General reflection
This has been a very difficult assignment for me. Aside from personal and health difficulties, I found this Moodle assignment far outside of my comfort zone, and experienced a lot of ups and downs!
Let’s start with the positive. As a first-time LMS end-user, let alone as a course creator, this involved a very steep learning curve. There are many things that I wish would be better in my course; however, I am pleased to have learned several lessons – or at least have them reinforced through this experience. First of all, it reminded me how hard it is to struggle through a course, and through an assignment. I am generally a person who figures things out fairly quickly, is responsible, punctual, and achieves fairly well. When I was in teachers’ college, I learned that this can be blind spot when it comes to teaching students who struggle. I will never forget a workshop, where we were put into various simulations of disabilities (e.g. glasses that impede vision, loud & sudden noises to distract) to help us to understand what some students struggle with on a daily basis. This experience of struggling to press through a difficult assignment, feeling lost and inadequate, as well as going through health difficulties gave me a healthy new dose of empathy – particularly for adult students who are not comfortable with technology.
Secondly, I learned the importance of learning through community. As I focused and muddled through my content module, I found myself getting more discouraged especially with regards to the GUI and the navigational components. At one point, I decided to check in on the discussion forum, and was amazed to see that others had struggled with the same thing that I was! I had sincerely felt that I was the lone straggler. I followed the suggestions in that discussion thread, “Final Assignment(s)” and specifically found Natasha’s clarification and Tyler Sherwood’s post so helpful. Both the UMass site as well as dabuttonfactory.com, helped me break through, and from there I was able to figure out a few more things. I had allowed myself to become isolated and in doing so, did two things: made myself think I was alone in my confusion, believing I was lacking somehow, and secondly I had inadvertently cut myself off from the lessons of other fellow travellers. A painful lesson, but one that I will carry with me to the next ETEC course to be sure.
Now, for the negative – I have had to learn other software applications before, even ones that are quite involved, such as professional photo editing software and spreadsheet software, though, so I did not expect to have such difficulty. I found Moodle to not be very intuitive and also cumbersome. There were several points where I wanted to quit, especially at one point when I started to view others’ final products… extremely discouraging. As I said, though, thank goodness for the learning community of this class. Thankfully, the Moodle docs page helped a lot. It was hard to be patient and learn step-by-step, detail-by-detail, to get to a point where I felt somewhat comfortable navigating Moodle rather than feeling like I was blindly following directions, clicking and hoping that something would materialize. Incidentally, when I spoke with the technology director of my school about Moodle (or rather, begged him for assistance), he informed me that the school opted not to go with free Moodle but another LMS due to the fact that the potential cost of supporting faculty for Moodle instruction and trouble-shooting along with anticipated frustration and resistance from faculty would be major issues. In the end, I am happy to have learned what I did – but as applied LMS in general. I am not a fan of Moodle and frankly hope to never have to use it again. I see the potential of Moodle for instructors that have the time and/or patience to create courses, or enjoy the flexibility and potential – or perhaps little or no choice given the choice of their institution, however, I think that I would much prefer using my time and energy with a more intuitive (probably proprietary) LMS that allows me to focus more on actual course content, than navigating the LMS, agreeing with Bates and Poole (2003), that “it is important that students and teachers not spend a great deal of time on learning how to use educational technologies or on making the technologies work.”
Course site details
All of the activities take into consideration that this course is intended for those that are interested in volunteering, but cannot commit to a f2f course. Thus, all of the activities are asynchronous, allowing students to contribute, learn, and respond in their own time.
I tend to like a clean look to everything I do (I love how clean and simple the Google search page is!), so that is part of why I chose the appearance theme. I added buttons that were colour coded: a light grey for the course main page, and light salmon for students to see the supporting activity buttons. Though I am an advanced amateur photographer, the graphic design aspect of this course was a challenge for me, and I think learning some guiding principles specifically as it relates to GUI would have been beneficial for a novice like me.
Since this is a volunteer course for adults, the purpose of the assessment is not to create a grade, but for students to learn more about themselves, and reflect on how the course content applies to them specifically in determining their gifts, talents, passions, and personal style in order to maximize their volunteering potential. In line with this, the quiz was intended to review content (rather than to “grade” the student), and the other activities are largely reflective or discussion-oriented in nature. I also tried to focus on activities that are “community-centred” (Anderson 2008a), “to show how members of a learning community both support and challenge each other, leading to effective and relevant knowledge construction… having a shared sense of belonging, trust, expectation of learning, and commitment to participate in and contribute to the community.” The nature of volunteering, and especially in the context of the course is volunteering in community, thus a focus on the community created in the course as well as the in-person community.
I would have also loved to add more video, especially of some guest volunteers to tell their stories. I would have also liked to include more readings. Since the current course in its face-to-face (f2f) format relies a lot on the facilitator in live, real-time discussions, the on-line course would have to be supplemented in other ways to give the richer feeling of peoples’ stories that is intended. I think that more videos and readings of testimonials would accomplish this.
In general, although I am comfortable with being myself and having a presence in small groups, I find more difficulty with large groups, and I have learned through this exercise that I feel somewhat the same in an online environment. Part of this is the fact that I need to expose myself more as the instructor to be inviting and to create a “teaching presence” (Anderson). However, depending on the participants online, I have no way of “drawing out” the course participants (especially because this is a voluntary non-credit course) to reveal themselves. Thus, it puts me as the instructor in a somewhat awkward position. Overall, though, the success of the course (and perhaps of any course) is so that there is interaction between the instructor and students, and so in order to make myself more accessible, I posted by personal digital story (“Journey of a life-long volunteer”) as well as my photo, and professional social media coordinates to take the first step in initiating dialogue and a learning relationship. This is how I tried to facilitate what Anderson (2008a) describes in his section on “learner-centred” lens: “experienced online learning teachers must make time at the commencement of their learning interactions to provide intensive and opportunity for students to share their understandings, their culture, and the unique aspects of themselves.” (p.48) Anderson (2008b) also describes a “social presence” as it relates to “establishing a supportive environment such that students feel the necessary degree of comfort and safety to express their ideas in a collaborative context, and to present themselves as real and functional human beings.”(p.344). In this course, this level of comfort is only possible with someone taking the first step in setting an example and precedence, and of course this is the instructor, me.
As per the instructions, certain activities were set up as a selective release. In the completion of the entire course, I would set up all steps (except the final Orientation as selective release, conditional on completion of the previous module/activity/reading. This helps to keep students’ accountable, and in this case, from merely browsing and staying focused on the current lesson in order of intended progress.
Finally, the “Overview” at the end of my course would be an in-person session. This is possible of course, only for course participants in Ottawa, but it accomplishes a combination or balance of maximizing flexibility as well as facilitating social and collaborative learning activities. (Anderson 2000b, p. 349)
Overall
Overall, I feel like the lessons (technological and pedagogical) were hard-fought, but could have been somewhat easier if I had been more engaged in the community, and if perhaps there was step-by-step guidance in the area of the web design, GUI, navigation, etc… for those of us that are completely new to LMS platforms. I think it would have also been interesting to learn how instructors create courses on BlackBoard Learn, since it is what we are on the student-end of for this course.
References
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
Anderson, T. (2008b). Teaching in an online learning context. In Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F.Theory and practice of online learning. Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf
Bates, A.W. and Poole, G. (2003) Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. New York: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated.