confident, as they did for me.
If you like to read a longer paper I prepared for you, called "Models and Methods help training at a distance", please feel free to follow this link :You could read it online or download at your own convenience. It is a PDF file.
I hope you will like it and that we shall share at lot on these topics on Monday 27th 6 am UTC or in the dedicated forum.