Project Documentation

Target Audience

This course: Getting Things Done: Life Changing Time Management Skills aims to helping students be successful in their post-secondary learning, especially to those in grade one, because transiting from high-school program to higher education program is a shift for students’ academic life, thus, it may causes time wasting (Indreicaa, Cazanb, & Truţac, 2011). Moreover, graduate students, especially university students are asked to finish multiple assignments as well as to learn a large amount of professional knowledge and skills. Therefore, a systematic time management tool will provide great opportunities for graduate students to achieve better performance in schools.

A brief introduction of the content and structure of Unit one

I have developed the Unit One: The Art of Getting Things Done for Assignment #3. It is the first unit of this course and students are expected to learn the fundamental knowledge and skills of time management through this unite. The content of this unit roots from the Part One in David Allen’s book. I created three steps to corresponding with three chapters in Part One. In Step one, students will learn about three things: the limitation of conventional time management skills, the needs and feature of “knowledge work” and why people could not operate efficient time and project management.

I moved Chapter three forward to Step two, because in my understanding, the techniques in this chapter is easier and more practical for beginners to follow to start organizing their ideas and to-do list. The third step provided detailed tools and principles that could help build a personal time management system. It includes five phases for managing multiple tasks, “two-minute principle”, “right person principle”, horizontal and vertical action management as well as the importance and tips for system review.

Besides the text book, two TED lectures presented by David Allen were also embedded into Unite one as important materials, which provided thought provoking, vivid, inspiring and more concise presentations about the content of Chapter one and two. I also made a short video to briefly introduce the core skills and principle of building workflow. These videos are believed to be capable to improve students’ engagement.

In addition to the content and materials, I put objectives, assessment rubric and activities into the instruction as well. Since the assessment rubric of activities is connected to the assessment of the entire course, I create a separate unit for all the important information and rules for students’ success. Therefore, students could easily find and access to them. The Participation, Project and Keyword Reflection Rubric was borrowed from Diane Janes’s rubric in ETEC 510. The Online Students’ Responsibilities was retrieved from Lorn Kennedy’s online course: Science Fiction English 10. The Netiquette: Rules of Good Practice about Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) was retrieved from Tatiana Bourlova’s resources in ETEC 565. Give my thanks to these great instructors for their great works.

Due to the non-mandatory quality of this course, the purpose for setting rubric of assessment and activities is to provide a standard of qualified learning for students and reinforce their participation and practice. Activities will be assessed following the rubric, however, I will provide timely and detailed feedbacks to push forward students’ practice and understanding of time management throughout this course.

All the activities are recommended to be published in the discussion forum in order to build an open and collective learning community. Despite the individual introduction, there are two types of activities in this course. The first one is keyword reflection which includes an elaboration of two keywords and a question for public discussion. Another activity in Unit one is developing a time management project from the ground. This activity will be a part of final project. The purpose of these two kinds of activities is to foster students’ knowledge (by keyword reflection) as well as practice of time management.

My Understanding of Individual LMS

Jenkins (2009) suggested the idea of Participatory Culture in the report. The researcher argued that in 21st Century, this culture calls for shifting “the focus … to those of opportunities for participation and the development of cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement” (p. xiii). Therefore, individual LMSs can be regarded as tools that can enhance the diversity of educational subjects by means of creating spaces for non-core courses or soft skills which are not available in formal education. The enhancement not only provides more opportunities and choices for people to learn, but also be able to prepare people for the full participation into the multimedia culture in 21st Century.

Coates, James and Baldwin (2005) mentioned the possibilities of building and delivering diverse courses by using “an increasing range of features” (p. 31) that provided by a learning system. However, they questioned whether such offerings are an “encouragement or limitation to the diversity and distinctiveness of discipline focuses and teaching approaches found across an institution” (bid). In my case, the LMS offered me tools that allow me to put various materials in a course to build a simultaneous multimedia-learning environment. Interestingly, Coates and peers also argued that the “textual nature of the Internet may reinforce conceptions of teaching as the transmission of decontextualised and discrete pieces of information” (p. 27), which means software such as LMSs might limit the personalized pedagogical practices. Stella Porto (2013) pointed out that “empowering users to use their own customized toolbox is counterintuitive to the essence of LMSs”. It might be true because when design this course in Moodle, I felt that the approach of representation was restricted by the functionality and the structural tools provided by this platform. Also, although an LMS could help build a multimedia learning environment easily, it still lost some important methods of interaction and presentation, for example, the non-verbal interaction between an instructor and students might be impossible or very hard to realize.

It might be obvious that getting used to the system of an LMS is a time consumer to both instructors and students. Porto (2013) described is as “The conundrum of systematic complexity and user-side simplicity”. However, it might worth the time to explore the possibilities of an LMS to gain rewards from better learning outcomes. Meanwhile, the technological barriers might shut people out before such rewards happen.

On the other hand, as an online learner, I agree with Coates and peers’ (2005) argument that LMSs may have negative influence to students’ confidence and motivation, as well as the management of their learning. I think pure online learning highly relies on student’s self-motivation and self-regulation. Meanwhile, LMSs may “mediate the academic conversations students conduct with their peers and with staff” (p. 28). Therefore, students may feel being isolated and lacking of supports either from instructors or other students. These disadvantages should be taken into account from the start of the instructional design.

My Ability to Design the Online Instruction

To be honest, neither my knowledge about instructional design, nor my experience of teaching is rich enough to design a qualified online course. The reason for picking up time management as the subject of my design is because my passion about its life-changing potential and my experience of the huge improvement it has provided to my productivity and efficiency.

Fortunately, I did learn a lot by reading and watching during this course which has equipped me a little theoretical capability to give an instructional design a try. For example, Chickering and Ehrmann as well as McTighe and Wiggins’ s research provided me a great framework to design this active oriented course. Coates and peers’ research and Porto’s article offered me a clear view of the limitation of LMSs which might lead to immature thinking and practice to avoid them. Furthermore, Jenkins’s description and explanation of participatory culture was an icebreaker for me to get a scope to know about new paradigms of education and culture in this new and ever-changing digital age.

I also learned a lot from instructor Tatiana’s webpage of ETEC 565 as well as the Moodle courses she provided as examples. I not only retrieved resources from these online courses, but also learned about how to structure the contents logically and present them in a simple and clear format.

ETEC 565 is my first course of educational technology. Due to the limitation of time and capability, the online course I have built is a rough and immature prototype. I will keep polishing it until one day it is good enough to be delivered publically. I hope this course could help as many people as possible to master the excellent tools to help manage their time.

 

References

Coates, H., James, R., & Baldwin, G. (2005). A critical examination of the effects of learning management systems on university teaching and learning. Tertiary Education and Management, 11, 19–36.

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Porto, S. (2015). The uncertain future of Learning Management Systems. The Evolllution: Illuminating the Lifelong Learning Movement. Retrieved from: http://evolllution.com/opinions/uncertain-future-learning-management-systems/