In my district we have access to Moodle shells created by BC teachers. It is fantastic to have access to these but there is currently no training available. It has been very challenging as everything is a challenge. I was delighted to be able to work with Moodle through this course simply because it allows me more time working in the platform and experimenting with its functionality.
This year I am also experimenting teaching blended social studies and English courses as humanities. What I’ve been doing is crafting an in class English course that mirrors the socials course I have access to on Moodle. I have really liked the option of teaching a blended class because students are able to work independently while I can tutor them one-on-one.
My dream for this project was to create an online English class that parallels the socials course. I took my in class course and began adapting it. Ideally students would take both the courses together and they would be fully inclusive, though I would supplement through various class activities and discussion that will not be mentioned. In my context this would be wonderful as students are often absent for a variety of reasons. This way they would always be responsible for their learning only that learning would be richer and more supported when they were at school. In this way I would be allowing more students to be successful in their learning.
I have noticed many challenges while working on this project, for one, the time investment required to create these courses is incredible. They should really be created by a team of people. I don’t see it being very feasible for one teacher to design the variety of courses that I teach without being guaranteed them for several years through a permanent contract.
The issue of copyright is also an important one when looking into creating online courses. I modelled my courses after the shells that I have access to. I did this because I wanted continuity across courses for the students. While doing so, I realized that the courses don’t cite their information. I feel like this must be in copyright violation. What I did was simply to link to outside content. It makes my pages look sparse but I feel like it is a safe method to choose.
I also found it to be very frustrating trying to upload files and facing error messages. Sometimes it was frustrating enough that I would working on the project for the day. I think that the internet access and bandwidth at my school may be a real challenge, especially with the lack of support in the district.
Continuing with my course design, I tried to think about how I could include practice for each of the skills to make sure students are spending enough time engaging with the material. Sometimes I used games and sometimes I gave assignments. I feel that, as I taught this course, I would want to update it and make some changes. I wanted to include examples for each assignment but I did not feel like I had the time to do that. Had I been teaching this course before I would have used student exemplars. I think that it would be nice to have a rough outline of the course and to update it every year. Again I feel like this would be better accomplished with teachers working as a team.
I tried to keep the information on the page minimal and to include different types of media. I did not want students to be overwhelmed by text and I wanted to be sure I allowed for different modalities. Gibbs & Simpson say that the “trick when designing assessment regimes is to generate engagement with learning tasks without generating piles of marking” (2005). I think the quiz feature on Moodle is great for this as you can input feedback when students make mistakes and it is automatically given when the quiz is automatically graded. For this project I chose to use a sample provincial exam to assess nonfiction reading. In that way I am helping the students to prepare for the exam while covering my standards for this unit.
Working through this assignment has been a good chance for experimentation. If, “the initial selection of an enterprise-wide LMS is a high stakes and high risk decision which involves a great deal of technological and institutional forecasting” (Coates, James & Baldwin, 2005) then it is important to take the time to test it out. Unlike the universities mentioned by Coates, James & Baldwin, at my level the challenges and costs are borne by the public school teacher alone and a lot of thought must be put in by me to see if the cost of creating these courses is worth it for the relative gain.
Works Cited
Coates, H., James, R., & Baldwin, G. (2005). A critical examination of the effects of Learning Management Systems on university teaching and learning. Tertiary Education and Management, 11,(1), 19-36. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11233-004-3567-9
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved fromhttp://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf