Introductory Module for Online Course Design
The URL of ePortfolio: https://blogs.ubc.ca/chenyizhen/introductory-module/
The URL of the project: http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/course/view.php?id=615
Course Title and Learning Objective
I plan to develop an online course named Getting Things Done: Life Changing Time Management Skills. This course is designed for postsecondary students who feel overwhelmed by vast amount of missions and commitments, or been trapped by short-term problems and trivial chores and could not focus on things that really matter. This program could help post-secondary students:
- Regain the feelings of life control from frustration.
- Set both academic as well as life priorities.
- Free the minds from disruptions and keep focusing on real goals.
- Build a significantly efficient workflow.
Elements of Structure
This course contains four units that provide theoretical and practical assists from short-term and emergent problem solving to manage tasks in lifetime.
The first unit is a fundamental overview of GTD (Getting Things Done), a time management system that created by David Allen. The content includes:
- The call of the requirements of contemporary working environment:
- The essence of keeping the statement of “mind like water” in the age of “knowledge work”.
- The limitation of top-down approach and the affordance of the bottom-up principal in relation to personal productivity improvement.
- The principals and techniques of GTD and entry skills that improve daily work immediately.
- “2 minute” principle and “right person” principle
- The five horizontal stages of mastering workflow
The second unit provides the necessary knowledge and practice of building workflows to improve productivities. A GTD workflow consists five stages: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. This process aims to empty your brain by moving everything that disturbs you into an external and reliable system. Therefore, your mind will be prepared for things that really matter.
By transforming into the statement of “mind like water”, GTD recommends six levels of perspectives for organizing ideas and tasks. This third unit recommends a weekly review system based on various perspectives, which aims to set priorities in projects and lead to a clear view of important targets in long-term.
The fourth unit helps students cultivate personalized and dynamic system that clarify and systematize commitments, ideas and values in lifetime. This course will also introduce strategies that integrate current electronic technologies and tools with time management principals to create ubiquitous and positive life engagement.
Learning Outcomes
After finishing the whole course, students are expected to:
- Renew their ideas about time and time management.
- Be knowledgeable about divers time management theories and skills.
- Develop and personalized work flows in one specific area (job, family) or for everything.
- Capable of setting priorities in mid-term, long-term and even life-long levels.
- Eliminate distractions and noise, giving you more mental space for creative, innovative, and strategic thinking
Materials and Resources
The content of this course is mainly based on David Allen’s book: Getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity. Students are required to purchase this book as the textbook. Students could get general ideas of how GTD works on improving their efficiency by visiting these websites:
Getting Things Done Official Website
Or by subscripting:
This video animated a brief introduction of key concepts of GTD:
Billionaires tell you how to get things done
The following two writers provided awesome book reviews and guides of GTD on their blogs:
Getting Things Done by David Allen BOOK SUMMARY & PDF – Paul Minors
Getting Things Done – David Allen – Josh Kaufman
Students can also learning more about other time management theories and skills from these blogs:
Activities
Activities in this course are mostly focusing on practicing time management skills in a bottom-up order, which includes:
- Collecting individual thoughts, commitments, works, and goals into an external and reliable container.
- Build personal work flow to preserve, accomplish, delegate and defer various stuffs in your mind in one specific area.
- Create review system to dig deeper into your insightful thoughts and reinforce the implementation of time management in one specific area.
- Set priorities in lone-term goals in one specific area.
Assessment Methods (partly borrowed from ETEC 565A 66B Brumwell and Science Fiction English 10)
Assessment methods include self-evaluation and instructor evaluation. Different rubrics are imported to assess assignments, instructor as well as self-evaluation and there will be a teacher rubric that takes into account the peer and self-evaluation. This course will foster an environment of inquiry-based learning where students will create projects, share and publish them frequently. Students are also encouraged to finish a weekly reflection which will be respectfully read and responded by the instructor. In order to foster collective working environment, the participation of discussions is taken into account as well.
Forum participation: 25%
You will be responsible for participating in a number of forum discussions on Moodle in the introductory unit, then at least one every course. These will be based on skill-building activities, current events and course readings and watching. You are expected to reply to each other’s reflections and projects in a conversation format.
Self-assessment: 25%
Unit thoughts: posted to the Unit Discussion Board
Reflections: private submissions to me describing your efforts and concerns about individual and group work
Final summary of personal thoughts and experience
Instructor-assessment: 50%
Activities: ongoing skill building exercises throughout the course
Project reviews
Assignments reviews
Communication Methods
Students could reach instructors by two methods. One is through the General Discussion Board (Where you would post your question and your peers would be able to support you) or sending messages through internal mailbox. Another is emailing your instructor directly. The instructor will try the best to respond in 48hrs.
Embedded or posted the introductory content elements or learning objects
Course Introduction: The context of the urgency of implementing systemized time management skills into post-secondary learning
Limitation is one of the most significant characters of time, no matter we realize it or not. Akatay (2003, as cited in Cemalolu & Filiz, 2010) defined time management as the efficient use of time to achieve goals in a limited period. Erdem and Kaya (1998, as cited in Cemalolu & Filiz, 2010) pointed that the purpose of time management is increasing the quality of time without any extensions of it. Therefore, “planning behavior” can be regarded as character of time management (Claessens, Rutte, & Roe, 2007). This behavior reflected the requirement of what Peter Drucker has described “knowledge work” (as cited in Allen, 2003, p. 3), in which “the task is not given; it has to be determined” (p. 13). Because thinking about the expected results of the work turns out to be a key question in making knowledge work productive.
Post-graduate students’ effort largely fits the description of knowledge works, and as various researchers’ suggestions, all university students have better have some time management strategies to achieve their academic goals (Swart, Lombard & Jager, 2010; Trueman & Hartley, 1996; Erdul, 2005; Demirtaş & Özer, 2007, as cited in Cemaloglu and Filiz, 2010).
Thus, an asset of behaviors and tools associated with systematic principles are necessary for knowledge workers as well as higher-education students. Therefore, they can maintain the control of themselves from big-picture thinking to small details and keep the status of openness to new materials everyday (Allen, 2003). This is the reason why time management skills are valuable and sometimes are necessary for higher-school students.
Besides, many researches showed that, time management has direct positive effects on academic achievement. Former literatures noted a strong positive relationship that exists between time management and the academic achievement. For example, Indreicaa, Cazanb and Truţac (2011) revealed that effective time management could raise students’ academic performance.
Objects or Elements of Graphic Design
This online course will be designed in a business style because the potential students are post-secondary students. The interface will be simple and clean that ensure the navigations and important information are clear and could be easily noticed. Elements that fit the theme of improving the effectiveness, efficiency and productivities in life and work will be properly put into the design.
Navigation tools
I will use the Moodle calendar to navigate the process of this course and for the convenience of managing the calendar and sharing with students, the Moodle calendar will sync with my Google Calendar. A schedule will also available for students to download to have a whole map of this course.
The following example is what the schedule may looks like (borrowed from ETEC510, by Diane Janes)
References
Allen, D. (2003). Getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Cemaloglu, N., & Filiz, S. (2010). The relation between time management skills and academic achievement of potential teachers. Educational Research Quarterly, 33(4), 3-23.
Claessens, B. J. C., van Eerde, W., Rutte, C. G., & Roe, R. A. (2007). A review of the time management literature. Personnel Review, 36(2), 255–276.
Indreicaa, E., Cazanb, A., & Truţac, C. (2011). Effects of learning styles and time management on academic achievement. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 30, 1096-1102
Swart, A. J., Lombard, K., & Jager, de. H. (2010). Exploring the relationship between time management skills and the academic achievement of African engineering students – a case study. European Journal of Engineering Education, 35(1) 79-89.