Sometimes my overly-eager spirit and desire to make things ‘look right’ come in handy, as it did this time when I tackled the task of creating my moodle’s GUI splash page as part of Assignment 2 rather than 3. As a result, my greatest challenge for Assignment 3 was in creating my first content module (or on my page – ‘unit 1’), and making sure that everything flowed with a logical progression. I was very grateful for my previous experiences with creating web-spaces for my students, specifically with the use of Wiki-Classrooms, as it had already given me some idea of the layout and content that provides senior high school students with the information they need, in an easy to navigate format.
When designing blended or fully online learning spaces, I always find it somewhat challenging to know how to best format a page so that it has the content the students require, but will not overwhelm them to the point of glossing over important parts to later claim “they never got that information”. I attempted to strike the right balance in my pages, while keeping in mind that students taking an online course would be best to heed the advice I put in a ‘Course Conduct’ page, which was to make themselves familiar with all of the course pages as a whole. That said, were I to actually launch this moodle and course, I think I might take a ‘staggered release’ approach to each unit’s content, and wait for certain intervals before making all lessons visible to them. I would provide them with a unit description and outline for each, but wait until closer to the scheduled dates to open the lessons to them. Not only would this help avoid an overwhelming amount of pages and content at the beginning, but it would hopefully help them pace themselves in the course, and tackle each section at the most appropriate time, since the course does indeed build upon itself as it progresses. For students wishing to work ahead I would release each unit in full perhaps a week prior to the unit’s scheduled start, allowing both student autonomy and opportunities for asynchronous completion, while encouraging collaboration by requiring them to attempt the work at a somewhat similar pace. This format allows for Anderson’s (2008a) ‘How People Learn Framework’ as per the “affordances of the current web”, with some elements of what he calls the “semantic web 2.0” (p. 66). Although moodle is a platform that is largely designer (e.g. teacher lead, it contains opportunities for student and content agents to shape the personal experience of the course, depending on the subject.
In my course design I attempted to provide opportunities for choice, interaction, and reflection, to encourage students to take as much ownership over their learning as possible. As I mentioned in my reflection for Assignment 2, I see my role as more of a ‘content curator slash guide’, rather than an ‘instructor’, especially in an online context. In fact I would be dismayed if I were to learn that my students were relying solely on what is delivered in the confines of either the online or in-person classroom, never seeking out their own information. The trick, of course, would be ensuring that they did their own exploring with a critical eye, but without monitoring their every action or search the only way to do this would be through modeling the use of reputable research and observing their discussions in the course forums. As Martin (1999) writes: “When students feel themselves identifying with us and our disciplines, they come to appreciate the struggle for knowledge, some may even choose to become part of the intellectual adventure” (as cited in Palloff and Pratt (2013). Although I did stipulate the use of a class textbook, the website and the students’ own research would become its own growing body of ‘text’, hopefully striving together to meet the learning goals of the course that feel authentically achieved.
My Digital Story
If I am completely honest, I chose Voice Thread in part because it was a format that I had no prior experience with, and after a simple Google search I had not found many previous examples of teachers using it to create their Digital Stories. However, I also determined that it was the right platform for this particular task, as per the criteria for evaluating the appropriateness of media stimulated by Siemens (2003). I knew I wanted the platform to support personally-chosen images (e.g. not preloaded graphics), a voice-over, and text. In the past I had used a program called Screen-Cast-O-Matic to create video-lectures, were essentially just me reading aloud a powerpoint presentation and uploading it to YouTube. If there is a computer tutorial involved, this platform is perfect, and I watched more than one such tutorial when trying to learn some of the more challenging elements of moodle. For this purpose however, I felt that Screen-Cast-O-Matic would actually offer a bit more than would be necessary, and the extra time I would spend navigating the program would not result in any better version of my Digital Story. What really clinched my decision was when I learned that Power Point slides could be uploaded to Voice Thread as individual images through a simple drag-and-drop of the entire file, so I could exacerbate the benefits of images, text, audio, and video. I created a simple Power Point presentation with minimal text to allow greater focus on the audio, uploaded it to Voice Thread, and then added in my voice and a few simple animations using my tablet and pen. The end result is a fairly simple, but I believe effective, presentation that reflect on larger elements of my moodle course through a personal lens.
In my moodle, I presented my Digital Story as an exemplar for a small student assignment that would take place later in my course. What I often find when teaching a challenging course is that students benefit from reflecting back on previous content in both personal and dynamic ways, to help them trigger memories of what they have already done and hopefully create new connections with their work and experiences as a whole. Their choice of platform would be an open one, but encouraging as in Lesson 1 of the course, I would require their choice to be made for maximum effectiveness. As Ciampa (2013) outlines in Learning in a mobile age: an investigation of student motivation, in order for activities to engender both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation they require elements of “challenge, curiosity, control, cooperation, competition and recognition” (p. 83). The moodle course as whole, and potentially this task, exhibits many of these elements, especially as students are both encouraged to post to forums with questions for each other, collaborate where required, and then post their work to forums where their peers are prompted to critically reflect and comment. Especially with online courses, finding ways to weave in techniques that increase motivation and interest are vital, and so my aspiration with this assignment is that it will function as an opportunity for students to not only review the course and their own places within it, but how its themes can be extracted and applied to their “real” worlds.
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_2008Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf
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
Ciampa, K. (2014). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, (30), 82-96. Doi: 10.111./jcal.12036.
Siemens, G. (2003). Evaluating media characteristics: Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/mediacharacteristics.htm
Palloff, R. M., Pratt, K., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (2013). Lessons from the virtual classroom: The realities of online teaching (Second ed.). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.