Author Archives: Amber Dumouchel

Digital Story

Hi there,

Here is a link to my digital story for viewing. You can find my video reflection here. I’m sorry it’s late being posted. I didn’t realize people were linking them here as well. Also the embed function isn’t being reliable (though I fought to make sure everything worked on Moodle) so I’ll include links to the files on each subtitle.) This was intended to be a transmedia digital story, told over different forms of media with student participation at the end. It was supposed to be an introduction to the course.

Timmy’s Dilemma:

Commercial:

Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Sarah’s story:

What do you think? Will online learning work for you like it did for Timmy?

Cork Board

Final ePortfolio Synthesis Reflection

Personal Summary

I am a K-12 teacher working in the Yukon. I have been teaching for 4 years and I have always tried to include technology in my practice. It has been an integral part of my life and it would be odd to not include it as much in my teaching as I do in my personal life. This being said, I often find myself challenged with how technology is best used in my classes, how to assess more fairly and accurately across platforms, and how that could be represented in marks. It has also been difficult proving the validity of my teaching methods to staff and parents. These are some of the challenges I was facing and the reasons why I chose to enroll on the MET program.

 

Précis of flight path

My main goals for this course were to learn how to better select technologies, better assess work, and spend less time struggling with making technology work the way I needed it to. The result of this being less time wasted and more time spend working with students, perfecting my delivery of blended courses.  I looked at my practice through the lense of the The National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers’ survey (2008). I established student learning and creativity to be my strength due to small class sizes, student motivation, and my own creativity in lesson design. I pinpointed assessment to be an area I would like to improve in, especially as it is a focus for the territory currently. I also identified improving my skills with Moodle as a goal. I had just started working with it and no training was provided by our district

In any case, I felt like, in this world of changing technologies and ideas, we were all learning together to see what worked best in different communities and with different classroom dynamics. I identified my school climate and technological infrastructure. Since I have arrived in the school, we have managed to procure a 3d printer, laptops for every student, and I have a new smart board projector that was installed over spring break! Our principal is very supportive if we take the initiative. By taking the initiative to use more technologically to facilitate and inspire teaching, we are also helping to encourage technology use in the school. I am always open to discussing and sharing techniques with other teachers, and luckily in a small school, people are very aware of what is happening in other classrooms. I decided that a goal for ETEC 565 would be to learn about the newest technological innovations, improve my practice, and bring new ideas about teaching and learning into our school culture.

 

ETEC 565 Reflection

This course for me has been both enlightening and frustrating. Throughout the time of the course I have organized a festival, written report cards, gone on vacation, and continued to be an active member of the community. I struggled with connecting with a course wholly online that seemed so disconnected from my daily life. I did however enjoy what I was learning and brought it into my lessons. I discussed interesting items with students and asked their opinion for how they like to learn. I think it is important to have this dialogue with your students, at least at the high school level. Their suggestions and ideas help to keep me relevant. Keeping abreast of technological trends through them will help me to continue to be a lifelong learner. Also, taking a master’s degree (or coursework) while being a teacher is a good way to model how students should behave. They need to learn to organize their life to plan for work, school, extra curriculars, homework, and familial obligations and it is good for them to have an example for how that might look.

During this course, I had a hard time interpreting assignments and I think this is because it was online. I don’t connect very well with others in an online environment and generally my understanding of assignments comes from class discussions about plans and reminders and suggestions from professors. I let my own ideas get away from me and that became a problem. I will be finishing up the last two courses from my program next semester. I hope that the lessons I learned here will help me and that I will look more carefully at assignment descriptions in the future. My takeaways from the course will be the Moodle I worked to create, the SECTIONS model as a way of choosing new technologies (Bates, 2014), broader possibilities for mobile devices in the classroom, some improved suggestions for assessment, and some of the predictions for the future that help to identify technologies that may be better to focus upon.

 

Next Steps

Over the course of the the MET program I am always bringing up and discussing what I learn with my colleagues. Our district would very much like to bring more technology into the classroom but, aside from myself, there is not very much interest from the staff. This is why, when our school received funding for new epson smart projector, it was placed in my classroom. For the future I would love to experiment with it and learn how to better utilize it in my classroom. I want to continue working with Moodle as my LMS and to see how they can be used in conjunction. I was also given apple TV and a class set of laptops and I’ve purchased an iPad for the classroom. I want to work with how all of these can be combined. I want to work to adapt traditional knowledge and topics of the area to the technological age. I want to streamline my teaching process to save time for both myself and my students. I hope that as I become more adept at using these technologies, that others in the school pick them up. Since I’ve been taking this course in particular I have helped two other teachers set up their own Moodle classroom. I hope that in the future this momentum builds and grows to fulfil Alexander’s predictions (2014) and create a truly blended classroom that fits into my student’s world.

 

Works Cited

Alexander, B. (2014). Higher education in 2014: Glimpsing the future. Educause Review, 4(5) Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/higher-education-2024-glimpsing-future?utm_s
 ource=Informz&utm_medium=Email+marketing&utm_campaign=EDUCAUSE

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in the Digital Age. Retrieved March 30, 2016, from  http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

The International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). Standards for Teachers. Retrieved March 30, 2016, from http://www.iste.org/standards/ISTE-standards/standards-for-teachers

 

Moodle and Digital Story Reflection

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/

Predictions for the Future

On the whole, think that education will continue to evolve, adapting more digital technologies to change the way knowledge is transmitted. The goals of education will change as well to reflect the changing world. If education serves to prepare the next generation to be productive members of society then it will continue to shift and change to prepare students for the changing job market.

I agree with Alexander that blended learning will become the norm as “blended life” becomes widespread (2014). As more and more of mainstream society adapts to changing technologies, wearable technologies, adaptive technologies, etc, education will adopt this. Literacies will change and adapt to include digital stories as their proliferation in the future seems highly likely.

I do not think that fully online education will become the norm at any level. There is something about being in the classroom and having that accountability and human interaction that will not change. For myself, having taking many online classes, it is a very unnatural thing. I find the richness of the classroom preferable and if I lived in an urban area I would not be taking online classes. Online learning will continue but I think for its accessibility and adaptability. It will be a choice for some who prefer it, and others for whom it is the only option.

As far as MOOCs and free education, at the tertiary level education is big business and as with any business I think the stakeholders would fight to maintain its viability. Look at the music industry and their war to protect copyright as an example. I think think that big universities would fight free education in the same way. I think the only reason they support MOOCs is because they know that they aren’t a threat to the system.

Education is also branded (though more so in the USA). Having a degree from a recognizable university means something both for employers and for the prestige of simply having it. Universities are a class symbol and people from all over the world vie for entry into the top schools.

These are just a few of the reasons I feel that education’s change and adaption of technology will be slow and will follow shifting trends in the world. I don’t think that the nature of education will change despite the technologies introduced. As a teacher, who is comfortable with technology and uses it often in her daily life, I will continue bring my knowledge into my practice. I will continue listening to the suggestions of my students to create an environment that is more reflective of their world and the way they learn. I will continue to talk about my successes with the faculty at my school in hope of inspiring others to adapt their classrooms as well.

Alexander, B. (2014). Higher education in 2014: Glimpsing the future. Educause Review, 4(5) Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/higher-education-2024-glimpsing-future?

 

Talking About Copyright

I’ve had the opportunity to travel, live, and work in many places around the world. In doing so, I’ve seen many different interpretations of copyright. In some places, Korea in particular, the idea of copyright doesn’t exist. If it exists, you can copy it. The goes for movies, books, software, products, brands. I think I saw a Shrek branded hair salon once that was definitely not official. As you can imagine, it is difficult to keep students from plagiarizing when the idea of intellectual copyright doesn’t exist. Actually, it’s hard enough to keep them from plagiarizing when it does. It takes significant education on what plagiarism is, why it’s wrong, and how to credit ideas.

I think that with the technologies available today, that there really should be some loosening up of copyright law, or even a reimagining. I like that music streaming pay services, like Apple Music and Spotify, are becoming more popular as they represent an adaption to the digital era. I think it is important to have these discussions with students and see how they feel around the issue in the first place.

I think that because of my thoughts and experiences with copyright, I haven’t really had enough discussion about it with my classes. We talk about it with regards to copying work and citing sources in essays but that is about it. I’m also not as strict as I should be when it comes to citing sources in class work, or small assignments. I tend to deal more with it if there is a problem, It could be a good social justice lesson asking if violating copyright is justifiable in other countries or at home and then debating the results and connecting the discussion to personal copyright of students work and online posts.

With regards to my digital footprint, I was lucky enough to receive my undergrad from UBC and we had a few lectures on this. It was enough to ensure that my social media is always something I would be fine with anyone seeing. I know that nothing is private and I do try to impress this upon students. I also make the choice to not allow students on my social media, unless it is being used specifically for school. I like distance from work and personal life. I think it could be interesting to take a look at copyright and how it pertains to social media. What about the lawsuits Pinterest has faced over their link sharing? What about the sharing of misatribited quotes? There is a lot you could do here and it might provide a fun way to reaaly delve into the ideas around copyright.

Curriculum Redesign and Digital Literacy

In British Columbia right now they are updating the curriculum (the Yukon uses BC curriculum). I took the the to peruse the new document and uncovered some interesting things pertaining to the topic of this discussion. They mention the “increasing importance of digital media in communicating and exchanging ideas”. This is written in the curriculum document and clearly supports bringing these new technologies into the classroom. They even suggest a module titled “Digital Communication: blogging/writing for the web/ writing for social media/gaming/podcasting”. I thought that the MET program would be very happy to hear of these changes! The explicit mention of technologies in a curriculum is a positive move in the right direction. The problems of stagnating educational practices at the tertiary level, shown in Wesch’s video, are not indicative of the situation everywhere. I think that universities are slower to react to change than grade schools because of the institution itself, though I found the education department at UBC to be quite embracing of new technologies and methodologies when I was there, which was quite inspiring.

In the past I’ve had students connect online using media to favorite authors and occasionally students from other schools. I ran up to problems sometimes regarding culture (with female Arab students in the UAE) but for the most part my experiments were well received. I think adding social media to classes is ideal way to introduce new media. To redesign a course around social media might work better but would be putting too much at stake. In addition administrators might not be as accepting to such a change. By bringing it into a developed course it could be used to add to the course and could slowly be brought in more each year. From my current position it is hard to do work with social media as it is blocked on our server and any work with it must be done at home or on wireless networks but I think that if I went to the technology department with a solid proposal, they would probably let me attempt it on a trial basis.

It will be hard to shift the focus from social media as a distractor to it being an important part of education. The lack of control might seem daunting to some. However, the new curriculum states that “digital literacy is an essential component of an educated citizen” and with continued understanding of the importance behind its inclusion, progress will continue to be made!
“English Language Arts.” Building Student Success – BC’s New Curriculum. Web. 03 Mar. 2016.

Reflection to Intro Module

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

Assessment and Poor Attendance

In my school we have fantastic access to technology. We have a supportive principal with frequent budget surpluses that allow us to order what we need. One of the challenges I see to using technology to support student assessment in my context is that it requires a lot of time investment in order to see relatively small gains. I have yet to teach the same class more than two years in a row. This is really a deterrent into investing significant time developing technology for a course. However  a lot of time is also invested in trying to help students with poor attendance catch up. Perhaps the time spent developing this technology would save time in this area as well.

Students here are often absent from school. They take time off to travel to Whitehorse, there are biannual REMs, trips to neighbouring communities and countless workshops at the school. We also have real problems with tardiness. In this I have found that working to create course shells and then acting as a tutor have been a successful strategy.

A positive part of the small class sizes is that if I am able to organize assignments online then I can spend the majority of the class working with students one on one to offer constructive (formative) comments on their work. If they are stuck on an introduction, I can immediately make suggestions. This aligned nicely to the best practice mentioned by Gibbs & Simpson where students were “…gaining immediate and detailed oral feedback on their understanding as revealed in the essay.” Technology supports assessment in this way by freeing up time for the teacher to provided these tutorials. It would be impossible to keep records of this sort of assessment without the process being tedious and without me seeing the direct result, honestly I would probably drop off. I know their strengths and weaknesses like my own because of the small class sizes but right now in my district there is a real push for having detailed records of formative assessment. I want to try to tap into technology to help make this easier.

In some courses I have been given audio feedback on work. I would like to bring this into my courses as it would help me to keep record of what is being done. My goal would also be to have a visible and strong connection between the standards that I am trying to cover and the assessments that I am assigning. I wonder if having quizzes students could do that would give immediate feedback as to why they were wrong but also that were not scored might also be a good thing for me to try in my context.

Gibbs & Simpson say that the “trick when designing assessment regimes is to generate engagement with learning tasks without generating piles of marking.” As I am working on my Moodle course I am keeping this in mind. I know that the time investment will be challenging at first but that in the end it will pay off. I am also wondering if there isn’t a way that MET students might share their course shells from this program with others, or for teachers in general to for groups and create courses. We could modify them to fit our context but having them started would make techniques like this much less daunting to start in the future.

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

Contrasting the MET Program and Moodle shells

In my school we have small class sizes and frequent absenteeism. Therefore this year I’ve decided to try teaching a blended humanities classroom. In that way students can follow along when they miss school but also are guaranteed a rich experience in the classroom. I wa given course shells on Moodle but no training. I’ve decided to work with Moodle for our second assignment so that I can better work with this platform in the future. Because of this I’d like to analyse the failings in the Moodle course shells by contrasting them with the MET program and using Anderson’s attributes of learning as a guide. That way I will identify areas for improvement in the course shells.

Learner Centred

All of the MET course that I have taken use discussion board introductions “to provide incentive and opportunity for students to share their understandings, their culture, and the unique aspects of themselves” (48). Indeed I learned a lot about where my classmates hail from, and that informations is useful, especially in understanding their unique contributions in the discussion forum. This is in contrast to the Moodle sites I was given for my classes. They simply jump right into content.

Knowledge Centered

I think that the MET program allows students to be brought into the  “discourse and the knowledge structures that undergird discipline thinking (49) though the readings and videos we are asked to explore throughout the course. We also have to take theory courses to broaden our understanding. I have noticed the same readings assigned several times in different classes and I think this is to make sure that we share the same knowledge base. Knowledge centered classrooms “also need [to give] opportunities to reflect upon their own thinking” (49). Most assignments in the MET program give the opportunity to reflect but in the moodle courses this is never provided. I would like to add more room for this.

Assessment Centered

A problem most instructors and designers face it finding what is “usefully – rather than most easily – assessed” (49) In the MET program this is often solves through peer assessment but are high school students aware enough to make this effective? The Moodle shells I have are entirely assessed summatively. There are tests in some of the courses but much of them is project based. This is fine in my situation but I could see how the marking would be difficult for a teacher with larger class sizes. I would also like to add more formative assessments somehow.

Community Centered

I find that with the MET program being community centered is very important. There are always discussion boards to negotiate ideas and give life to the readings. In additions, there are frequent group projects. Depending on students one class might come to a different understanding of the material than another. I find that with the high school moodle courses, while there is a discussion board, the work is primarily individual. Not much of a community is developed. I try to remedy this by exploring the topic together initially with frequent class discussions I would like to try to put at least some of this into the online environment.

Anderson’s categories present a useful way of thinking about online learning and definitely provide some food for thought when it comes to assignment 2 and modifying my current Moodle shells.

 

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_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Let’s Streamline Communication

Poor Trinh! She has let the methods of communication get out of control and now she is feeling overwhelmed. Just as a f2f teacher might find themselves overwhelmed with classroom management issues, Trinh needs to better organize her class so that her workload becomes manageable. Anderson, Archer, and Garrison (1999) refer to this as instructional management. It is also worthy to mention that while Trinh says that she believes in learner-centered classes, by having students immediately contact her with questions and inquiries, she is setting up a very teacher-centered class and thusly overwhelming herself.

She needs to streamline communication so that it becomes manageable for her. Perhaps she should use the blackboard platform to create a help needed discussion board, or one for questions. There students could post questions and answer them for each other, then Trinh could help if needed. This would eliminate repeated questions as well. These discussion boards would go far in creating a community of inquiry.

Another option, though not one I would personally like, would be to set up online office hours, perhaps a once or twice weekly google hangout that students could join. She could have them at different times so that all students could attend despite their time zone. The students already log on for live lectures so this would not be asking too much.

Anderson, Archer, and Garrison state that “student activity is influenced by tutor behavior” (2000). Therefore it would seem that a more visible teacher presence would create a learning environment where students approach topics with more depth and a higher level of critical inquiry. Therefore by increasing the visibility of her contributions via a discussion board or an online conference Trinh would be helping to guide thinking and analysis and indeed learning to a higher level.

In creating these options, she could also specify on the homepage ways to get in touch, with email being explicitly stated as a last resort. The changes I suggest will not only help to Trinh to create a more manageable workload, but will serve her to create the more learner-centered class she desires.
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Retrieved from http://www.anitacrawley.net/Articles/GarrisonAndersonArcher2000.pdf