Synthesis

Summary of Experience with Course Activities

Overall, I’m pleased with the level of learning and challenging inquiry that this course offered. I chose Moodle because it authentically motivated me to be useful in my occupational context. Furthermore, gaining experience within the medium would serve me well in any educational technologist role that I seek in the future.

Design Skills

My progression in this area can be best defined as consolidating. I have aligned, for some time, that design should follow C.A.R.P. principles (contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity). In addition, there should be simplicity and user friendliness to the overall user interface (UI) and one should always navigate their audience. I particularly enjoyed Conrad’s (2000) reading on instructional design; I think it will be a valuable resource for planning and designing courses in the future. Additionally, student goals should be made explicit and with qualifiers that focus on creativity. Finally, overall planning structure ought to follow an Understanding by Design (McTighe & Wiggins, 2004). Learning engagements should include plenty of formative assessment opportunities to drive learning forward.

Initial Goals

Most of my initial goals in my Moodle course design did stay the same. However, as the course progressed, I realized that another unit of inquiry, rather than the one proposed would be a better fit. I felt that the “Who we are” inquiry into the interdependencies of body systems would fit better with Moodle because the learning sequences could be scaffolded nicely upon one another. The previously thought out unit was very artistic and open-ended, so it would have been quite complex to design, particularly for my first time designing a course in Moodle.

Working with Various Media

Moodle

Pivotal learning wins were linked to figuring out labels and access to forums – the latter of which is further described below, within this section. The former, using labels, left me elated since they significantly reduced the amount of content being shown on the landing page. This ultimately enhanced the simplicity and navigation.

My biggest struggles came down to how the Moodle courses were designed and structured administratively. The faults of the current design are that course creators do not have access to the full left hand navigation panes. Secondly, users have a lack of access to more recent versions of Moodle and third-party plugins. Creative freedom would be nice here, especially in trying to overcome the rudimentary UI aesthetics of Moodle.

Most importantly, the biggest learning challenge was trying to get student and guest access to the forums. I struggled with this for weeks. First, I engaged in self-initiated smaller inquiries on Moodle forums and YouTube. Next, I asked the professor. Neither of which were fruitful. Luckily, I had access to a Moodle expert on staff. Even after 30 minutes of troubleshooting, he too, was baffled. It wasn’t until he started changing random boxes that we were able to fix the error. In his professional and respected opinion, it was poor administrative setup.

Eliademy

Connections with Eliademy had strong authentic links to my school’s Creativity-Action-Service (CAS) Programme. I have communicated this already with the CAS coordinator, secondary vice principal and the head of learning technologies. I think its free structure and ease of exporting integration into our Moodle run LMS are huge wins. High-school children could create their own courses in the medium, then be counted as fulfillment credits towards completion of this programme.

Quality of Learning Experiences

Reading Materials

In general, I thought the readings were relevant and topical to the learning outcomes for each unit. However, some were lengthy and redundant. I found most of the Bates (2014) readings to be overly verbose, lacking succinctness and most observations and/or conclusions to be quite introductory. The newly revised International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE, 2016) document would be a great example of readings with appropriate length and value.

Discussion Themes & Questions

Overall, discussion topics, themes and questions were rich and fruitful; it was evident that they were designed around the goals of each unit and the readings helped offer enough insight to critically reflect and engage in discourse. Yet, I felt that because of the amount of content or project work some weeks, I couldn’t give the forums the time that they deserved in order to “truck on” with other learning modules.

Course Activities & Projects

The activities and projects were all enjoyable because they allowed for differentiation and student-led inquiry. However, I believe the assessment criteria in Assignment Two is flawed. Points five and six explicitly talk about audience access, of which I was having large difficulty in my forums. I spent a lot of time trying to hash this out, yet it wasn’t until after I had contacted the professor, that she mentioned it wasn’t important for this assignment. If it’s not important, points five and six, particularly six, need rewording.

Furthermore, I’m still shocked at the lack of understanding with the zero peer assessment score I received on assignment one because I didn’t have any peers. First, this course is flawed in that students are asked to collaborate around choosing an organization important within their contextual realm of knowledge and then perform a critical analysis on it. This makes no sense to be a collaborative project as it is highly personal. Why not give student groups a fictitious organization in a problem-based learning format and have them choose an appropriate LMS based on problems identified in the scenario? That way, the goal is central and authentic to the group, rather than the individual. Therefore, it motivates all the members, not just one or a few. I agree, wholeheartedly, that social constructivist collaboration with peers is important. Yet, be flexible for individual differentiation if it arises. I wanted to work with a partner, but no one signed up in my group. I should not be punished for a fault in course design or lack of general interest.

I appreciate that I was allowed to inquire into an area that had authentic and contextual purpose; this largely motivated me towards completion of the task. However, I did seek out authentic peer assessment on Twitter from both stakeholders (Eliademy and SSIS admin) and received it. When I offered the snippet of this to the professor in rebuttal of my argument that my formative peer feedback was authentic, it was not acknowledged.

Perhaps what infuriated me further, was the irony, later in Unit 4, when we engaged in the course readings on social media. One of the readings, in particular. was on the very notion of how Twitter can be a powerful educational tool (November & Mull, 2012).

Range of Media

A real strength of this course is that it exposed students to a wide variety of learning management systems and other digital platforms to explore. Choice is a pivotal notion in any inquiry and allows for immediate motivation and differentiation.

Conclusion

In general, ETEC565a offers rich learning experiences with plenty of opportunity and differentiation for those wishing to get started or advance their skills in LMS design. Readings are relevant to activities, yet need to be slimmed down in order for students to engage in richer discussions on the forums. During weeks when there are assignments due, do not include major discussion activities. Furthermore, some ambiguities need to be fixed in assessment outcomes for assignment two. Lastly, if students want to critically analyze an institution independently, don’t penalize them when they try to get peer feedback outside of the course.

References