Here is the link to my Moodle course for Simple Machines for Science 5.

You can navigate to the Introductory Module by clicking on the navigation menu or by scrolling down and clicking on the first page that says START HERE. The quiz can be found below that in Module #2.

Assignment #2 Reflection

This assignment took a lot of time for me as I have not taught the content beforehand, though I intend to teach it in the upcoming school year. I spent my first weeks of working on this assignment to research, build, and sequence the unit outline. My aim was to make it flexible for both an online course and a blended classroom so that I could use it later. Additionally, I had no prior Moodle experience so I spent an abundant amount of time learning about the Moodle environment and designing the layout to be more streamlined than some of the example courses that I explored. There were both rewarding and frustrating experiences in that process. My final submission shows the unit acting as a fully online course including an introductory and quiz for Grade 5 science students. My reflection below outlines several components of my experience in creating and designing it.

 

Unit & Overall Assessment Development

The first and most important aspect of this assignment was to develop a pedagogically-sound and age-appropriate unit of study. I began my research for my course content with some aspects of ETEC 565A literature in mind, particularly:

• meeting the needs of online learners through best pedagogical practice (Anderson, 2008),
• providing a motivating learning environment through the use of engaging technologies (Ciampa, 2013),
• progressive assessments that scaffold through the course (Bates, 2014), and
• detailed and clear communication about course requirements with a focus on cognitive, social, and teaching presence (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 1999).

With these components in mind, I started by developing some focus questions and learning outcomes for the course. I pulled several of these from the BC Science 5 Curriculum (2015), but I also added in a focus for simple machines in the students’ immediate environments and an overall understanding of simple machines and why they are pertinent in our lives. Later, these questions highly informed the development of the course schedule of activities. General course outlining, although difficult in moments, helped me to imagine the shape of the course, solidified the standards that I wished for students to achieve, and actually informed almost everything that I built thereafter. It made me glad that these aspects of the course development came into fruition first because I wasn’t very familiar with the content itself and needed a refresher on the physics of simple machines for late elementary students!

As the schedule and course began to develop further, I endeavoured to meet further considerations in the research such as small group discussion opportunities for students (Garrison et al., 1999) and varied assessment practices (Bates, 2014). This had a ripple effect across the content that I had already developed and I had to make sure I was making appropriate changes in each spot where one may find similar information. I worked hard to leave little room for inconsistencies across the course but it was difficult to do this; I needed to make sure information was detailed and clear, but some information needed to be repeated across a few sections within the course.

Through my unit research I discovered several interactive online resources, which made me really excited. I was aiming to have the course be both engaging and enriching to 10 year-olds, so I leaned more toward hands-on activities, games, and challenges over static text and images. As I developed the unit, it felt natural to create a progressive set of assessments where students could have interactive experiences and build their own simple machines. After reading Bates’ (2014) Assessment Appendix, I felt a need to slightly tweak the balance of interactivities, quizzes, and project-based learning present throughout the general course content. I opted not to include a paper or requirement for large written bodies of work (such as essays) because they are not necessarily fitting for the subject area or grade level; I felt that there are other means that can demonstrate young students’ knowledge of physics and simple machines better than the written word. Moreover, the students would be required to write posts and replies for weekly discussions. Therefore, major assignments in the course are inclusive of visual or audio-visual media with physical hands-on activities that may be more accessible and engaging to 10 year-old students.

 

Course Design

I took a number of steps to create a streamlined and attractive course design, developing a number of headers, subheaders, and graphic buttons through the use of Moodle and an online designing tool called Canva. Once I began to get a feel for how I could design the content layout in Moodle, I created a colour palette and selected fonts to make sure that these elements were consistent across the course.

However, it proved that Moodle can be a challenging environment to format graphics in. Despite having a WYSIWYG HTML editor (What You See Is What You Get), what you see wasn’t always what you got. As an example, sometimes <p> spaces would appear in the course even though I hadn’t entered them; it made my work look too spaced out and awkward. I altered and discarded some of the design components I had created because of these ongoing issues. Instead, I opted to use formatted tables to control spacing problems. Of course, this was time consuming, but now the layout and formatting is much more friendly to review.

Coates, James, & Baldwin (2005) discuss the importance of ease of use and course navigation from the perspective of different users of an LMS. After perusing several example courses, I really disliked that there were no navigation options at the bottoms of pages, especially on pages with large amounts of content; they felt clunky and difficult to use. As a remedy, I created button icons that matched my theme and hyperlinked them to advance or go back to pages in the order that they appear listed on the Moodle course home page.

It should be noted that watching tutorials on YouTube didn’t always help to fix the numerous problematic formatting situations I encountered. The version of Moodle available to us through UBC was very inconsistent with the versions featured in the videos, both new and old. I often watched a tutorial then clicked my way around to figure out the components on my own, but I think that the overall look and feel of my course ended up being all right in the end.

 

Quiz Development

Developing the quiz was challenging for multiple reasons. First, I hadn’t yet developed the specific content for the modules that the quiz was assessing so I needed to know what would be included. Second, because I’m not very refreshed with the specifics of the content, I had to do a little studying myself! Since my course assessment outline included two quizzes, I settled on creating the first quiz, the Simple Machines Quick Quiz which falls around the midpoint of the course. This quiz is intended to be a formative assessment for both students and myself. It is worth only 5% of students’ final grade for this reason.

As I developed questions for the quiz, I had to dive back into the content schedule overview that I had developed far earlier in the assignment process. I carefully looked over which foundational vocabulary, concepts, and simple machines would be included in what we’d cover so far by the point the assessment was to be delivered to students. I aimed to strike a balance in students defining terms and used some of the multiple choice questions and all of the “essay” questions to get students to critically apply that information. One of the major foci in the course is to get students identifying how simple machines can ease real-life work in their own environments, so some of the questions naturally flowed with that focus.

In order to learn about the quiz feature of Moodle, I spent some time viewing tutorials on YouTube, and of course, relied on some of the questions and answers in our ETEC 565A discussion forums in order to help me understand the affordances and constraints of Moodle quizzes. I experienced some cognitive dissonance with the development of grade boundary feedback: providing sweeping feedback doesn’t necessarily address specific problems in student understanding and learning (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005). To remedy this, I opted to use these scores predominantly as a piece of formative assessment, helping me to identify which students I would need to further support via synchronous correspondence. For students who achieved lower scores, the feedback reads that I would be video conferencing directly with those groups to help them better understand the foundational content we’d have covered so far, including vocabulary definitions and the components of some simple machines such as levers, wheels & axles, and pulleys. This intervention would hopefully catch as many students as possible who were struggling with course content.

 

Future Course Development

The quiz also got me thinking about the development of my course content module (Assignment #3), and the methods by which I may be disseminating materials. 10 year-old students would probably not be very engaged with consuming large bodies of text as content, so I opted to include points throughout the introductory module about tutorial videos available each week. While these might be time consuming to create, they could be utilized in future iterations of the course.

Although I outlined both communication and assessment strategies for the entirety of the course in my introductory module, I will touch on them here in my reflection.

Communication is made available through discussion forums, including a Q&A forum for course and technical issues, a parent portal for adult-to-adult-only communications, as well as through a specified Gmail account for teacher-student private conversations. Additionally, I have listed that I will provide synchronous communication options as students close in on assignments and for parent-teacher conferences midway through the course. I gleaned much of this balance from both my communication experiences throughout MET our group Google Doc activity where we discussed the implications of synchronous and asynchronous communications on student learning.

Student assessments for the rest of the course will be progressive in nature and vary from collaborative online experiences, to quizzes, to hands-on and individual physical creation of complex combinations of simple machines submitted through videos. I am still unsure as to which content section I plan to be developing further for Assignment #3, but I fully anticipate creating a rubric of assessment for an assignment so there is transparency on how students would be evaluated. Again, much of the balance of assessments was influenced by the Bates (2014) Assessment Appendix.

Something that really helped me was teaming up with Randy to provide feedback and support for one another in the final stages of module development. I hope that we can do that again in the next assignment – it helps a lot to have another set of eyes on your work.

 

Assumptions: Access & Parental Support

I had to make a number of assumptions in my course, including logistics and technology access for students, as well as the fact that parents would be involved in assisting with their course projects from home. Two particular assignments assume access to mobile devices that can take video as well as video software. If I actually taught in a fully online school environment, I would be sure to take time to set these as course registration parameters and/or look for ways to provide support or alternatives for students who lacked access to these resources.

This is part of the reason that I created a parent portal: it was an attempt to ease these issues but also a space to provide adult to adult communications when necessary to support at-home student understanding. The goal was to create social and instructional presence for students beyond the confines of the online course (Garrison et al., 1999). For example, the introductory module could be seen as a large and overwhelming amount of information for a 10 year-old. Therefore, I made it a requirement to review the introductory module with parents.

 

Conclusion

This assignment was a large exercise in professional growth and empathy for online course designers. The introductory module taught me about the inherent inflexibility of online learning environments, and the small margin by which instructors need to work to meet and support individual student needs (Anderson, 2008). Backwards design was an important and fundamental strategy in my work on this assignment; I am familiar with it as I use it frequently to create lessons for my own students. Additionally, I learned about Moodle’s affordances, constraints, and how to add different design elements to provide increased ease of use for students. Moreover, I worked through the nuances of issues of utilizing quiz and feedback components, and how these may or may not meet the needs of students directly but may provide formative feedback for both teaching and learning (Bates, 2014). Overall, this was a great learning experience for me, and I am pleased with the final product of my introductory module.

 

References

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in digital age, Chapter 8. Retrieved fromhttp://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

British Columbia Ministry of Education. (2015). Building Student Success: BC’s New Curriculum. Science 5 Core Competencies and Big Ideas. Retrieved fromhttps://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/science/5 on February 2 2016.

Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation.Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved fromhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf

Coates, H., James, R., & Baldwin, G. (2005). A critical examination of the effects of Learning Management Systems on university teaching and learning. Tertiary Education and Management, 11,(1), 19-36.http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11233-004-3567-9

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Retrieved from http://www.anitacrawley.net/Articles/GarrisonAndersonArcher2000.pdf

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved fromhttp://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf