Précis of Flight Path
I have revisited my Flight path while working on this final course reflection. I feel I have achieved most of my goals, which included:
- Enhance my skills in evaluating, selecting and using various learning technologies, such as LMSs, online communication and collaboration tools, multimedia and social media.
- Explore pedagogical affordances of various social software and web 2.0 tools.
- Enhance my understanding of formative and summative assessment, particularly when delivered online.
- Create a sophisticated prototype LMS course site.
- Reflect on how I can enhance my practice by using my experience and learning from the course.
- Add ETEC565A artifacts to my existing MET ePortfolio that I created during ETEC590 Graduating Project course.
I am still thinking what to add to my ePortfolio (goal #6) as the access to my course in Canvas will be lost after ETEC565A finishes. I will probably add my digital story with the reflection on my experience creating it as well as the LMS rubric we created with my peers.
Overall Experience
I had a great experience working on various assignments, collaborating with peers and experimenting with different tools in this course.
What I loved most about this course is the great course structure/design; practical approach; applicable assignments; easy and timely communication with instructor; detailed, constructive video feedback on assignments, the opportunity to experiment with various tools and some elements of surprise (ex. “This week we will conduct our discussions in Mattermost…”); and amazing help I received from reading questions and answers in the general discussion forum.
At times I felt there are too many things going on in the course. I also felt there were too many reflection exercises, but I am thankful for the opportunity to try and test various tools as well as reflect on everything I have accomplished. What I think I would do differently is remove the requirement to cite sources in the reflections. This is my personal opinion based on my experience reflecting in this course – instead of really focusing on reflection I needed to think how to include readings into it, and it stopped being a reflection for me and started being an additional assignment. I liked doing reflection exercises in other courses more.
Assignment 2 allowed me to work with peers and consider a scenario with indigenous communities. As I have never had experience working with indigenous communities before, I found the assignment quite challenging. This activity made me review various perspectives on LMS selection and consider blended learning particulars. This was a great learning experience as I normally work on designing completely remote courses and use LMS for eLearning only. I found the SECTIONS model (Bates, 2014) and as the “Seven Principles” model by Chickering and Ehrmann (1996) to be very useful analytical tools for the LMS rubric assignment as well as for the course introduction and course content assignments. The questions put by the SECTIONS framework helped me analyze learning technologies and how appropriate they are for the purpose and the context. I will keep it in my toolkit for my future projects.
For Assignment 3, I decided to work in Canvas. I have invested a lot of time in combining best pedagogical principles and overall course design, trying to make it aesthetically pleasant and pedagogically sound. Although I regularly design various courses, I had to think carefully about what information to include, what activities to use, how to make quiz work without breaking the course flow, what tools to choose to support various interactions in the course and to offer me a new way of facilitating teaching and learning and provide meaningful opportunities for feedback and support for learners throughout the learning process (Anderson, T. 2008a).
As I mentioned before, it was a surprise to struggle with embedding images in Canvas but I found the way around it.
It was really pleasant to read about backward design in this course. I love this approach, and I know that not many organizations use it.
While choosing the digital tool for Assignment 4, the digital story, I considered my students, ease of use, cost, appropriate instructional approach, effective organization of the video, novelty, speed (Boyes, Dowie, & Rumzan,2005). I have also considered some criteria by T. Bates (1985) to make the video more effective: good presenter, clear audio; short and to-the-point; demonstrates clearly a particular topic and links to what the learner is intended to learn.
I loved class and group discussions and the fact that most of them were based on cases/scenarios and questions that required us to share our experience.
I also appreciate multiple opportunities to create videos. They were challenging but effective.
Next Steps
In my Flight Path, I mentioned that I would like to be able to evaluate organizational needs and their specific contexts to help them to find best solutions for their particular situation, whether it is an LMS, a CMS, or any other platform. I feel this course gave me an opportunity to explore various tools and platforms and consider particular requirements while working on the LMS rubric. It also expanded my knowledge and skills in selecting and using technology and creating assessments using best practices. It was valuable to experiment with various synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. It was my first time using Mattermost and I loved it. I feel all these applicable activities prepared me for better supporting learners for whom I design my courses. I am now prepared to create better opportunities for them to interact, collaborate, and learn from each other using the tools that various LMSs offer as well as various social media, mobile technology and multimedia.
I also feel the course proved to be valuable for getting me closer to realizing my bigger goal: helping organizations and educational institutions to plan, manage, develop and deliver technology-based learning and provide faculty training on integrating educational technology and using best practices in face-to-face and online environment.
As I am currently designing in 5 various LMSs used mostly for higher educational institutions, I would like to expand my knowledge and explore cloud-based LMSs suitable for corporate training. I recently received a request to evaluate current online program (currently set in Moodle) for a big company with a franchise model and suggest a more suitable LMS for their needs. I will start with exploring Docebo and an LMS plug-in for a WordPress site as I have read many good things about them. In addition to doing my research and testing these platforms, I am going to chat with people who are using these tools in their organizations to get their feedback.
Regarding multimedia, in June I am planning to take a Scenario design: In-depth and hands-on course by Cathy Moore, my favourite training design blogger. I design scenario-based media pieces at work, but I would like to learn how to design more complex branching scenarios to create challenging real-life experiences for my Nursing, Counselling, Law and Business students. I am also interested in experimenting with Twine – an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. What I love about this tool is that it publishes storues in HTML but you do not need to write any code to create a simple story in Twine (although it never hurts).
I am also considering learning HTML5 that is used by media developers at my work to create engaging media pieces.
As you can see, I have many plans, and this course helped me with deciding what next steps to take.
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, A. (1985) Broadcasting in Education: An Evaluation London: Constables
Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/
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&type=pdf
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