This was the first time that I have designed a course using an LMS and I really enjoyed the process overall. I am currently a teacher on call and don’t have a class to design a course for, so I decided to create a course for those interested in learning the fine art of landscape photography.
As a professional landscape photographer myself, I get asked all the time how to make a career out of photography and how to take better photos. I wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to take this course at first, but I decided that the most useful would be to make it a beginners course and scaffold the learning so each module would build on the previous. The goal is to teach one fundamental skill and then have students go out and practice that in a landscape setting and come back to share their work each week.
I designed the course using Google Classroom not really knowing anything about it. In hindsight, it probably was not the best LMS for the job because it did have a number of limitations. One of the biggest limitations was the lack of a built in central discussion board. I was hoping to use something that everyone could post their work to on a weekly basis, similar to a discussion thread in Blackboard and then have people comment on it. The best that I could work out was a way for students to create their own post on the “Stream.” This “Stream”, which is similar to a Facebook feed, would likely become quite cluttered as more and more posts were added to it.
For the Introduction/Ice Breaker I wanted everyone to share a photo of themselves and tell me a little bit about their background, but I also wanted each person to share their favourite landscape photo that they’ve ever taken. The reason for this was that first off, I wanted to see what they thought constituted a good landscape photo and second, for it to act as a starting point to future improvement. I specifically pointed out that I didn’t care if it was taken on an iPhone or wasn’t perfect, that I wanted to hear more about the story behind the photo and why it was so special. I love hearing the stories behind a photo, even if it isn’t the most technically perfect photo. There is a real beauty in the emotions and feelings that a photo can retrieve for people.
For the assessment piece I was curious to try Google Forms to create a quiz since it was easily integrated with Google Classroom. Although the quiz was a fairly basic way of assessing understanding, it was a valuable tool to test out to see its limitations. It worked fine to create a simplistic quiz, but to really get an understanding of students’ progress and to give some type of feedback along the way, I decided to have them submit a photo each week to be assessed. This is in line with research that claims that frequent assignments and detailed (written) feedback are central to student learning (Gibbs & Simpson 2005).
I also had them create a digital portfolio of their work as a final project. I thought that this would not only help them to see their progression over time, but that they would have something they could physically use to pitch to brands or clients in the future to get potential jobs. As Bates points out as well, the use of portfolios encourages self assessment and reflection as well as being useful for formal assessment purposes (Bates, 2014). I know that for me, tests don’t really help me retain the information. I prefer hands on assignments. This is backed by Gibbs and Simpson who found that a combination of coursework of varying types and examinations produced better average mark rates than did examinations alone. (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005)
Overall, I was very pleased with the results of my LMS. I’m not sure that I would use it at this point for a course, but I could definitely see me taking pieces of it and potentially creating something like it on a different LMS.
Thanks for reading and viewing.
Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-8-assessment-of-learning/
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