For the purposes of this assignment, I chose to create an online Social Studies 10, a course that I am familiar with. As the name suggests this is a high school course required for graduation in British Columbia and is intended for students in grade 10, or later grades needing to complete the course to graduate. The course is designed to be a combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning to allow students some freedom in the pacing, while still maintaining teacher presence through the need for weekly synchronous virtual meetings and activities intended to also promote the development of community through fostering student-student and student-teacher interactions leading to social presence within the course (Anderson, 2008b).

Social Studies 10 (SS10) is a course that I have taught many times in the past I felt that I knew it well enough that I could focus my efforts on creating the online course, and its component parts rather than creating a course from scratch. I also chose SS10 because my current course is very teacher centred and it is time to shift the focus to being more learner or learning centred (Anderson, 2008a) even though I am not planning on teaching a fully online course anytime in the near future, and hopefully world events don’t make that decision for me, I plan to take the activities and resources I build for this online course and incorporate them in my face-to-face classroom.

I elected not to design a course for independent study, which would give students the complete freedom of self-pacing, since many high school students at that age struggle with staying on top of deadlines (Anderson, 2008a). In my role as a Teacher-Librarian I have many students at the end of the school year coming to me in a panic as they are enrolled in self-paced independent study courses and need to have exams invigilated/supervised by teachers as the course was ending soon and they had yet to write any of the exams. Independent study may be suitable for senior grades in high school, and certainly in post-secondary education, but they can be very problematic for many younger students.

As I worked through the process of transforming my face-to-face course to an online course one of the biggest considerations was assessment. In a face-to-face course there is always the fallback of having a in-person quiz or test, and while that usually doesn’t give the most accurate representation of a student’s ability and usually only touches on lower-level thinking, they are relatively easy to generate and administer (Derek Bok Centre, Harvard University, 2013). Online testing can be problematic and often requires the use of special programs to try and ensure academic honesty, for this reason I made the decision to move away from quizzes and tests as summative forms of assessment, though I will use self-making quizzes as formative assessment, and implement summative assignments – in the case of my opening unit, Government, a Concept Map. I also chose to use the Community of Inquiry model and will use small and large group discussions and activities for assessing students throughout the course (Anderson, 2008a).

I chose to use Moodle as my Learning Management Suite (LMS) for several reasons. Google Classroom, which may have been easier to learn and use, offered more support for synchronous communications, however the fact that the servers are located outside of Canada means that it does not comply with Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) regulations here in BC (Government of British Columbia, 2023). Canvas, which I have become familiar with through the MET program, I still find clunky at times and again lacks the synchronous communications capabilities of other platforms. My preference would have been the use of Microsoft Teams, as I am familiar with it having used it for the last 3 years and it supports synchronous communication for small and large groups, was not suitable as it did not easily allow users outside of the school district to have viewing and editing permissions – though possible, which I actually think is benefit for security and privacy under the SECTIONS model (Bates, 2014). All of these left Moodle, which has been used by my school district in the past for distance/online learning. Moodle has a good variety of included activity types and the ability to embed materials and tools from outside the platform while being straightforward for students to use. However, I found it frustrating to use for several reasons principally the limited ability to format text within the LMS, especially indentation and fonts sizing. Attempting to format outside of the program and paste in resulted in the preferred formatting being lost. It is also cumbersome to link various pages within the course (no option to select other pages when generating links), though the auto-linking of resources and activities within Moodle was handy at times – though I would have preferred it to display in the editing view, and not only in the published view. The lack of display/thematic options was disappointing as I like to personalize my courses and highlight important information through themes which was not possible, though may be the UBC shell as other tutorials I used described the option of changing the course theme.  Thought, the lack of selectable themes and the resulting straightforward appearance may actually be a benefit for some users making more accessible. I would also need to find an outside resource to facilitate synchronous sessions, which is another level of complexity for myself and my students and could cause issues (Osterweil et al., 2015).

References:

Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning (pp. 45-74). Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Anderson, T. (2008b). Teaching in an online learning context. In Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and practice of online learning (pp. 343-365). Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In Teaching in digital age. https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/

Derek Bok Centre, Harvard University. (2013, November 19). Assessment: The Silent Killer of Learning / Eric Mazur [Dudley Herschbach Teacher/Scientist Lecture] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBzn9RAJG6Q

Government of British Columbia. (2013, May 31). Table of Contents – Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96165_00

Osterweil, S., Shah, P., Allen, S., Groff, J., & Sai Kodidala, P., & Schoenfeld, I. (2015). Summary report: A framework for evaluating appropriateness of educational technology use in global development programs. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts & The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/115340/Summary%20Report_A%20Framework%20for%20Evaluating%20Appropriateness%20of%20Educational%20Technology%20Use%20in%20Global%20Development%20Programs.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y