Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

I spent the whole morning at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre Hotel for the E-Learn Conference 2005. Attended a few very interesting presentations. What I find valuable of this conference is that you will find the presenters are from all over the world. This is a perfect chance for us American online educators to find out what's the rest of the world (more specifically, Asia Pacific, African and East European nations)are researching on.

I learned some very interesting course design characteristics from Mr. Tik Chan, INTI College Malaysia and Yan Liu, School of Foreign Language and Literature of Beijing Normal University. Both of them have mentioned about lack of "Course Writers" meaning subject matter experts that are willing to "write" online courses in their institutes. To think about more closely, it does require a great effort to train and prepare a content expert to be an online course instructor. What's more unique about the courses they presented is that the students will heavily rely on the "pre-written" course materials and less on human interactions (synchronous / Asynchronous). This would require the content leader (instructor), instructional designer and editor (people who check and correct errors in the written content) to work closely together in order to produce the impressive "easy to understand" online contents. There are yet more to explore, going to get some sleep and wake up early to catch Curtis Bonk's OOPS keynote tomorrow morning at 8:30.