The Diploma Centre offers a range of postgraduate courses to lawyers and other professionals. Lectures are webcast; enabling students to attend onsite/ view online (live and on-demand). Due to the time constraints of busy professionals, we recognised that there was an increased demand for online courses. In Autumn 2016, we offered a purely online certificate course.
This presentation will describe our experiences in transitioning our Certificate in Data Protection Practice to a wholly online offering. We will provide an overview of the challenges we faced, the factors that impacted on our design process, and describe how we used technology innovation to enhance teaching and learning on our courses. We will also report on the evaluation of the course and student feedback.
We sought to address the gaps that exist for remote learners by:
- Upgrading and customising our learning management system
- Improving our video resources to create content that learners find more engaging
- Creating original interactive online learning activities to encourage engagement and active learning
A new online platform has been tailored to our students’ needs and offers an improved user interface.
Lectures were recorded using the open source programme OBS Studio and uploaded to Vimeo. Various new lecture video formats were used in line with best practice on how production values affect student engagement.
Interactive materials were created to accompany sessions (using Articulate Studio 13). These included quizzes, infographics, and eLectures – click-through, customised activities that were self-paced and involved active rather than passive learning.
The key performance indicators revealed very positive results:
- An increased number of international students/students based outside of Dublin;
- More peer-to-peer learning/online socialisation;
- Improved learning experience/student satisfaction;
- Expansion of online elements in our blended learning courses.
Topics: Global challenges in Higher & Further Education , Topics: Innovations and design in online & blended learning
