Design decisions
Before I could begin to design my online course, I had to figure out how I could effectively integrate it into my current teaching context. My first obstacle is that I teach grade 6, which means that students are coming to school every day and they are going to access whatever type of course I design mainly from within my classroom or the computer lab in the school. When discussing how to make technology choices regarding student access, Bates (2014) states that “no matter how powerful in educational terms a particular medium or technology may be, if students cannot access it in a convenient and affordable manner they cannot learn from it” (266). In addition to designing for an elementary setting, I work in a community where students have little to no access to computers, tablets or phones outside of school. If they do have these devices, they are shared between many siblings and usually have poor Wi-Fi connection and limited data. Homework is also never assigned because it is not part of the school/community culture and this restricts the opportunity for completion of tasks online and outside of school hours. After taking all these factors into consideration, I decided that it would be unrealistic to design a fully online course, so I chose a blended learning environment instead. Every feature of the course is available online, from lessons to assignments to discussions boards. However, students can also interact with myself and their peers face-to-face during class time.
Course content
I decided to design a grade 6 social studies course. Language arts and math are focused on so heavily in the school that often times, social studies get pushed aside. One of the few resources we have is Nelson’s Canadian Communities, Past and Present textbook. We do not have access to any accompanying teacher guides or activities. While the book does follow the Ontario, rather than the Quebec curriculum, it still fits within the progressions of learning and competencies identified in the Quebec Education Program for grade 6 social students. I never teach from a textbook, but the information, texts and images are relevant and engaging, so I chose to use this text as a springboard for the online course, helping inspire lessons, discussions and learning activities. The course contains four modules, each one exploring a different aspect of the establishment and development of Canadian communities.
Opportunities for online interaction
Students will be able to experience various types of interactions in this blended learning environment. They will be provided with choices of topics for the web quests and end-of-module project and they will receive immediate feedback through Moodle during the web quests and the quizzes. This supports student-content interaction by encouraging “the customization of content in unprecedented ways to support the individual needs of each unique learner” (Anderson, 2008, p. 58).
Seeing as this will be the students’ first time experiencing course content online, I feel that it is important for them to develop student-student interaction skills in a structured environment. Bates (2014) explains that for student-student interaction to be effective, “careful thought [must be] given to the educational goals of discussion within a course, the topics for discussion and their relationship to assessment and learning outcomes, and […] strong preparation of the students by the instructor for self-directed discussions” (p. 289). In the first module, my presence in the discussion boards will be much higher than later in the course. I hope to model how to appropriately engage in the creation of threads and responses, in order to guide students in their interactions with peers. As they develop confidence and the necessary skills, the student-teacher interactions in the discussion boards will reduce, providing students with more opportunities to participate by taking ownership of their own learning (Anderson, 2008, p. 59).
Assessment strategies
The assessments for the course are separated into four categories: web quests (20%), quizzes (20%), participation (20%) and an end-of-module project (40%). Aside from the quizzes, the assessment tasks are designed to support active learning, where “students must talk about what they are learning, write reflectively about it, relate it to past experiences, and apply it to their daily lives” (Chickering & Ehrmann, 1987). Students will learn through an inquiry process, which will encourage them to formulate questions, gather and organize information, interpret and analyze data, evaluate, draw conclusions and communicate (Cairo & Soncin, 2015, p. 3).
An area that I struggled with in the design of the course was feedback. As an elementary teacher, I give feedback often throughout the day to individual learners and the class as a whole. I found it difficult to translate that level of feedback online. Gibbs and Simpson (2005) state that “if students do not receive feedback fast enough then they will have moved on to new content and the feedback is irrelevant to their ongoing studies” (p. 19). I have attempted to overcome this issue by providing multiple avenues for feedback: written feedback in the discussions boards, immediate and adaptive feedback in the web quests and immediate and overall feedback in the quizzes. Within each module, students will be receiving various forms of feedback weekly.
Using Moodle
While I knew that selecting Google Classroom would be the easier LMS choice because I have used it before, I wanted to challenge myself to learn a new platform. I have started applying for jobs and many of the companies I am looking into use Moodle, so I felt like this was the perfect opportunity to gain some experience and practice. At first, I had absolutely no idea what to do. I was glad we had access to previous courses because they gave me some insight into how I should and shouldn’t organize the course. Although it was time consuming, I ended up watching a few videos on YouTube and reading some of the Moodle help guides to figure out how the platform worked. Once I got the basics, it was quite easy to navigate and many of the controls are intuitive. I ran into some issues when I was designing my quiz, because there are so many options for each question in terms of multiple chances and feedback. Now that I have a clearer idea of how I want the course modules to be organized, I am looking forward to designing the course content components for assignment 4.
References
Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. 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/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf
Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/
Cairo, M & Soncin, L. (2015). Nelson Social Studies 6 Canadian Communities, Past & Present Student Book.
Chickering, A. W., & Ehrmann, S., C. (1996). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3-6. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples.htm
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf