Assignment 2 Reflection
For this assignment we were tasked to complete an introductory module and design the course structure for our course. I have decided to design the course I wish I had when I first started as a data analyst. One principle I wanted to follow in the design of this course was to make it continually accessible, but to do so I also needed to maintain the privacy of students. I think it is important for this course to be designed in a way where the content is open because I believe it should act as reference material for the future of anyone who is a part of the course.
I found myself considering the content first, rather than the interactions and assessment – and how to design these in a way that works for a self-paced course.
Improvements to be made
1) Anderson (2008) outlines important interactions which include: learner-learner, learner-content, and learner-teacher. So far in the course I think I have an outline that will elicit learner-content, and learner-teacher interaction, but I need to continue to think about how to elicit learner-learner interaction. I have included some discussion boards, but because this is a self-paced course, I need to reconsider how I would like students to interact with each other given potential gaps in time.
2) Another area that I will continue to investigate is how to make sure that the LMS site, and the companion website are accessible and mobile friendly. You can see the website as it shows on my mobile device:
“Horizontal”
“Vertical”
3) At this point I could take or leave Moodle. I found that there were the right kinds of activities available (discussions, questionnaires, quizzes, and I found a GitHub integration that almost worked), but that customizing the design to fit the course was not possible.
Building websites is hard! (But also, rewarding).
This blog, and the website I have developed for the course: https://intro-to-data-and-viz.github.io/ are my first real attempts at website design, and I’ve learned a lot! I appreciate how quickly customizable WordPress is, but I also now appreciate how specifically customizable a self-generated website is! There are small tweaks that I wanted to see, and I was (with much Googling) for the most part able to add very specific customization (for example, the checklist navigation).
References
Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning (pp. 45-74). Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf