First published Feb. 28th 2016 for ETEC565:
My moodle: HHG4M – Human Development Across the Lifespan
General Reflection
I chose to make a moodle because I identified it as a gap in my knowledge and skill-set. I kept hearing about the platform but had no experience with it, whereas I had done some tinkering with Blackboard Connect in a previous course. Since moodle is a free platform I could also better see the use of learning it for future use in my teaching. I found that my previous experience with simple coding and Wiki classrooms were beneficial in tackling some of the finer details of the moodle, but for the most part YouTube tutorials were all I needed to guide me in the right direction when things became less intuitive. I decided to take on the creation of a navigation bar at this stage, although it is not due until later in the term, because of how much clarity and ease of use it provides. I was also lucky to benefit from the kindnesses of two of my classmates, Victoria and Colleen, who had already created their navigational menus and passed along valuable information to me.
Course Development
The course I chose to design around my moodle is one I have taught twice before, the second time with a blended approach using Wiki classrooms. I would see the students every day in class, but the vast majority of the course materials were on the Wiki, and students were also occasionally responsible for building it themselves, as a Wiki allows. By the time I was preparing to teach the course a second time I had read Anderson (2008a), and had begun to take the ideas within it and other literature into consideration when designing my blended classes. What I appreciated so much about the use of Wiki classrooms was, as Anderson elaborates, the opportunities for “project-and workplace-based (assessment activities), that are constructed collaboratively, that benefit from peer and expert review, and that are infused with opportunity and requirement for self-assessment” (p. 50). Especially in the social sciences, a dynamic and constantly developing field, I felt that students would be limited rather than fully served by the strict adherence to a class textbook, and thus wanted them to learn the important critical skills required for responsible research in academic journals and online.
As students become more accustomed to functioning and working online, I would both model but also assume a high standard of interaction with online materials. My role would be something of content curator slash guide, who would expect an increasing level of independence when searching out the content required for concept comprehension and engagement. The flipped (or inverted) lesson model, as created by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams in 2007 (Phillips & Trainor, 2014, p. 104) follows similar principles, which is that students arm themselves with the required content prior to face-to-face interaction, at which time they are required to engage with and apply it in a more critical way. The online class could function in a similar way, in that teacher-chosen or created materials would be provided to students for self-study, and later engagement in meaningful formative assessments and project-based tasks. Just as online courses required a front-heavy planning and workload for the teachers in order to ensure smoother instruction later on, so does flipping, and if careful attention to interactivity is paid, both models can provide the instructor with a clear idea of how individual students are faring in their understanding and progress. This interaction can be as simple as mandatory posts in the forums or labeled participation in Google docs, but it can also be encouraged through other social media tools like blogs, wikis, or Twitter. In fact for this reason I decided to embed a Twitter feed into my moodle, which is currently set to display tweets from my username, but in a real-life application of the course would follow instead a class hashtag, with students encouraged to create tweets for their peers to follow. Through this and other interactive communication strategies, which will be further explored in this reflection, hopefully a positive learning environment that would feel “collaborative and social, not competitive and isolated” (Nel, Dreyer & Carsons, 2010, p. 245) would be established.
Communication & Assessment Strategies
As Anderson (2008a) describes on page 50, online tools can help to further assessment opportunities for students without the need for greater teacher participation. Online quizzes are included in the article’s list, and provide important check-points for both the students and teacher in their knowledge base, but I believe these quizzes should be carefully partnered with other forms of assessment, especially those with a greater degree of critical thinking required. Other than the essay questions, the moodle quiz question options were almost all knowledge-centered, and based around the retrieval of facts. I was slightly shocked when I discovered that the ‘short answer’ option was actually more of a ‘cloze reading’ type of question, and not the format of question I was expecting from an English teaching background. In a fully-online type course, I would likely use quizzes more often than in a blended environment, where I could check in with students and their understanding more frequently, but in both I would stress the importance of students interacting with each other and acting as collaborators. Establishing this important “community centered” (p. 51) approach would be a key challenge in an online course, but in an effort to do so I have woven weekly discussions and occasional peer collaboration through Google docs throughout the course.
Despite being online, frequent opportunities for student assessment and feedback would be a vital part of keeping students engaged with the material, each other, and myself, the instructor. All smaller forms of assessment would be building towards the final culminating activity, which I have deliberately chosen not to be an exam. When reading Gibbs and Simpson (2005), I heard my own experiences and beliefs echoed in their assertions that students prefer coursework to exams (p. 7). I personally believe the opportunities for the teacher to get to know the students and their individual strengths and weaknesses are much more easily facilitated through consistent engagement and low-stakes assessment, so that by the end of the course there is rarely a surprise in a student’s abilities when submitting their final products. Unmarked frequent assessments, peer assessments, and opportunities for constructivist learning – all of which could be facilitated through the moodle forums and/or external platforms like Google docs or Padlet – would all be better indicators of student understanding than occasional tests or one large final exam (p. 8).
The challenge implicit in the above aspirations for such an online-course environment centers around student motivation – although this is perhaps always the challenge of any teacher. Ciampa (2013) outlines six elements that “make an activity both intrinsically and extrinsically motivating for a learner: challenge, curiousity, control, cooperation, competition and recognition” (p. 83). In my experience the variable most difficult for teachers to encourage is that of curiousity, as many students will respond to the question of ‘why did you sign up for this course?’ with ‘because I had to’. The other elements can be engineered through effective course design and varied tools that meet the students at their individual levels of ability and need, for example freedom of choice in topics or format for products, the use of varied instructional materials, etc. However as outlined by Ciampa, curiousity falls into two categories, sensory and cognitive, and only the second could be truly stimulated online (p. 84). Students would need to “discover that their knowledge is incomplete or inconsistent”, and then “have the desire to explore and attain new information and competence” (p. 84). I have learned how to better foster curiousity through in-person interactions and rapport with students, but it would be an unknown as to whether or not students with low levels of curiousity could be equally encouraged through online interactions alone. The hope is that through peer and teacher interaction, and the use of the other five elements of motivation, even students who begrudgingly signed up for the course would be able to complete it in a way they found satisfying.
In Conclusion
Although at times this assignment felt like a daunting one, I was glad to again have the chance to ‘get my hands dirty’ with a new form of technology, and acquaint myself with this popular platform. I have constructed it around the assumption that the senior-level high school students would be exercising a high level of autonomy and self-direction, but have tried to integrate approachable means for communication and collaboration in order to better enrich their experience. Although it requires a significant amount of backwards-design, the appeal of teaching through a moodle-designed course is clear, and despite the asynchronous and distance-based nature of the platform, could still facilitate an enjoyable interpersonal learning environment.
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
Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
Nel, C., Dreyer, C., & Carstens, W. A. M. (2010). Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. Tydskrif vir letterkunde, 35(4), 238-258. Retrieved from http://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/download/53794/42346
Phillips, C. R., & Trainor, J. E. (2014). MILLENIAL STUDENTS AND THE FLIPPED CLASSROOM. Journal of Business and Educational Leadership, 5(1), 102-112. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/1644485724?accountd=14656