VM curriculum designing

Virtual mobility  has a lot of advantages, like accessibility of materials from home, possibility to use convenient timing for learning . However, lack of interaction and feelings of isolation could be disadvantages associated with virtual mobility course.   Social interaction among learners themselves and learners and their teacher has a huge motivating impact on the learner’s morale and achievements. Social interaction allows giving and receiving direct feedback, exchange of ideas and reflection of one’s own ideas. The design of virtual mobility activities  will involve using a combination of the expositive, application, collaboration  learning organization methods.

Expositive methods emphasize “absorption” of new information. Expositive methods include presentations, case studies, worked examples, demonstrations.

Application methods emphasize the active processes learners use to perform procedural and principle-based tasks and build new knowledge. Application methods include demonstration-practise method, job aids, case-based or scenario-based exercises, role play, simulations and serious games, guided research, project work.

Collaborative methods  emphasize the social dimension of learning and engage learners sharing knowledge and  performing tasks in a collaborative way. They include online guided discussions, collaborative work and peer tutoring. Collaboration is an effective way of enhancing meta-cognition and may and may increase learning effectiveness and  contributes to motivation of virtual learners[1].

Strategies for collaborative  learning activities:

1. Create transparency of expectations and purpose: Specific information about how and why the collaborative or interactive activity is included should be provided and ensuring students are familiar with the collaborative tool being used should be done at the outset.

2. Provide clear instructions: One cannot assume that students will know how (and why) to interact or collaborate to form a learning community. Clear instructions, outlines, and due dates need to be provided as the basis from which collaborative work can start. Sufficient time is needed to build relationships among students.

3. Form small groups:

In an online learning context, research indicates that smaller groups – usually three to five students – are more effective than larger groups were some students can ‘lurk in the background and not contribute.’

4. Monitor and support: The online instructor should be available to support collaborative work and to participate in the interaction from time to time, and as needed by a particular group or emerging learning community.

5. Include etiquette guidelines: It should not be assumed that students participating in an online course or learning environment will necessarily share the same understanding of etiquette and how to work together. For this reason it is important for the instructor to map out initial guidelines for interaction. The different between cooperative work (where individual students each submit their own contribution) and collaborative work (where students work together as a team to produce one product) should be explained[2].

Each learning activity should have the following description at virtual learning environment following this table:

Specific objective(s)	To be able to: Select... Describe... Draw...
Steps to be implemented by the learner/ tutor	Go and find... Open... and write about... Use.... and present... …
Learning resources to be used (please, provide resources/ links/ other)	online publication video record hard – copy readings ....???
Expected output/ indicators	A blog entry … A drawing... A math task solved...
Evaluation criteria	………………… ..............
ICT tools used to implement the scenario online (Web 2.0 tools, VLE, other)