Course_Site

Reflection on Designing my Moodle Course – Climate Change in the North

 This was an overwhelming experience, but very rewarding in the final analysis. Although I worked through many activities in the toolkit, and had some great support from peers, I ended up learning most about Moodle and html from the extensive online Moodle community – including videos on YouTube, blogs and html instructional web sites and videos. After incredible frustration and watching many Moodle videos online, I was very satisfied to learn enough html to code my entire Splash page for my Moodle course using tables formatting. Html is like mathematics, once you get over the fear factor it ends up being a very logical symbolic system and I am amazed at the structures that can be built. I would have liked to experiment more with colour and other artistic aspects of design but – next time.

My choice to design an enrichment science course to go with our Northwest Territories Experiential Science curriculum came first from my growing appreciation of the excellent support technology can offer to science students in grasping complex concepts and systems, and secondly from the thought that if integrating technology into core science learning could increase the engagement, interest and learning achievement of our High School students it would be great step forward.

Research suggests that technology itself “has little impact on students’ attainment of educational outcomes” (Johnson & Aragon, 2002, p. 1). Instead the decisive factor is the quality of instructional design. Online course designers need to

“address variability in student learning styles and provide external forms of motivation for the isolated student. The challenge is also to facilitate active learning in online courses while avoiding the tendency to provide too much information. The most difficult challenge may be to devise ways to promote high levels of interactivity among students and instructors” (Johnson & Aragon, 2002, p. 2).

In the design of this course, I have kept these challenges clearly in mind. Content areas like science, math, geography, biology can really benefit from multiple ways of representing knowledge, and in particular, benefit from lots of visuals – diagrams, animations, maps and digital learning objects… my latest favorite (Bates & Poole, 2003).  This course incorporates a variety of technologies to support the scientific concepts. The audio-visual dimensions of video support students in visualizing the overall  ‘systems context’ of climate change, and in the Inuit video, allows students to experience a personal connection to these big ideas through listening to respected elders speak about their experiences. Photos from the students’ familiar environment puts the course into a meaningful context. Some of the scientific data is embedded in the course in the form of charts and maps, or linked to online graphs and diagrams that present complex information in a very accessible visual format using colour coding (Siemens, 2003). I intend that students’ exposure to these varied ways of representing information and understanding will become a ‘model’ for their own explorations in how to organize, synthesize and present their research data.

Online multimedia offers students access to new ways of representing knowledge, new resources, expertise, and it provides a ‘seamless’ and scaffolded introduction into practicing and mastering the many new media skills in an educational context. Social media tools in this course will also enable our remote students to interact and collaborate with fellow students across our Board, other northern communities, and across the globe, and support collaborative discourse and projects enabling development of confident, critical thinkers and leaders (Anderson, 2008). Knowledge construction is active, and supported by peer interactions as the students work with content, receive feedback from peers and instructor, and work towards the high level task of providing recommendations to their communities. The final project is ‘authentic’ and provides motivation for students to create a high quality project that will be viewed by significant people in their lives – namely community members, parents and elders. In line with Chickering and Ehrmann’s (1996) recommendations for using technologies to support best practices, this course provides a variety of ways for students to interact with each other through asynchronous Group and Class discussion forums; and synchronous Chat activities with fellow group members and the instructor on a regular basis or by request. There is a specific page in the CLASS WIKI for course questions that will allow students to give others feedback, as well as a clear location for instructor responses. The course starts off with an Introductory Activity that invites students to post a brief biography on the Introductions Page, or provide links to any online sites they may already maintain. To begin to build community students will respond to others’ biographies and share some of their initial ideas about climate change as it is impacting their community.

There is much discussion about 21st Century skills, and this course will be a good introduction to these skills – interpersonal, team and technological (Rotherham and Willingham, 2009; A Vision for 21st Century Education, BC, 2010). The technologies in this course have been selected with these considerations in mind, as well as Anderson’s (2008) suggested attention to cognitive, social and teaching presence that enable learner-centred activities, collaboration and expert guidance. Please refer to the attached  MultiMedia Inventory Moodle Course  which charts the types of technologies used and their intended pedagogical application; although clearly there are many overlaps and interrelationships in most cases. For example a ‘Discussion Forum’ can facilitate peer collaboration, interactions with the instructor, content learning, and also have an assessment and feedback function. The technologies used enrich content learning: videos – linked and embedded, web sites, animations, models, maps, audio; and enable individual learning and collaboration: asynchronous discussion forums, group wikis, glossaries, survey for peer/self assessment, quizzes, and synchronous chats periodically throughout the course (Bates & Poole, 2003; Anderson, 2008).

I have tried to integrate ‘enriched content’ with activities emphasizing higher level thinking skills like analysis, summarizing, synthesizing, evaluation, and finally generating recommendations with supporting justifications. Activities are authentic and involve creating projects and products for audiences outside the school walls – the community, other schools, and perhaps the government (Siemens, 2003; Chickering & Ehrmann, 1996). The group tasks are authentic, and model the knowledge and skills of the ‘Community of Practice’ of an Environmental Consultant, for example, as they research, synthesize, organize and evaluate information (Bonk & Cunningham, 1998). The technology will enhance all aspects of learner interactions – with a greater variety of learning materials, with ‘expert others’ in addition to the local teacher, and peer to peer interactions about the learning material (Bates & Poole, 2003, p. 99). The course has a significant amount of text, but it is balanced with extensive media supports that guide students to extend their knowledge from their basic scientific concepts, and to apply this knowledge through critical thinking, problem-solving and engaging in tasks that are relevant to their lives and cultural context. The course glossary and the two quizzes are intended to emphasize the importance of competence in the basic concepts of the field, and encourage students to reflect on their learning and understanding throughout the course. The emotional engagement of the students in course tasks that are so directly relevant to their lives will support meaningful self-reflection and assist students in making connections between their course project, global issues and community concerns.

Assessment is formative and on-going using group process, forums, and task completion, aligned with learning objectives and skills being taught (Gibbs & Simpson, 2004). A synchronous chat forum is planned to consult with groups every Module and when necessary – if there are pressing questions in the Course Questions Wiki page – chats for group or class will be announced in the class wiki. Assessment strategies are clearly outlined in the course introduction, and rubrics are provided through a link on the Course Introduction page. There is a Pretest quiz testing prior knowledge, and halfway through the course another concept/vocabulary checking quiz. Successful completion of this quiz is required to continue to Module 3, with three allowed attempts. In the final Module 4, students will fill out a survey on their assessment of their own experiences in this course, the group process, peer relationships and overall satisfaction with the course. Designing quizzes and surveys to be an accurate and valid reflection of course content and skills is very demanding, and I struggled to fairly represent the learning objectives and levels of thinking. The final project is a summative assessment and the rubric is provided at the start of the course through a link. This rubric is also intended as a framework for the students to follow as they prepare their final project.

I developed the rubrics in Word using rubrics I have developed in the past as well as some ideas from several websites. I found that they would not transfer and embed in Moodle. I experimented with various formats and finally ended up converting them to image files which I could embed. Not totally satisfactory, but I will have to explore further the correct approach to generating and inserting tables in the Moodle course.

All the images are photographs that I took and sized for embedding in the page. For most of them I had to go into the page and enter coding to space the text nicely away from the graphic, since after insertion, most of them by default were crammed in with the text for some reason. I created my navigation buttons in Powerpoint, saved them as image files, sized them, and then uploaded them to my splash page. This GUI was the thing that caused me the most trouble. I started laying it out in Dreamweaver but had some issues. I ended up doing many html tutorials to learn to code the page. There seemed to be online disagreement around frames and tables, and html and CSS, but eventually I got the coding that achieved the layout I wanted.

In the last week we invited our other group members to test out the courses – which we did. Their courses were great – nice splash pages, good navigation, excellent technology choices….. but I had a major problem – when they logged into my course you couldn’t see my great Splash page. My splash page was built on a page in Topic 1. All you could see was a list of the topics and activities! Well we looked at screen shots of html to what I had  forgotten. I watched videos – recoded the pages as html pages – since none of that coding showed up, saved it, it disappeared, so that was not it — that coding must be higher level in Moodle? A few other people were having similar issues, no one seemed to know what to do. I madly watched videos, looked at source code on web pages….. anyway  my solution was to rebuild my splash page above Topic 1  – I figured if I could see that page when the course loaded that would be the place to put it.  I had to reload all the images and recode the page because it did not work when I tried to copy and paste the code from one page to the other?  This took me few days and finally when one of my colleagues checked it showed up… what a relief.

The splash page of the course uses graphic images that I created myself, which are linked to the main components of the course. I coded the page in html using tables after experimenting with frames. By the end of the course I became more confident and created an html block for navigating through the course – which ended up being a more fluid approach than the one I had already designed. So I had a lot redundancy in my navigation, but I guess that cannot hurt. As I was linking all my pages to this navigation block I realized that I could have designed the course in a different way that would have made all this much easier – next course!

Despite extensive consultation with other members of the class and research online there does not seem to be a definitive way to program for selective release of modules. I solved this problem in my course by making the release of Module 3 conditional on satisfactory completion of the mid-course quiz (70% grade over 3 attempts), and Module 4 is hidden until I am satisfied that Module 3 and all tasks have been completed by groups and everyone is ready to move on to the final project, when it will be released manually by me. I have ensured that connections to the assessment and final project pages are made available at the start of the course so students know what they will be working toward, since Module 4 is a culminating project.

As per my proposal, the Moodle course will be hosted on the school server in order to bypass bandwidth issues. This will give us a closed environment to pilot this course, and offer support for staff to collaborate on courses or activities. I believe that if this course is to run on our server, we will have to load the specific information from the various web links onto the server as well, and only the collaboration tools will link through to the Web live. I anticipate there will be a few issues to work on, but I know I can count on some support from our Board technology people to help solve any problems, and to help configure the Apache /SQL system server; though I found setting it up on my Mac very straightforward.

I went through several phases of downright frustration, hostility and delight as I created this course. I must say I was a bit skeptical about my possibility of success given the lack of any real instruction or support or guidance during this process (that was my perception of it at the time) – I experienced it as a sink or swim kind of thing – perhaps because my technical skills were a lot more basic than many others in the course. However, I tend to work really well under pressure – so this approach worked for me – very motivating. I see now there was some scaffolding and peer support, but yes it was self-initiation basically! I find myself at the end of the course genuinely pleased at my progress, and feeling very self-satisfied at my triumph over html!

This course is designed as an enrichment extension for Experiential Science grades 10-12 in the Northwest Territories. The course embodies constructivist strategies and a wide variety of technologies to support learning, collaboration and interactivity, and assessment. Students will be learning to use a variety of technologies to master content in the course, to organize and present information for on-going group tasks. The final group project is a multimedia community presentation of research supporting group recommendations with justification for community action and government policy. As much as possible the students will be involved in authentic activities, and engaging with the language, culture and practices of science, environmental assessment, and cultural research.

Below is a link to the Moodle course login page. I have designed 4 modules with activities, forums, quizzes and a survey. Module 1 & 2 are visible to students so they could be assessed. Module 3 & 4 will be released upon completion of the mid-course quiz.

http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/pluginfile.php/21964/user/backup/backup-moodle2-course-cavanagh-20120327-1551-nu.mbz?forcedownload=1

Course Home page:

http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/course/view.php?id=354

 

 

References

 A Vision for 21st Century Education: Premier’s Technology Council, December 2010. Vancouver, British Columbia. Retrieved from:  http://www.gov.bc.ca/prem/popt/technology_council/

 Anderson, T. (2008a). Teaching in an Online Learning Context. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. (pp. 343-365). Athabasca University. Retrieved from: http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008_Anderson-DeliveryQualitySupport.pdf

Anderson, T. (2008b). Towards a Theory of Online Learning. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F.  (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. (pp.45-74). Athabasca University. Retrieved from: http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008_Anderson-Online_Learning.pdf

Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers. Retrieved January 6, 2012 from: https://www.vista.ubc.ca/webct/urw/tp0.lc5116011/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct

Bonk, C. J., & Cunningham, D. J. (1998). Chapter 2: Searching for learner-centered, constructivist, and sociocultural components of collaborative educational learning tools. In C. J. Bonk, & K. S. King (Eds.), Electronic collaborators: Learner-centered technologies for literacy, apprenticeship, and discourse (pp. 25-50). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Retrieved from: http://www.publicationshare.com/docs/Bon02.pdf

Chickering, A.W. and Ehrmann, S.C. (1996).  “Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever,” American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3-6. Retrieved January 6, 2012 from:  http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples.htm

Chickering, A.W. and Gamson, Z.F. (1987). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.  American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39(7), 3-7. Retrieved January 6, 2012 from: 
http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm

Gibbs, G., Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (1), 3-31. Retrieved from: http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

Johnson, S., Aragon, S. (2002). An Instructional Framework for Online Learning Environments.  In: T.M. Egan & A.A. Lynham. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Academy for Human Resource Development, pp.1022-1029. Bowling Green, OH: AHRD.

Janson, A., Janson, R. (2009). Integrating Digital Learning Objects in the Classroom: A Need for Educational Leadership. Innovate, 5(3). Retrieved from: 
http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol5_issue3/Integrating_Digital_Learning_Objects_in_the_Classroom-__A_Need_for_Educational_Leadership.pdf

Rotherham, A., Willingham, D. (2009). 21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead. Educational Leadership Teaching for the 21st Century, 67(1), 16-21.

Siemens, G. (2003). Evaluating Media Characteristics: Using Multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Elearnspace. http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/mediacharacteristics.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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