Unit of Learning Reflection
My designed learning unit is based on real, personal needs in my teaching context. A key consideration in the design is the school’s controversial decision to discontinue Triple Award (TA) Chemistry, opting only to offer Double Award (DA) Science. Using a hybrid learning system allows students who wish to pursue TA that opportunity without compromising the quality of education for DA students. The trade-offs are that TA students need to spend more time learning off timetable and the instructor needs more planning and organization for the logistics of additional and possible different experiments taking place in the classroom simultaneously and managing students with varying progress throughout the course.
At the same time, I try to strike a balance between helping students attain content knowledge, transferable skills, and inspiring joy in learning chemistry, all under the very real constraints of preparing students for the content-heavy high-stakes IGCSE exam and the limited face-to-face instructional time. The learning experience enhances teaching and learning by technology augmentation under the SAMR model (Puentedura, 2010), while working within the parameters set by the limits of a physical school and a standardized curriculum.
In my evaluation of LMSs in Assignment 1, Google Classroom (GC) was the best choice for my context because it is free, simple to use, and familiar to students and teachers. The ease of content editing and collaboration between teachers are highly useful features to reduce workload of individual teachers while allowing multiple perspectives when designing and modifying the course. GC is an even clearer winner when considering that our school develops its own LMS (mainly for administrative tasks) and therefore would not pay for another platform.
The syllabus is designed following the community of inquiry framework described by Anderson (2008a). Teacher presence is established by designing and organizing learning activities, sequencing, and providing instructions to model expectations. In particular, the designed contents include multiple pathways for students to pursue personalized learning and various activities to assess the same learning outcomes.
The final assessment is a mock exam and therefore only contributes to the school grade, not the actual IGCSE grade. The goal is to create an assessment that will accurately predict achievement on the actual exam while also incorporating various methods of assessment and question types to motivate students to learn chemistry skills outside of test-taking. The affordances of using a digital assessment including the ease of creating a multidimensional assessment that can assess not just the lowest hierarchies of Bloom’s taxonomy (Mazur, 2013). An online assessment affords self-grading for simple questions to save grading time for teachers and the inclusion of multimedia for more complex questions. In an ideal setting where there is no standardized test, there would be more opportunity to design questions that better reflect real-life problem solving, rather than teaching to prescribed syllabus statements. The result is a compromise between objective and quantitative assessment of lower orders and more subjective higher order questions that are more time-intensive to grade.
References
Anderson, T. (2008a). Teaching in an online learning context. In Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and practice of online learning (pp. 343-365). Athabasca University.
Puentedura, R. (2010). The journey through the SAMR model. IPad Educators: Sharing Best Practice in the use of Mobile Technology.
Topa Ciftci, G., Dogan, M. E., & Unal, B. (2023). The WhatsApp application use as a support service in distance education: A case analysis. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 24 (2), 202-216.
Eric Mazur. (2013). Assessment: The Silent Killer of Learning / Eric Mazur [Dudley Herschbach Teacher/Scientist Lecture] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBzn9RAJG6Q