For this assignment, I partnered with Alexis Handford. Alexis has experience in instructional design at the postsecondary level, and I have experience as an educator at both secondary and postsecondary levels. We wanted the pairing of our experience and skill sets to very closely mimic the professional collaboration that occurs in designing and implementing online learning opportunities at a Canadian postsecondary institution. Additionally, given our experience as students who are immersed in an online educational context, we knew we wanted to take the advantages and benefits of learning we have personally experienced through the MET program and to embed those opportunities in the course for our potential students. Given the number of worldwide users, its overall brand recognizability, and its open source accessibility, we knew we chose Moodle as our learning management system. Overall, we found its usability, intuitive controls, and built-in graphical user interface elements very accessible to a novice user.
I will reflect upon two major elements of our design process: the learning theories that underlie the layout of our course materials and content, and our efforts to enmesh relational and social emotional pedagogy with curricular concerns.
We outline in our Learning Processes that we have built the course on the foundational principles of inquiry-based, student-centred, constructivist learning. Von Glasersfeld in his 1995 work “A Constructivist Approach to Teaching” describes constructivist learning as thus:
Learning, from the constructivist perspective, is not a stimulus-response phenomenon. It requires self-regulation and the building of conceptual structures through reflection and abstraction. Problems are not solved by the retrieval of rote-learned “right” answers. To solve a problem intelligently, one must first of all see it as one’s own problem. That is to say, one must see it as an obstacle that obstructs one’s progress towards a goal. (p.9)
Von Glasersfeld also notes the importance of social interaction in all forms of learning and that such “social interaction is no less essential in the acquisition” (1995, p.7) of curricular competencies than it is in other life pursuits. In designing our course, we wanted students to understand that the learning of the content (ie. the particular skills associated with academic research and writing) requires self-regulation and reflection that will emerge from high levels of social interaction throughout the course.
However, students who are transitioning into an academic post-secondary environment may not intuitively appreciate the role played by social interaction in fostering these skills. Swan (2002) finds that successful online interaction “require[s] a social environment that encourage[s] peer interaction facilitated by instructor structuring and support” (p.26).
Discussion forums in our first week are designed to foster a social environment conducive to productive social interaction. The first is an introductory activity intended to build community and the “social presence” defined by Tu & McIsaac (2002) as “the degree of feeling, perception, and reaction to another intellectual entity in the CMC environment” (p.146). The second discussion forum asks students to reflect on their own learning processes and how they might see these as potential influences in their development through the course; it is an activity intentionally created to stimulate the self-reflexivity essential to constructivist learning. For both discussion forums, clear instructions are given and the scoring rubrics and general expectations and guidelines are provided for students as a way to provide structure and instructor support.
Creating the final assessment together was an incredible professional learning opportunity. We worked under the assumption that the criteria outlined in the assignment could serve as our institutional or departmental requirements. Within this framework, Alexis and I collaborated extensively to ensure that the final assessment still reflected the pedagogical and design principles from which we had created the course. Our two final essay questions assess both the curricular content and relational pedagogy. Our first essay question asks students to read an abstract and then to discuss the central claim and argument of the paper as well as its validity as a source. Identifying these elements of a research paper are essential academic research skills. However, our second essay question asks students to reflect on the research process, identify a personal challenge in that process, and explain how they might go about addressing this challenge. This social-emotional readiness and self-reflexivity are also essential to entering into an academic learning environment. Ultimately, I am particularly excited at the intentionality of instructional design and pedagogy that went into the creation of this course.
Thanks for reading!
Joyce
References
Swan, Karen (2002) Building Learning Communities in Online Courses: the importance of interaction. Education, Communication & Information, 2:1, 23-49, DOI: 10.1080/1463631022000005016
Tu, C., & McIsaac, M. (2002). The relationship of social presence and interaction in online classes. American Journal of Distance Education, 16(3), 131-150. 10.1207/S15389286AJDE1603_
Glasersfeld E. von (1995) A constructivist approach to teaching. In: Steffe L. P. & Gale J. (eds.) Constructivism in education. Erlbaum, Hillsdale: 3–15. Available at
http://www.vonglasersfeld.com/172