It was an amazing experience creating the course on Academic Writing and New Media. I actually felt like an instructor designing a course for a real audience. The long discussions and exchange of ideas that Paige and I had, the writing process, content curation, pedagogy and assessment alignment, digital story and activity design, LMS limitations and struggles, usability and structure challenges – all contributed to the overall learning. I really enjoyed working on the project. Here is our joint reflection on the digital story and the first module for the course.
Digital Story Reflection
As we began to consider our digital story, we realized that creating learning outcomes is essential to keep focus in the video. These outcomes are specifically tied to the course goals, yet they are more specific and reflective of the content module. Thus, our learning outcomes include students being able to identify the significance of academic integrity in school and professional settings, define and recognize specific forms of plagiarism, and consider their own academic journey and the skills that will help them best act with integrity.
The topics we chose for the digital story are academic integrity and plagiarism, with the main focus being on the former. Many universities have eLearning modules that use text, audio, and videos that focus on explaining these topics and how to avoid plagiarism. However, many of the available online resources on these topics have the tendency to shut down the conversation before it can even begin. They are either way too informative or focus on shaming students away from plagiarizing, which, in our experience, is not effective.
We wanted to make these topics relevant for students by demonstrating that avoiding plagiarism and gaining the right skills for writing is not only required for academic success in the digital age, but also these skills are a must for effective communication in personal and professional life. Our intention with this digital story is to normalize academic integrity, make it relevant for students, and help them understand common forms of plagiarism and how to avoid it.
The digital story is included in the first week of Module 1 and serves as a hook to gain attention (Robin, 2006), helping students understand the seriousness of plagiarism and academic integrity. The video is tied to assessing students’ own skills and creating a learning plan based on the skills learned in the video and content module. As Bates (2015) explains, multimedia should be connected to a learning activity or some type of constructive engagement with the material. Applying our course’s pedagogical perspectives of constructivism and collaborative learning, it was important to us that students be able to actively do something with the video once they watched it as well as reflect on their learning.
“Media offers both cognitive and affective experiences. It can provoke discussion, an assessment of one’s values, and an assessment of self if the scenes have strong emotional content” (Carleton College, 2012).
We created the persona of Christina as a warm and relatable student that other students in the course could identify with. On the one hand, we used Christina’s perspective as the crux of the story to show rather than tell students about the importance of academic integrity, and on the other, engage them emotionally with the content. Keeping the seven elements of digital storytelling in view, we edited the script several times for economy and pacing (Robin, 2006) as well as keeping the length under 6 minutes (Hazlett, 2013).
We explored many different platforms, including WeVideo, before settling on iMovie as the best choice for our digital story. We were using free video clips, photos, music and narration in our story; hence, it was important for the tool to allow mixing different media seamlessly. The free version of WeVideo produced videos with a logo, Adobe Spark had length limitations on each slide, and Camtasia supported only limited transitions and effects. Doing our research resulted in a video that not only met our expectations, but exceed them. In iMovie, we used the Ken Burns effect to zoom in on photos and create a more personal experience for learners. We decided that the bulletin board template provided the most engaging means to tell the story in a way that made linkages across ideas. Although iMovie is relatively limited in terms of interactivity, we used the affordances of text, audio, and video to bring the story to life (Siemens, 2003) and help transition learners through the complexities of academic integrity. We were very impressed with iMovie’s functionalities, including Closed Captions on our YouTube upload and integration with other tools such as screen capturing software.
Taking the SECTIONS model into consideration, we recognized that some students would prefer to watch the video, read the information, or watch the video and read the information (Boyes, 2005). Thus, we provide the video script and follow-up activities for students to extend its application. We challenged ourselves to think “beyond” the video itself and consider what students who watch this video would require to make it a personal experience. Explaining plagiarism in words is sometimes difficult, so it was important to use the video to provide real-world examples of plagiarism in the context that it could happen in this course.
Course Content Module Reflection
From the onset of this course, we had planned to apply constructivist approaches to the course design. Being very much aware of the fact that students coming to this course will have a range of knowledge and understanding on the subject, we wanted students to identify the gaps in their knowledge and pursue their own learning goals (Driscoll, 2005, p. 391). Hence, right in the first week, we asked them to create a learning plan. This plan is shared with the instructor, who would not only be able to provide guidance to the students, but also understand the needs for her students and how best she can support them in their learning as well. Moreover, by providing multiple resources and opportunities for knowledge construction, we have used the principles of self-regulation with the expectation that when reviewing and selecting resources, students will plan, synthesise, and evaluate their learning (Shunk, 2012). Similarly, as a constructivist teacher, Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ remained in our purview; we “provide enough help and guidance but not too much” (cited in Driscoll, 2005). Hence, some resources and activities were marked as supplemental and optional.
Social negotiation is not only a central aspect of social constructivist approaches to learning but a core attribute of online environments (Anderson, 2008). Due to the assignment requirements, occasionally it became a little difficult to adjust the course accordingly. For example, having small group discussions in the first week is probably not the best choice, as during the initial few weeks students are getting to know each other; hence, it makes more sense to provide open access to all student posts and allow them to read and respond to whichever post they prefer. The same is the case for the quiz, which, for motivational purposes, should ideally be introduced later, perhaps in week 4 or 5.
Since our course is structured into bi-weekly segments, we created content for Weeks 1 and 2 of Module 1: Writing in the Digital Age. Covering academic integrity and copyright in the first week and citation in the second week signals to students that these are important concepts that lay the foundation for success in this course.
As Bates (2012) explains, online course designers must signal to students how to move through a course by sequencing or chunking the curriculum. Hence, the Module 1 Overview at the beginning and Checklist at the end clearly signals the expectations of Weeks 1 and 2 to students. Also, the digital story at the beginning of Week 1 sets up a consistent structure for each week in the course. The course content is supplemented with media (digital story, Google Slides scenario, Quizlet), readings, questions, discussions, and eventual formative quizzes and assignments. This type of structure signals the importance of students’ active engagement with the course material. Although consistent design is important, so is providing students with a variety of multimodal activities and opportunities to practice what they are learning (Briggs, 2015). Our main considerations for designing these activities were 1) chunking them appropriately and avoiding coverage of all information in one activity, 2) using the platform effectively to express key ideas, and 3) ensuring each activity had supplemental resources and extensions to test knowledge and build skills.
We were challenged to find ways to incorporate learning activities into our module, as many online tools we found were only compatible with certain systems, such as Google Classroom. Thus, we had to be creative in finding ways to engage learners and situate copyright, academic integrity, and citation in practical, real-world terms. Inspired by Moore (2017), we designed a branching scenario, where each decision point is a multiple-choice question (p. 221) students must work through to make effective copyright decisions. We found creating a scenario to be an effective way to align with our goal of personalizing the learning experience and putting the student in the role of actively making ethical decisions, which is what they will be expected to do as they write and produce work in this course. Scenarios in Google Slides was a natural fit for this type of activity, although a limitation is that students may be tempted to use the arrows to skip ahead in the activity.
Since we were tasked with using backward design at the outset of this project, we had a good idea of how to structure the content module in such a way that students would be prepared to complete the quiz and skill-building discussion by the end of Week 2. We created a custom graphic that resonated with our honeycomb theme to create a splash screen image to direct students to different sections of the modules. We used Thinglink to create the links as it is easier than using HTML image maps for links. Also, given the issues with images in Canvas, we did not want to use many images. Moreover, the Rich Content Editor had limited functionality. When we tried to edit HTML directly, on subsequent views the LMS automatically added multiple span tags and weird style code. This was a big issue we faced with the tables in which the borders and background color became very difficult to manage and keep consistent with our overall theme.
Overall, we are happy to see how the course has come out. It is different from all the courses out there on the internet. It has our own voice and personal touch. A lot of thought went into designing this course, including how to model activities for online learners, and we think students will find it engaging and useful.
References:
Anderson, T. (2008). 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. (2012, June 26). Nine steps to quality online learning: Step 7: Design course structure and learning activities [Article]. Retrieved from https://www.tonybates.ca/2012/06/26/nine-steps-to-quality-online-learning-step-7-design-course-structure-and-learning-activities/
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/
Briggs, A. (2015, February 11). Ten ways to overcome barriers to student engagement
online [Article]. Retrieved from the Online Learning Consortium website: https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/news_item/ten-ways-overcome-barriers-student-engagement-online/
Boyes, J., Dowie, S., & Rumzan, I. (2005). Using the SECTIONS framework to evaluate flash media. Using the SECTIONS framework to evaluate flash media, 2(1). Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186.6505&rep=rep1&tzpe=pdf
Carleton College (2012). Why Use Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning. Retrieved from https://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/media/why.html
Driscoll. M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning for instruction (Ch. 11 – Constructivism). Toronto, ON: Pearson.
Hazlett, C. (2013). Optimal Video Length for Student Engagement. Retrieved from https://blog.edx.org/optimal-video-length-student-engagement
Moore, C. (2017). Map it: The hands-on guide to strategic training design. Montesa Press.
Robin, B. (2006). The educational uses of digital storytelling. In Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 709-716). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
Schunk, D. H. (2012). Learning theories: An educational perspective (6th ed.).
Siemens, G. (2003). Evaluating media characteristics: Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/mediacharacteristics.htm