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Hi my name is John Proctor and I am a lecturer at a College in Northampton shire UK. For about three years I have been trying to develop a way of delivering the Higher national in computing (Part time) on line using techniques such as email, chat room, message and board, all where successful to some extent but the biggest problem that I could see is that the approach taken by most forms of online learning, was to use websites that taught them selves so as to save money, but the drop out rate was incredible something like 70% of lost students. So how I approached this problem is to use existing students and try and measure and quantify criticism. So before each lesson (usually the day before) I would send out an email which had the notes required along with any references to material, this worked to a certain extent but the problem was how quick the student can get an answer to a problem. If they are in class the simply request help so imagine you are trying to fix a small program that you as a student had written, and you have to wait up to 24 hours for an answer where as in class you simply put your hand up. Second problem was how to do Lectures on line and this is where the penny finally dropped I started to use screen capture here is one I did on how to use MSN Producer (free with office) http://www.jproctor.net/hnc/Lectures/CamProducer1.html

The advantage then is that you can just screen capture what you are doing, say for example you are demonstrating Access, Excel or writing a programme. So the system that I started to use was to offer students chat room at certain times of the day and an archive of lectures, all though I would generally put a link to the flash lecture within the email so as to treat the email as an actual Lesson so the end result is to offer actual one to one mentoring. I hope you find this of some use my URL is http://hnc.jproctor.net