For the purposes of the second half of this assignment, I chose to focus on the Elections lesson/sub-unit of the larger Government unit of the course.

While this lesson is in the middle of the larger government unit, I selected it as it had the greatest opportunity for interactivity in an online setting. In my current course design, other topics are largely teacher-centered or individual learner centred. For an in-person course, this lesson would take 1-2 classes, for the purposes of this online lesson, I have stretched the lesson/unit out to a one-week time frame to facilitate deeper discussions and to accommodate the semi-asynchronous nature of the original design of the course.

Being enrolled in the Inclusive Makerspace Summer Institute as well this semester, I wanted to bring in as many accessibility and inclusivity features as I could. It wasn’t as challenging as I initially thought because many of the considerations for inclusivity/accessibility also fall under the Universal Design for Learning framework (Tobin, 2014). The lack of a built-in screen reader functionality in Moodle is a serious shortfall for an LMS and doesn’t align with inclusivity and accessibility, nor the elements of UDL (Tobin, 2014). To compensate for this, I included an audio recording of the text on the screen for those who choose to use it. I recorded my own voice for the audio, rather than using a computer-generated voice to maximize the metacognitive benefits of the voice principle (Denvers et al., 2018, p.14).

It was very striking to me the need to be very deliberate in the design and content for the online course. For an in-person course, one can adjust on-the-fly based on verbal and non-verbal cues of the students – something that while technically possible is much slower and problematic to identify in an online course. Therefore, as the instructor/designer anticipating issues ahead of time needs to be much more intentional.

One of the key elements of the design was to keep the segments of the lesson/unit short so that students could tackle as much or as little of the unit as they had the time, capability and capacity for (Denvers et al., 2018, p. 13; Tobin, 2014, p. 18). It was also presented in a scaffolded, step-by-step, way with self-checks included along the way (Tobin, 2014, p.18).

Since this is part of a larger whole, it was important to include the key vocabulary that would be learned in earlier lessons/units so that the learner/student has the best chance of understanding and applying the concepts of the unit. This preloading of the vocabulary also serves as a form of pre-training and review, if I was to flesh out the larger whole (Denvers et al., 2018, p. 13).

One struggle for me was determining how much detail to provide. For my in-person version of this lesson/unit the PowerPoint, which is the basis of this lesson, contains much less detail and is supplemented with verbal topical examples and class discussions. When setting up this course, the temptation was to go into great detail about each of the topics and provide numerous resources for additional information – something that would likely have caused many students to feel overwhelmed and shut down. It was a challenge to find a balance between not providing enough information for students to understand the material and providing, hopefully, just enough, though the only way to truly know would be to run the course and use student performance and feedback as a gauge (Tobin, 2014, p.21). Additionally, I wanted to provide a few carefully selected resources for students to support their learning, and they could then go further on their own, using the internet to its informational advantage.

A key consideration in the selection of my media was the reliability of the sources and the accessibility of the information to my target audience, grade 10 students. There is a great deal of misinformation and opinions presented as facts online, especially relating to government and politics. As a Social Studies teacher I feel it is very important when teaching government and politics to be as impartial as possible and allow students to develop their own opinions and beliefs, not imprint mine on them. As such, most of the videos that I embedded came directly from Elections Canada (n.d.) and CIVIX (n.d.), an organization designed to support the teaching of democracy and government in Canada. It was also important that the media I selected was engaging while not distracting to the viewer/student and was not simply an audio component to text on screen or a talking head video (Denvers et al., 2018, pp. 12-13). It was also important to make sure that captions were available for the videos, and I made sure the video I created had open captions so that viewers didn’t need to select themselves.

The Plotagon video I created was based on the personalization model of keeping the information presented in conversational way (Denvers et al., 2018, p. 14). The narrative form of the information in the video is also ties in with the First Peoples Principles of Learning that “learning is embedded in … story” (n.d.). My dislike of hearing my own recorded voice and using Plotagon’s computer generated voices instead goes against the voice principle, but the characters do conform to the embodiment principle (Denvers et al., 2018, p. 14).

I focussed on formative assessment and feedback within this lesson/unit through the use of ungraded extension questions between the sections of content, a form of low stakes/no stakes assessment, which provide students with feedback, along with the ungraded H5P review activity at the end of the material (Denvers et al., 2018, pp. 14-15). The discussion forums throughout serve both as a means of peer assessment as well as providing students with the ability to assess their own understanding based on the responses of their peers (Anderson, 2008a). These provide students with feedback before they tackle the summative tasks of the newspaper article responses and final discussion. The results of the embedded questions within the Moodle lesson and H5P review activity serve as checkpoints to determine student’s engagement letting me know who has and hasn’t engaged with the material and if they were struggling with concepts. The discussion forums are also an easy way to check student engagement and build community through student-student interaction and communication (Anderson, 2008a). The Fair Voting article responses and corresponding discussion topic serve as the summative assessment tasks for the unit.

This second part of this assignment was a learning activity for me, largely to do with Moodle. I learned how to accomplish some of the tasks I thought we not possible in completing Part 1, like formatting. I was still frustrated by the limitations of the program when it comes to embedding items and the restrictions of various activities, like the question pages and the alignment of videos on the page.

Having taught the course many times before I didn’t learn anything new about the material, however the need to establish teaching presence while not being in the room was certainly a learning experience as was finding ways for the material to stand on its own, something that is not required of me in the classroom – I can always take a few minutes to explain, elaborate or reteach material and activities (Anderson, 2008a).

Other than the submission of the Fair Voting article assignment there is no required student-teacher communication, though they have been reminded that I am available for guidance – and hopefully by this point in the larger course a community of learning will have been built which brings with it a level of trust with their classmates and me so they are comfortable in their sharing to the group and in reaching out to me (Anderson, 2008b).

While the Moodle lesson is designed as a linear activity, the inclusion of the menu on the side provides for a level of choice for students as to the order they access the material and activities (Denvers et al., 2018). I did not include the Moodle lesson questions in the menu as I wanted students to complete them in sequence after the appropriate material.

After completing this assignment, I can certainly appreciate more the need for a team to develop effective online courses at the post-secondary level. Doing this as a lone wolf, the process was very tedious and at times overwhelming, even for a single unit of learning, let alone a whole course, if one were not able to carry the course forward to the next year, or if someone had multiple courses to construct, it would be almost impossible to generate this level of interactivity and multimedia content for every topic and unit, especially while also teaching and assessing (Anderson, 2008b; Tobin, 2014).

While I won’t be teaching this online course, many of the resources that I gathered for this course will definitely be incorporated into my in-person classes.

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

Canada’s Election Process | Elections Canada’s Civic Education. (n.d.). Elections Canada. Retrieved July 22, 2023, from https://electionsanddemocracy.ca/canadas-elections/canadas-election-processDevers, J. C., Devers, E. E., & Oke, L. D. (2018). Encouraging metacognition in digital learning environments. In D. Ifenthaler (Ed.), Digital workplace learning: Bridging formal and informal learning with digital technologies (pp. 9-22). Springer International Publishing AG. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-46215-8

Home – CIVIX Canada. (n.d.). CIVIX. Retrieved July 22, 2023, from https://civix.ca/home/

First Peoples Principles of Learning. (n.d.). First Nations Education Steering Committee (FNESC). Retrieved July 22, 2023, from https://www.fnesc.ca/first-peoples-principles-of-learning/

Tobin, T. J. (2014). Increase online student retention with universal design for learning. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education 15(3), 13-24. http://commons.hostos.cuny.edu/online/wp-content/uploads/sites/68/2015/09/INCREASE-MforsytONLINE-STUDENT-RETENTION-WITH-UNIVERSAL-DESIGN-FOR-LEARNING.pdf