My Moodle was set up to be an English 10 course that would parallel a social studies 10 course I received access to from the BC Learning Network. I wanted to create a blended humanities course. However knowing that I would have to assign both a social studies and English grade on the report card I thought that having two distinct course shells united under themes might be a better way to approach the course. Firstly, it allows easy and clear access to a course where the framework is designed by myself but comes to life with students. I planned out roughly far more than I included in my assignments, knowing that the course would be more valuable to me if I could take away from it a start to the coming year.
Moodle was the right tool for many reasons, which can be analysed using the SECTIONS model by Bates (2014). It is appropriate for our students as our school has an wonderful budget and plenty of laptops and computers. It would be taught through moodle, in school, in a blended learning environment. Our students are often absent as the nearest city is a four hour drive away and school is not prioritized in the community. In this way, if school is missed, Moodle can be accessed outside and students will not fall behind when time is missed. It is being brought in by our district and its use is supported.
Moodle is fairly easy to use, as it is designed intuitively, and it is supported by the district so I think it will be adopted more in the future. The cost is minimal and there is an IT person dedicated to the project. As far as teaching and learning go I think it is up to the teacher to plan in a way that encourages different learning styles. Moodle can the ability to be used in a variety of ways and interactivities. I like that you can modify the HTML of the page as I have some background in coding and it gives you a much greater degree of flexibility.
I started using Moodle this year with no idea what I was doing, despite this the students have remained positive about the experience. I offered them the opportunity to go back to textbooks for a unit and they unequivocally chose to continue on Moodle. They like the flexibility in presentation. They like how topics are covered through different media. They are digital natives (Prensky, 2001) and Moodle allows for the transmission of information in a way that they are much more comfortable and engaged with. The biggest challenge with Moodle is simply the speed of our internet connection. As a rural community we don’t have fiber optic cables and so it is much slower than we would like. Generally it is sufficient for streaming but as we share bandwidth with the hospital there can be times when it doesn’t work. I hope that we will have our infrastructure improved in the future.
For me, online courses can be challenging. I find that I really need face to face input from peers or professors. In creating my introductory module my final vision for the course muddied up the project I handed in. For my first unit I didn’t want to waste time on too many introductory activities… I already knew my students. I wanted to get right into an introductory unit where students would learn the formatting and reading skills they would need for the course. The result of this being that my introductory unit was rather content heavy and was much more suited to being a content unit. After several emails with Boskic I was able to see where things went wrong. I ended up taking some aspects from that unit and creating a separate introductory unit. Therefore for this project I fleshed out my introductory unit (this took the most time). I had a very challenging time inserting quizzes into the first unit to fulfil the requirements. It felt very contrived. I ended up making a course questionnaire and a reading level assessment. I think that if I were to use this course in the future I probably wouldn’t use most of this first unit as it doesn’t make sense in my context. I also made my second module a content module, making sure it met the requirements, which took very little time as I had already done most of it for the first assignment.
After my discussion with Boskic, we decided to include my digital story in the first unit. In approaching it, I really wanted to bring in as many different platforms as possible to really highlight how digital stories can be told across different media. I has worked on a project on transmedia storytelling, in another course as a method of digital storytelling, and was excited to bring elements of transmedia into this project. Transmedia is ”a new form of multiliteracies where the elements of a fictional narrative are dispersed across different platforms and channels in order to create a complex, coordinated, and unified story, in which each element contributes uniquely as the story unfolds” (Dumouchel 2014). In addition I wanted to tell the story from different perspectives as I felt that was more reflective of how a story might be told in real life through different news media. I wanted students to piece together information from different sources to draw their own conclusions. In the case of my story, I wanted it to tell the story of online education with them adding to it through the cord-board conclusion. I wanted it to help prepare my own students for the journey on which they were about to embark. Henry Jenkins (2006) coined the term transmedia in discussions about how television and film series were telling their stories across different platforms. I think that if this is what the media is doing, then this is what education needs to be doing. The readings I assigned for the first week were along the same theme. My goal was that at the end of the module students would have a fairly good idea if online learning was the right choice for them. “It’s storytelling, and ‘digital’ is just the time we’re in” (Visser 2014).
The final issue I found challenging in working on this project was the one of copyright. Throughout my teacher training we were told not to reinvent the wheel. I agree wholeheartedly. Teaching is challenging enough without having to create everything from scratch. The challenge then comes to copyright and usage. In perusing the UBC copyright act is says that you are allowed copying short excerpts for students. I used information taken from a textbook and from various online sources and some of my own creation. I put a citation at the end of each page but I am still a little worried about how copyright looks in online courses. I tried not to take images often, even from the creative commons, because of the challenges of citations and copyright. To get around this I made buttons as images and included a few of my own. I think, as I continue working online, copyright will continue to be a challenge.
All in all, I learned a lot in working through the assignment. I learned about myself, the platform, and how to structure online courses. I have been bringing bits of this course into the classes I’m teaching and I hope to continue to develop this course to be used in the coming September. It is an exciting time for the world of online and blended education and it feels good being able to get started!
Works Cited
Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in the Digital Age. Retrieved March 30, 2016, from
http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/(Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework)
Dumouchel, A. (2014). Transmedia Storytelling. Retrieved March 30, 2016, from http://etec.ctlt.ubc.ca/510wiki/Transmedia_Storytelling
Jenkins, H. 2006. Fans, bloggers, and gamers: Exploring participatory culture. New York: New York University Press.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon,9(5), 67-85. Retrieved March 30, 2016.
UBC Copyright “fair dealing”. Retrieved from http://copyright.ubc.ca/requirements/
Visser, Jasper. “How to Tell a Story that Stands out in the Digital Age?” Accessed July 17, 2014. http://themuseumofthefuture.com/2012/10/11/digital-storytelling-how-to-tell-a-story-that-stands-out-in-the-digital-age/