ETEC 565a Final Reflection

Flight Path

Interesting! Looking back I started my Flight Path by identifying feeling like an imposter in my role as Educational Technology Coordinator at Douglas College. While it has not completely gone, it is drastically reduced. The single biggest lesson for me has been that I can learn a range of applications – I just need to carve out the time and give myself an interesting project to work through to really get a good understanding of how a technology works and its limitations.

In terms of some of the goals for the LMS and digital stories, I felt these were largely met. I have an understanding of the workflow involved in creating the learning module, a sense of the work load involved in participating in discussions (although I am know I won’t truly appreciate having to assign a grade to discussions until I do that myself), and have experienced a range of assignments in 565a and 512 that support a constructivist learning philosophy that I can adapt for the MSTE 5120 course I am working on. The one aspect of social media assignment that I had hoped to cover in this course was to investigate what legal obligations I have with regards to requiring students to use a social media tool that requires the students to provide their names and personal information to a third party and that remains to be done..

Toolkit

LMS: Looking back at some of my blog posts, I had forgotten some of the problems I had encountered along the way. For example, the Chrome browser doesn’t support the WYSIWG editor, so I was completely lost as to how I was supposed to enter text until I found a screen capture at Moodle.org and realized what was going on.

I also had no idea prior to having to create the quiz how many different uses it could serve beyond automatically grading multiple choice questions. The two that come to mind are as a data collection tool and as an ungraded way to communicate with the instructor. One of the suggestions from a classmate was to use a quiz to allow students to privately express their concerns at the start of the course rather than trying to build this into an introductory discussion.

The workflow involved in creating the learning modules also made me more sympathetic when the due dates in a course don’t match – I now realize what would be involved to “simply change the date” if it is portion that was created in html. I also learned the importance of creating a master list of all the assignment and activity names, so that they all matched and didn’t confuse students by using synonyms to describe the same activity.

HTML authoring: Since I hadn’t done any work in html, I spent some time with the general tutorials and hand coded a short page to get things started. I then followed a series of NVu tutorials on YouTube and created a simple instructor introduction using tables and included a photo. When I uploaded this to Moodle, the photo wasn’t properly linked and I was also having problems getting NVu to change fonts (Joesph Turco may have pinpointed the problem, apparently the html file has to be saved prior to moving the photos into the images folder). At that point I decided to start over with Dreamweaver (via a 30 day free trial), knowing that there were local people I could ask for help if I ran into problems. The Lynda.com tutorials got me started, although I decided that I would do the pages without CSS and it worked well for the relatively small amount I did, but I plan to come back and spend more time learning to use Dreamweaver now that I have a basic idea of what I would like to be able to do.

Synchronous Communications Tools: I appreciated having the Wimba session recorded! I wasn’t able to attend and appreciated being able to review the portion from 50:30 to 1:03:00 on uploading files into Moodle repeatedly.

I used Elluminate to record the first draft of my digital story and the experience taught me the difference between have a general understanding of what a application should be able to do and the actual experience on the ground. For example, using application sharing with Journal disabled the mic and when the final story was recorded, it couldn’t be embedded and students would have to go through a login page. After several rounds of questions to Elluminate support (think Keystone Kops), it has become clear that I will have to use the Publish module and convert the file to a video format. I realize creating recordings isn’t the products core function but it was not nearly as smooth a process as I had hoped.

I offered to set up Elluminate (or use Wimba) sessions for my groups in both 512 and 565a, but in both cases the groups preferred chat and using a Google document to have the sessions. I think audio would have been much faster than chat, but I suspect that using chat is part of the culture of MET and that people may have feared that the time to get the session set up and working would have used a significant portion of the hour allotted to the meeting.

Blogs: I appreciated the ability to look back at the comments I had posted during the term as it reminded me of some of the obstacles and achievements along the way – I used it as a way to vent and report successes. I also decided to use WordPress to create a blog to assist in developing the technology plan at Douglas College. That experience was more involved, as I had to register the domain name, create the graphics for the top of the page, embed multiple file formats, link posts to pages and moderate comments. I have been struck by the relative ease of using the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress vs the one in Moodle. My own feeling is that Moodle is still a challenge for an average faculty member to design a good looking site and perhaps over time the editor in Moodle will evolve and make it easier.

Wikis: Using the wiki in 565a was interesting. I was surprised that some of my classmates had problems had problems with formatting and it yet again reinforces the Ease of use criteria that Bates and Poole described.[i] The contrast for me was with using a Google doc for collaboration on group projects. Since it leverages peoples experience with word processing, there were no problems with formatting and the convention of each person writing in a different colour allowed us to see each person’s contribution. It also meant there were no issues with version control as we were all working on the most current document.

565a Experience

Both my BSc and PhD are in chemistry and I had limited background in education. I completed a graduate course at the University of Victoria “Teaching and Learning in Higher Education” and trained as a facilitator and ran Instructional Skills Workshops all of which had been face to face. Thus, it has been interesting to take two online courses and see how they are structured. I would see 565a supporting constructivist principles both in the use of narratives for discussion and in the assigned projects: using complex and authentic problems to provide motivation to learn the requisite skills, providing for ownership of learning, critical thinking, problem solving and reflexivity.[ii] Also, the use of criteria-based assessment[iii] meant that I felt the tasks were challenging but achievable, provided I invested the time to work on them.

For me three readings stand out in the course. The most startling was “Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning”. I teach undergraduate chemistry where high stakes final exams have been the norm at all the universities and colleges I have either studied or taught at, so the statement “coursework marks are a better predictor of long term learning of course content than are final exams” is surprising as were some of the ways assessment and feedback can be provided to students.[iv] I feel I need to go to the sources cited in the article to be able to have a solid foundation from which to advocate for change in my discipline.

The second area is the chapter from Effective Teaching with Technology dealing with the SECTIONS model for selecting technology.[v] It is good to have a framework for making a decision, or justifying one after the fact. And the repeated use of this framework helped solidify it for me.

And third, are the chapters from the Theory and Practice of Online Learning in which Anderson argues that high quality learning can occur if there is interaction between the learner and at least one of the content, the instructor or the other learners.[vi] In 565a, I felt that all three were present and that the instructor created a social presence in the course by interjecting into discussion (with comments like “Hiya”, “Hold that thought”, “Help her out folks”) without stifling the flow of the discussion.[vii] As a learner it was reassuring to know that the instructor was present and would presumably intervene if things got off track. In contrast, in 512, the instructor posted 7 times to the discussion forum, of which 5 were housekeeping items and the other two I found only when I searched for them. It does go to support Anderson’s argument that instructor-student interaction is not essential to learning, although as a student I did not trust that the instructor was present and I will try to find my own way to create a safe environment in my courses.

Next Steps

Prior to this semester my practice has been to participate in ETUG and Educause conferences and email lists, and follow the Spark, Search Engine and New York Times Tech Talk podcasts.

I now have several items on my reading list, the remaining chapters from Theory and Practice of Online Learning and the references cited in Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning.

What I have taken from this experience is the need to pursue projects to make sure I fully understand an application. The projects currently on my to do list include: transferring my content from Moodle to Blackboard 9.1 and continue course development, use the Elluminate Publish module to convert my digital story into a file format that I can house in iTunes (when it is up and running), use CSS in Dreamweaver and to sort out for myself what the requirements are around the protection of privacy for use of social media with students. I am also pondering setting up a “Technology Challenge” for faculty in the summer to get them to try social media and document it either on their own blog or a blog for the project.

I have no doubt there will be more to do by the time the items on this list get finished.

---

[i] Bates, A.W., Poole, G.; Effective Teaching With Technology in Higher Education. 2003, Wiley. Pg 87-92.

[ii] Driscoll. M.P. (2005). Psychology of Learning for Instruction (pp. 384-407; Ch. 11 – Constructivism). Toronto, ON: Pearson.

[iii] As described in the UBC course ETEC 565a Learning Technologies Selection: Design and Application, Module 3, Unit 8.

[iv] Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005).  “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online 11 March 2009 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

[v] Bates, A.W., Poole, G.; Effective Teaching With Technology in Higher Education. 2003, Wiley. Pg 75-108.

[vi] Anderson, T. (2008). Toward a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.) Theory and Practice of Online Learning, Chapter 2 (pp. 66).  Available online at: http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008_Anderson-Online_Learning.pdf

[vii] Anderson, T. (2008). Toward a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.) Theory and Practice of Online Learning, Chapter 14 (pp. 343-365).  Available online at: http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008_Anderson-Online_Learning.pdf