A précis of my flight path…
In my flight path, I shared my goals for this course, ETEC565A, which I had hoped were realistic. My first goal was to develop a rubric or plan of action (based on one or a small number of models or frameworks) that I can use to evaluate and select new and existing educational technologies in my work as an instructional designer. My second goal was to gather a toolkit of technologies and online teaching strategies that I can bring into my consultations with faculty and instructors. Specifically, I wanted to learn more about: new and different options for communication, interaction and assessment tools and social media.
I feel that the ETEC565A eLearning toolkit, readings, activities and assignments helped me to achieve my goals. With respect to my first goal, I found that the SECTIONS framework (Bates and Pool, 2003), which I was able to apply to my learning a few times during the course (e.g. to create an evaluation rubric to assess which learning management system to use in a case study) is a useful tool that takes into consideration the needs of the institution, instructor and students when evaluating and selecting technology. I plan on using the rubric that my group created for our group activity as a starting point for creating such a rubric with my team at work. With respect to my second goal, I found that I did acquire many new ideas from this course, not just with respect to new technologies (e.g. ones that were used to teach this course, such as the Voice Board), but also teaching strategies. I was hoping to have explored more tools, but I think that keeping the number of tools small gave me more time to use the ones we did. I knew when I set both goals within my flight path that they were about attaining a set of tools that I could expand upon outside of the course, i.e. that I would need to devote time and effort after this course was over to sharing what I had learned in order to generate discussion with my colleagues and to determine how best to incorporate these ideas in my work and that I couldn’t stop exploring and experimenting when this course (or even the Master of Educational Technology program) is over.
About my eLearning toolkit experiences…
I believe the the eLearning toolkit is a valuable resource if a student in the Master of Educational Technology (MET) program is unfamiliar with a tool. I found that, due to my work as an instructional designer in higher education, I was already familiar with most of the items in the toolkit, such as learning management systems (LMSs); web design and HTML (for the purposes of this course, my familiarity and lack of proficiency in HTML was sufficient); weblogs; wikis and accessibility (which is a currently a huge area of focus in my work). I plan on using this toolkit to learn more about the tools I am not as familiar with long after this course and program are over.
That all said and done, I found that I didn’t use the toolkit very much during the course, and had no time to try the toolkit activities on top of course assignments. The few times that I did access the tool for the course assignments, e.g. for guidance on digital storytelling and figuring out how to create a splash page in Moodle (both of my biggest challenges this semester), I found that the tool wasn’t much help. However, with respect to my Moodle course design, finding answers on my own made the experience by far more rewarding (picture me running around with my fists pumped in the air after creating my splash page).
About my overall ETEC565A experience…
The fact that students are required to “get their hands dirty” and explore a selection of tools is one of the selling features of this course, and guided exploration–with the goal of completing an assignment–makes an activity more meaningful. I am happy to have expanded my knowledge of differences and similarities between LMS tools. My successes and challenges in using Moodle helped me to discover what it means to be on one’s own in researching solutions and answers to design questions. There are an array of help guides, tutorials and discussions online about the Moodle, and a community that is focused on helping each other (by sharing their experiences, teaching each other how to do things and in answering each others questions). I think that, without this community, Moodle would not be as successful as it is today.
I did enjoy creating course content and an assessments in the form of a quiz for my course assignments, which I designed following practices to ensure teacher presence and including activities to encourage independent study and community building that were outlined in Anderson (2008b) and Chickering and Gamson (1987), and found that the Moodle editor was simple to use. It was fairly simple for me to meet some of my assignment criteria, such as ensuring my second course module was mainly made up of HTML pages as opposed to Word documents, as I also encourage instructors in my workplace to make their course outline and content accessible as HTML pages. Other parts of the assignments were straight forward but took some planning, such as creating a course outline (which took me some time to consider). However, when I had difficulty in designing the splash page in my course, I was quite frustrated, as I had seen a couple of my classmates’ courses in Moodle and knew this was something achievable. I am grateful that the solution did not involve having to apply any HTML skills, as in today’s digital environment few people should really need HTML skills to use digital tools.
One of the key take aways from this course included the instructional strategies used in the course, such as using the Voice Board for course introductions, which was a new and refreshing way to meet each other, versus just a standard discussion posting. And, I was happy to see a few synchronous sessions were offered to answer assignment related questions–though I couldn’t attend one, seeing the recording was helpful.
This was the first time that I created a digital story, and I wish there had been a little more support with this assignment. So, why did I choose mostly PowerPoint and very little of GoAnimate in my story? My rationale was that I wanted privacy to explore storytelling tools while I still felt like a novice. I also wanted to avoid providing my personal information online (e.g. GoAnimate required credit card information to be able to create videos longer than 30 seconds) and wanted to avoid leaving my completed video on a third party website that I had no control over–I felt I was more in control hosting the story on a site protected by the educational institution that I was a part of. I still tried to exercise some anonymity in my digital story creation by not identifying myself in the video I produced and in the alias I used for the online tools during production. Finally, I wanted to use PowerPoint for my digital story so I wouldn’t have to deal with both the novelty of scripting and storyboarding and learning to use a new tool–despite which I found myself still experiencing technical challenges in getting the audio to work on my presentation!
Readings and case studies were another positive experience. The course readings provided a theoretical framework that I found valuable. Readings were also straightforward and relevant. As well, the weekly case studies were relevant to our learning as professionals and adult learners. They put real issues around using educational technology (even “old” ones like DVDs) into context and facilitated critical thinking and problem solving to find a solution. I wish more subject matter experts would take the time to create this type of discussion in their course. Though there were one or two weeks where pretty much most of the responses were similar, it was interesting to read the different perspectives of my peers on each topic–and it was the first online course I have taken where I was motivated to add my two cents beyond just meeting a course evaluation requirement.
Although I wanted to expand my knowledge of social media, in the end, I didn’t participate in the Twitter experiment due to lack of time that week and my persisting qualms about the character limitation. I find the character limitation to be a drawback of the tool–I’d much rather read a composed, longer post than follow a series of short posts.
I also really enjoyed the ePortfolio. The reflections helped me focus my learning, to apply the research and theory from my readings to my course assignments, and to document my experiences.
Because each assignment built upon each other, I found that through learning what I needed to do in order to meet the requirements of the fifth assignment, I was then able to go back and readdress design decisions I was forced to make for the second assignment (where I didn’t fully understand how to do exactly what I wanted, e.g. how to set up a Discussion Board). Because we worked on our Moodle course in steps, it also prevented me from completing everything at the very end.
I wish we could have had opportunity for more group/peer work, building something collaboratively, like the case studies we worked on in the first half of the course, or we could have had peer feedback on a draft of our digital stories (which would have been helpful to me–as coming up with a story script was challenging for me).
On the How to be Successful page of Module 1 of ETEC565A, it says “sometimes trying to master new skills can be frustrating”–this was my experience throughout the course, yet I would still recommend it to anyone.
About my next steps…
This is only my second course in the MET program. As I am still in the beginning of the program, there is a lot more I have left to learn and explore, and I can only hope the rest of the courses in the program are like this one.
My next steps include taking the SECTIONS framework (Bates and Pool, 2003) and the evaluation rubric that my group created in one course case study to my team at work so that we can determine how we can incorporate them into our own technology evaluation tool. I will share with my team the types of engaging tools and strategies, such as using Voice Board for course introductions, that were implemented in this course, including Alan Levines 50 web 2.0 ways to tell a story (Levine, 2007).
Additionally, I would like to devote more time to exploring tools within the eLearning Toolkit, which includes spending more time exploring Moodle (starting with assignments and the gradebook). And, I would also like to explore more social media tools and create more digital stories–I might even go back and revisit my first digital story from this course in order to see how I could make it more innovative and less like a Powerpoint presentation.
As a lifelong learner, there is no doubt that I will continue to learn after this course and program over. Technology and practices in education are always changing. In addition to taking the MET courses, I regularly research new ideas and strategies with my colleagues and attend conferences in order to share my experiences and learn from others.
References:
Anderson, T. (2008b). Teaching in an online learning context. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf
Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A framework for selecting and using technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole (Eds.), Effective teaching with technology in higher education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.
Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39(7), 3-7. Retrieved from: http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm
Levine, A. (2007). 50 Web 2.0 ways to tell a story. Retrieved from: http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools