Precis of Flight Path
I am a high school Social Studies teacher with a BC Distributed Learning school. Most of the courses I teach are delivered in a fully online format using a Blackboard 9.1 Learning Management System (LMS). Despite the workload challenges caused by large class sizes at my current worksite, I wish to utilize constructivist design principles to help guide my work with students. Through previous MET courses, I have come to understand constructivism in the following way: constructivist learning theory posits that knowledge evolves through social negotiation and the viability of individual understandings, that understandings come from our interactions with the environment, and that cognitive conflict or puzzlement is the stimulus for learning (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996; Savery & Duffy, 1995).
In reviewing the Etec 565A syllabus back in September, it became apparent to me that I wanted to use my time in the course to build greater variety in the ways that my students plan, document, and represent their learning. An obvious method of doing this is to build in more choice in terms of the types of projects and assessments that students complete. A less obvious way is to build pathways into my online courses, so that each student has a distinct curriculum to guide their learning. I also wanted to study some of the many options that exist for assessing students in online contexts. Since I wrote my flight path, I remain interested in learning more about webpage design and the techniques I can use to improve accessibility for students who have a disability. Finally, I expressed my hope to develop a theoretical framework that could serve as a foundation to help me make decisions about technology selection and implementation.
E-Learning Toolkit and Etec 565A Course Tools
As I moved through Etec 565A, I had many opportunities to build upon the goals that I had set in my flight path. Some goals were set aside along the way, some were partially fulfilled, while others were explored in more depth than I ever could have imagined.
In hindsight my goal to explore pathways or what some refer to as customized content for students in online courses is one goal that had to be cast-aside. As I re-discovered over the past semester, the M.E.T. program serves as a highly dynamic community of collaborative inquiry. Terry Anderson (2008) has touched upon educational communities in his paper, Towards a Theory of Online Learning. Anderson (2008) notes that communities of inquiry are likely to develop when instructional practices are learner-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered. In a similar vein, Chickering & Ehrmann (1997) have observed: “Good learning, like good work, is collaborative and social, not competitive and isolated. Working with others often increases involvement in learning. Sharing one’s ideas and responding to others’ improves thinking and deepens understanding.” As I progressed through Etec 565A, I began to understand that differentiation in online courses does not need to involve each student following a pathway that is completely customized to their learning preferences. In fact, an over-abundance of personalization may actually make it difficult to form the communal bonds that Vygotsky and many others have cited in research as being integral to learning (Anderson, 2008, p. 51). There is an intellectual vibrancy that emerges when students collaborate to tackle a complex task. We saw evidence of this time and time again in Etec 565A through the many discussion posts written to seek help when one of us ran into a problem or had a question that required some sort of resolution. The abundant, timely, and constructive responses to these requests is a clear example to me of the power that social cognition has to facilitate learning that is rich, enduring, and shaped by multiple perspectives. In environments of collaborative inquiry, choice can be built into projects so that students are pursuing options that are authentic and meaningful for them. At the same time, such an approach permits us to preserve the bonds of community that help to motivate and deepen our understandings.
The E-learning toolkit provided a resource to help me explore some of the goals that I set for Etec 565A. The page on Moodle helped me to appreciate the influence that constructivist learning, social networking, and system user-needs had in the design of this LMS. In past MET courses, I have worked with colleagues such as Alvin Gross and Rob Clements who had set up their own Moodle servers. Prior to taking Etec 565A, I had visited these sites to learn about the capabilities of Moodle and done some design work using the UBC Moodle 1.9 installation that was made available to me in Etec 531. Etec 565A gave me an opportunity to better understand the social constructivist design philosophy that has shaped the development of Moodle. Prior to this course, I thought all LMS’s were basically the same. The introduction to Moodle through the E-learning toolkit made me realize that the open-source underpinnings of this LMS make it very distinct from the commercial LMS’s that I have previously worked with. In my work with Blackboard and D2L, the focal point when a problem emerges with the LMS is our various channels of tech support. Since we pay to use a commercial LMS, the expectation is that someone at a help desk will trouble-shoot the problem and come up with a solution. While this process for problem-resolution sometimes works, it can also be slow, cumbersome, and often centered on what I would describe as band-aid solutions. With Moodle, there are thousands and thousands of people and resources to turn to for help. In Etec 565A, many of us, turned to Moodle.com discussion forums, a plethora of YouTube videos, and, of course, each other for help. I found this to be much more stimulating than waiting for a help-desk to respond to my query. For those who work regularly with Moodle, I imagine that the ability to change LMS source code as needed provides considerable freedom with design. With commercial LMS’s, I can only do what the LMS allows me to do. With Moodle, the options for design are not unlimited, but certainly widely expanded.
Web design and HTML authoring was a resource that I wish I had spent more time reviewing as the recommendations here were excellent. As the coding for my Moodle HTML pages demonstrates, I am not a professional web designer and need to study and review programming conventions in some more detail. I developed these webpages using Dreamweaver and made some silly mistakes that could have been avoided with better planning. One example is my use of font with the finished web pages. In the .css file, I specified Tahoma as the textual font, but may have been better served by using Arial, Geneva, or Veranda. The E-Learning Toolkit recommendation to judiciously use white space is also something that I should have better considered. There are some spots in my rendered Moodle pages where the text is compressed together and not as clear as it could be. Additionally, I’m not sure if used Alt tags for each and every image, so this is something that needs to be addressed to ensure that students with a disability can adequately access course content.
Synchronous Communication Tools, Social Software, & Weblogs are three pages that allowed me to explore the wide range of no-cost and proprietary solutions available to help build interactivity into e-learning content. While there are some challenges related to the protection of student privacy with some of these tools, the potential that they hold to engage students and propel learning is significant. What’s interesting to me is the way that many of the tools are being mashed together to help make websites more and more dynamic. In Etec 590, I used HTML 5 web page authoring software provided by Wix to create my e-portfolio. Wix, like many other web resources, is making many many tools available to website creators that facilitate communication, and the development of community. Such tools include apps to incorporate content from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Soundcloud, YouTube, Vimeo, Blogger, Tumblr, LiveChat, and Flikr Gallery. What I discovered in Etec 565A is that providing options to students in terms of how they choose to communicate and display work often pays dividends. In our course, we used Wimba voiceboards & classroom to facilitate interaction. In my case, due to the persistence of tendinitis, I used a Wimba voiceboard to record the reflection for my Digital story. After recording that reflection, I was amazed at how meaningful the recording had become for me. Perhaps this has something to do with a learning style that is receptive to audio, but I would strongly recommend to anyone engaged in reflective practice to give students the option to record their comments as opposed to writing them.
Our study of wikis in Etec 565A proved to be a significant surprise for me. I had previously done some work on the Etec 510 design wiki and found Mediawiki to be of limited use for my students. I emerged from Etec 510 with a good idea of how to add content to a wiki, but no deep appreciation for the process of socially constructed knowledge that is at the heart of each wiki. In Etec 565A, we got an opportunity to learn a great deal about wiki conventions. I found with each of us in Etec 565A working on the same topic, the wiki became very collaborative and a good example of group wisdom. After this experience, I decided to re-consider my previous disdain for wiki’s and use one in my Moodle site. It turns out that a wiki is an excellent tool for having classes present and update information about one or more of Canada’s 192 criminal correctional facilities. The Corrections Wiki as I have termed it will be updated over a period of years by multiple classes, and I am very excited to see how students add to it in future iterations.
Multimedia, Authoring Tools, and Accessibility are pages that speak to the incredible diversity that marks a great deal of web design today. Much of our learning with multimedia came through our work with the digital story and Moodle modules. George Siemens (2003) states that no media tool is perfect for every situation. Instead, as educators, we need to be careful to select media that most effectively presents learning materials in a way to achieve intended learning outcomes. As I experienced with audio-recording my digital story reflection, a small change in format can make a big difference with learning. With the digital story, we had an opportunity to play in the same learning spaces such as YouTube where our students spend so much their time. Mark Mabrito and Rebecca Medley (2008) tell us that many faculty tend to be unfamiliar with attributes of multimedia, social networking, and multitasking that characterize the e-learning footprint of students who have grown up exposed to the Internet. Our work with the Web 2.0 media production tools identified by Alan Levine (2007) in his “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” gave us a chance to be creative and to walk away with a wide spectrum of tools that we can immediately use to provide choice for students with class assignments and projects.
Students come to us with a variety of needs and backgrounds. Differentiated learning is one way many schools are attempting to engage students. Media remixes and digital mashups fit nicely with this strategy as they provide students with the flexibility to document and present their learning in unique ways that may be very meaningful to them (Mabrito & Medley, 2008). By nature, differentiation extends to students who have visual, hearing, and other disabilities. Our Etec 565A learning toolkit provides many helpful recommendations to ensure that our e-learning resources are more accessible. This is an area of instructional design that I need to work on, so I’ll be studying this resource and other web accessibility publications in greater detail.
Our class did not have a chance to do much work with mLearning, but it is a topic dear to my heart. As an iPhone and iPad user, I see tremendous potential for these technologies to expand opportunities for learning. For the past few months, our online school has been using Blackboard’s mobile App for Android, iPhone, and Blackberry. While our school staff will need to re-write some course content to make it mobile friendly, the use of the App gives students a communication and content-exposure tool that they seem to really enjoy. Not every aspect of a blended or online course can be delivered through a mobile device, but certain types of communications such as announcements and calendar events get a lot of attention from students when they are delivered in mobile form.
Reflection on Etec 565A Themes and Next Steps
In my flight path, I noted that I wanted to work towards a research-supported framework to facilitate decisions about technology selection and implementation. Jones-Kavalier and Flannigan (2006) point to the need for educators to be thoughtful about technology. They write, “the greatest challenge is moving beyond the glitz and pizzazz of the flashy technology to teach true literacy in this new milieu” (2006, p. 9). These authors encourage educators to emphasize the skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation with all students. Certainly, these same critical thinking skills apply to educators as we must analyze technologies with care and determine how they facilitate enhanced teaching. The SECTIONS model put forward by Bates & Poole (2003) is well-placed to give educators a starting point for such discussions because it provides a clear and practical framework that is centered on the needs and capabilities of students, staff, and the organization that surrounds them. In Etec 565A, I found myself occasionally drifting away from the SECTIONS model, and instead evaluating technologies based on incomplete criteria. My LMS proposal is an example where I got so pre-occupied with the costs, speed, novelty, and ease of use that I downplayed the critical effects that a Moodle installation would have on teaching and learning. Using the SECTIONS model in a piecemeal way is probably not what the authors intended, and certainly created some problematic ambiguity for me as I tried to understand the benefits and challenges of using Moodle in a school-wide context.
The National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS) exposed me to some critical competencies as I strive to become a co-learner and co-creator of educational content with my students. Don Knezek (2008), the CEO of the International Society of Technology in Education has written that, “the digital-age teaching professional must demonstrate a vision of technology infusion and develop the technology skills of others.” One of the things that crystalized for me over the past term was the significant need for my students to construct their knowledge and present their learning in authentic ways. I have been advocating at my school for students to use more media as a means of showcasing their work. In conjunction with this, I have been trying to expand my repertoire of media production skills, so that I can provide assistance to my students who are creating media using either a Mac or PC. I think the vision that Knezek has in mind is of a professional who develops the technology skills of all of the people, students and adults, around them. In this regard, I feel that I have fallen short. As a department head at my school, there is more that I can do to create avenues for my department members to share learning – and in so doing, broaden the technology skills of our department, myself included.
In our Etec 565A study of assessment, I was reminded of the important need to establish clear criteria for students and build-in opportunities for on-going feedback. Jenkins (2004) cites Brown & Glasner (1999) to emphasize that “assessment is recognized as probably the most influential factor related to how students learn” (p. 67). Likewise, Gibbs and Simpson (2005) reference Hattie (1987) who reports that feedback is the most powerful single influence in making a difference for student achievement (p. 9). I e-mailed these two course articles to my school principal, and he was so struck by their concision and well-reasoned arguments that he forwarded them to our entire staff. Assessment has become a pivotal pillar for our entire school district, and efforts that I can make to provide feedback in the absence of marks should help to guide my students towards enhanced learning outcomes. (Black & William, 1998 as cited in Gibbs & Simpson, 2005, p. 11).
Garrison & Anderson (2003) have suggested that education should be a collaborative constructive experience, where understanding is developed in a critical community of inquiry (referenced in Jenkins, 2004, p. 74). This vision for education is utilized in many MET courses, and particularly so in Etec 565A. It’s apparent to me that our course contained significant cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. These elements are often regarded as the hallmarks of a productive educational experience and certainly sum up my thoughts about the course. With respect to future directions, I have articulated much about that already in my post, but do wish to draw attention to one additional thing. Technology changes rapidly and it’s impossible to keep up with every educational innovation. To help with such transformations, I turn to my Personal Learning Network that includes Twitter and a pair of professional organizations that I belong to. Such communities, whether online or face-to-face, provide me with considerable support in navigating through the many changes that are taking place in education today. It’s been comforting to have had this same type of support in Etec 565A for the past semester, and for that I am indebted.
References
Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson (Ed.),The theory and practice of online learning (2nd ed., pp. 45-74). Edmonton, Canada: Athabasca University Press.
Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.
Chickering, A.W. and Ehrmann, S.C. (1996). “Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever,” American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), p. 3-6. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples.htm
Duffy, T. M., & Cunningham, D. J. (1996). Constructivism: Implications for the design and delivery of instruction. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Educational communications and technology (pp. 170-199). New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.
Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
Hmelo-Silver, C.,Duncan, R.G., &Chinn,C.A.. (2007). Scaffolding and Achievement in Problem-Based and Inquiry Learning: A Response to Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006). Educational Psychologist, 42(2), 99–107. Retrieved from http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/hmelo_ep07.pdf
Jenkins, M. (2004). “Unfulfilled Promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education , i, 67-80. Retrieved from http://www.glos.ac.uk/shareddata/dms/2B72C8E5BCD42A03907A9E170D68CE25.pdf
Jones-Kavalier B. R., & Flannigan S. L., (2006) Connecting the digital dots: Literacy of the 21st century. EDUCAUSE Quarterly,29 (2), 8-10.
Levine. A. (2007). “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story.” Retreived from http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools
Mabrito, M., Medley, R. (2008) Why Professor Johnny Can’t Read: Understanding the Net Generation’s Texts. Innovate. Volume 4, Issue 6, August/September. Retrieved from http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol4_issue6/Why_Professor_Johnny_Can’t_Read__Understanding_the_Net_Generation’s_Texts.pdf
Savery, J.R., & Duffy, T.M. (1995). Problem-based learning: An instructional model and its constructivist framework. In B. Wilson (Ed.), Constructivist learning environments: Case studies in instructional design (pp. 135-148). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
Siemens, G. (2003). Evaluating Media Characteristics: Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/mediacharacteristics.htm