diff --git a/content/blog/2022-10-17-future-of-teaching.md b/content/blog/2022-10-17-future-of-teaching.md index d876dcb1..b51891ea 100644 --- a/content/blog/2022-10-17-future-of-teaching.md +++ b/content/blog/2022-10-17-future-of-teaching.md @@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ is the "start page" of the series): * Teams * [Hybrid courses vs reverse-hybrid courses](@/blog/2022-11-07-reverse-hybrid.md) * Open source courses -* Registration and learner management +* [Registration and learner management](@/blog/2022-12-05-registration.md) * [Livestream courses](@/blog/2022-11-14-livestreaming-courses.md) * Collaboration in organizing * [Publishing videos supports more learning styles](@/blog/2022-11-08-video-publishing.md) diff --git a/content/blog/2022-12-05-registration.md b/content/blog/2022-12-05-registration.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2eb71e59 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/blog/2022-12-05-registration.md @@ -0,0 +1,89 @@ ++++ +title = 'Registration and learner management' +slug = "2022/12/05/registration" +description = "Large courses are more demanding on registration than you'd expect, but we have some ideas." + +[extra] +authors = "Richard Darst" ++++ + +*Part of a series on the [Future of +Teaching](@/blog/2022-10-17-future-of-teaching.md)* + +Registration and managing learners can be hard when there are hundreds +of them, but if you plan out a course well, it's manageable. + +In a small course, you register and people come, and everything else +gets figured out from there. When you have more than a hundred people +coming, perhaps with pre-made [teams](TODO:LINK), +registration can be much, much harder. Luckily, if +you plan the course considering that registration will be a major +task, it can work out OK. + +## Basic registration strategies + +**Basic registration** would be easy: you let people sign up, they can +get emails. Since we +[livestream](@/blog/2022-11-14-livestreaming-courses.md), people can +even attend without registering, which we think is important (providing +personal data is not necessary to attend - this is by design). +Registering allows someone to receive emails, and it's relatively easy +to send different emails to different groups if desired (for example, +those from our university get information on our local +online/in-person exercise sessions). + +At Aalto University, this is what we have done for most online +courses, and it works well. + +## Registration including teams + +If we want to provide [teams](TODO:LINK) as a service, things get more +involved. The main idea of registering including teams is that we want +to make them pre-arranged and the constant day-after-day. We also want to +provide an exercise leader for each team (again the same one each day). +The in-person equivalent to that is "sit at a table with at group, that group +is your team". Our online version is much harder than this, since we +need to pre-plan a lot more. We *could* emulate this by randomly assigning +Zoom breakout rooms on day 1, and then ask people to join the same one +each day. But, we think that part of the benefit is assigning similar +teams (if you know someone, you are with them) and having it clear +that rooms *will* stay the same day-after-day. + + +So, to do this teams online, our registration system needs to: +* Accept the normal registration +* Know a little bit about people to assign them to suitable teams (if + desired). +* Provide a way for people to indicate pre-made teams. +* Provide a way for us to see the information above easily and assign + the teams ... +* ... and then send everyone a customized email with their team's room + number +* And be able to quickly update this information based on last-minute + changes, send people new info, and not get overwhelmed with this + job. + +This, especially the last one, turns out to be exceptionally hard. We +are working on ways to make this better: +- point1 +- point2 +- point3 + +## Distributed registration + +The livestream and [reverse +hybrid](@/blog/2022-11-07-reverse-hybrid.md) approaches allow another +option: **distributed registration**. With this idea, we don't need a +central registration (or if we do, it can be only for general +information), and we let each local partner run a registration that +includes the teams - and let them deal with that locally in a smaller +and more manageable form. + + +## Summary + +We did a lot of great things with [teams](TODO:LINK), but it was a lot +of work back then, and is still a lot of work now. Anyone running a +large course (that goes beyond "infodump to an audience") should +carefully consider how to make this manageable. +