1) Summarize your experience.
a) State whether or not you have attained your goals for this course.
During the progression of this course, my instructional design skills went from 0 to infinity in a matter of weeks, which felt like a blink of an eye. Truthfully, I had no idea what this course would entail, but I took it on with full gusto. The first assignment was the most troublesome for me as I had no idea which area to hone in on to teach. Coming up with a subject area to teach was the hardest choice I had to make because it determined my success in being able to confidently teach a particular content area, in a mode that I was not confident in teaching. There were a lot of skills and content needed to be learned.
Did I achieve my goals? To determine the answer to that question, I looked back at the goals that I set out in my Flight Path…
My goals for this course:
- To decide upon a topic to teach in the course that I am designing — this could be the most challenging goal! Yes, I believe this was my most challenging task, and I in hindsight, perhaps a different topic may have been more relevant to my teaching.
- To explore the various platforms that are available when designing online courses. Yes, I enjoyed searching through the various LMSs such as EdX and Udemy to compare
- To develop a deeper level of understanding of the various skills, tasks, design techniques, and multimedia tools used to design an online course. Yes! The course assignments encouraged me to think critically about the content and assessment techniques that developed the intended skills, as well as explore various assessment and video tools that would effectively teach the content.
- To establish a collaborative and supportive online community where learners become contributors willing to ask questions and take risks. The opportunity to discuss and share ideas with others was invaluable.
- To delve into what it takes to create an online course and to discover the opportunities that the new knowledge might bring. I am hoping that I will continue on this journey of creating courses for learners as this practice will also enhance my teaching.
B) State whether your instructional design skills have transformed, became more focused, became broader or took on a new direction going through this course
I believe that my instructional skills became broader, as I believe I now have skills that can be applied in various avenues of online teaching. When I have the time, I would like to design a math challenge course for grade 5-7 BC students. I am finding that teachers are overwhelmed with the new curriculum and are having to differentiate for many students from varying levels of ability. If they had content for students who needed challenging tasks, then teachers would have more time to focus on students who need more face to face or one on one instruction. If I were to take ETEC 656a over again, I think the Math course is is what I would design in a WordPress or Weebly platform as the ability to make pages more aesthetically appealing is important to me. Although, the ability to create quizzes and assignments and to keep track of grades on the Moodle platform, are also great features.
2). Revisit notes on working with the different LMS platforms and digital communication and assessment tools.
I appreciate the space to explore and delve into the various LMS platforms as my only experience with a particular platform was Blackboard, until now. Because different platforms present positive and negative attributes depending on the nature of the course, various examples needed to be explored. I didn’t realize the many open accessed tools there were available on the Internet for assessment and communication purposes, and I would like to further explore options for my current teaching practice.
3). Consider the quality of my learning experience and how valuable the learning components were.
a). Reading materials:
The course readings helped me purposefully think about various aspects of my course design, that I would not have thought of. For example, the reading by Chickering and Ehrmann, discussed the importance of Social Emotional learning that is placed on the standards of learning. Throughout the writing of my course, the social and emotional needs of the potential students, would need to be in the foreground when designing assignments, using tech tools, and displaying specific content. As I read through the course content, and explored the various LMSs, I developed a greater appreciation for designers and instructors of online courses.
b). Discussion themes:
The discussion themes were vital to my learning. I enjoyed learning from others the various educational tools in creating and assessing. The purposeful questions were appreciated as they gave direction to the discussion, while encouraging the sharing of experiences. However, it was a lot of effort to keep up with the discussion while needing to complete the assigned tasks.
c). Course activities:
The platform assignment which asked students to critique a course helped me draw upon aspects that I liked about the platform, think about aspects that didn’t have relevance, as well as take aspects that I could use for my own course design. The assignments also helped me think more critically about the design of my own course and how I would go about teaching the content, and assessing my students. The video assignment encouraged me to explore various apps and programs that would creatively teach the content to my targeted students while removing text as reading may be a specific skill that is difficult for the particular students. Finally, I enjoyed working with my group members on critiquing the suitability of an LMS on a particular course as the other members challenged my thinking.
d). Range of LMSs, tools and platforms for experience and creating:
I didn’t realize the number of possible LMS platforms there are, as online learning continues to grow. I think we only scratched the surface of the possibilities.