Flight Path
I teach chemistry at Douglas College and all my experience up to this point both as a student and teacher has been face to face. I am also Educational Technology Coordinator and suffer from “imposter syndrome” since the College is trying to move more into hybrid and online learning. My goal then is to both have the experience of being an online student and getting hands on experience with some of the tools available at the College.
For the LMS assignment, I am most interested in the course layout, as opposed to integrating more advanced tools. My plan is to try to write modules for a hybrid course I anticipate teaching in chemistry and physics teaching. For me the challenge is how to set up a coherent set of activities over the two weeks students will have between coming to campus for lab activities and then translating that to the course design in the LMS. I haven’t used Moodle, so I will need to spend time to familiarize myself with the functionality it provides and I haven’t had use HTML beyond understanding some basics to fix web pages, so either learning to enter it manually or using an application that facilitates writing HTML will require time and effort.
I don’t currently use social media because they are not provided by the institution and the costs for me to use them have been a barrier.[1] I realize that many are freely available, but before I would ask or require my students to use them, I feel I have to investigate the terms of use, the protection of privacy requirements we are obliged to meet, any copyright issues and since the applications are not supported by my institution I would be required to provide technical support for students. Thus, my goal for 565a may be to investigate these issues and thereby lower the amount of time I will need subsequently to spend investigating these issues.
In terms of assessment, I have used Pearson’s Mastering Chemistry online homework for my courses. It is far more advanced than anything I could imagine building and I was pleased with how students used it. It provided hints to help the students work though problems and tracked the considerable amount of time students spent on their homework – I found it a good fit with the principles outlined in Technology as Lever.[2] What remains unclear to me is how to evaluate more qualitative contributions, ie online discussion postings, in a way that doesn’t overload the instructor with reading every post and yet is transparent to the students.
I am excited by the digital storytelling. I see the potential to incorporate short lessons into the chemistry and physics teaching course (these would be a screen capture movie as a springboard for discussion). In terms of students[3] the course is targeting practicing teachers in the lower mainland and we know that 99% of our current students have a computer and high speed Internet access[4] and I would expect it to be the same for these students. Thus, one could expect students to access media rich content from home. The three tools I could potentially use to create these: Mediasite, Elluminate or Camtasia. Costs rule out Mediasite, since I would have to request setup of the Mediasite recorder as well as technician time to operate the camera. This is a high cost for a small course that will run every second year. Ease of use may then be the deciding factor. I believe that recordings from either application can be streamed from the College’s media server (I will need to investigate this further) and be equally accessible to students. However, Camtasia is currently only installed on a few computers in our media editing rooms while I can use Elluminate from my own computer so the ease of use for Elluminate may favour it.
My sense of my situation is having an embarrassment of riches – there are numerous tools I would love to fully explore in ETEC 565a; however, focusing my time and energy on a few may be the key to successfully completing the course.
[1] Bates, A.W., Poole, G.; Effective Teaching With Technology in Higher Education. 2003, Wiley. Pg 95.
[2] Chickering, A.W. & Ehrmann, S.C. (1996). Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 4-5. Accessed Sept 8, 2010.
[3] Bates, A.W., Poole, G.; Effective Teaching With Technology in Higher Education. 2003, Wiley. Pg79.
[4] Douglas College Student Profile and Perceptions Survey 2008, http://www.douglas.bc.ca/__shared/assets/Stu_Profile_Srv_2008_Details55554.pdf, accessed Sept. 16, 2010.