ETAP 687 Reflections

I want to talk about the evolution of my online course over these past weeks, and the evolution that I anticipate it will experience over the next years. Alex, my instructor, has referred to our courses as living, breathing things that are always growing and changing. I realize now that courses not only change each time they run, but that it’s okay for them to change while the course is running.

An analogy that I’m playing out here: work with me ;) To think of a course as a stagnant puddle that doesn’t move or stir after it fills up with water means that it will eventually become a breeding ground for algae. I’d rather my course be like a stream…once it is filled with water, the water continues to flow and change. Like Pocahontas said in Disney’s interpretation…”What I like most about rivers is: you can’t step in the same river twice, the water’s always changing,  always flowing.”  I guess you can think of learning the same way, we want learning experiences that create movement of water or “information”, not let it get stagnant in the mind.

My course has certainly been somewhat of a river in its development over the past few weeks that I have been working on its design and building it into reality. My planned activities on paper looked great, but some of them didn’t make into the course because I couldn’t figure out the best way to put them in the course. The process of putting theory into practice is an eye-opening experience for anyone building an online course.

I just finished listening to my course feedback from Alex and I have to say that I am happy with her feedback (actually thrilled!) I have put a lot of time into the course in the past two weeks and I know there is still a few things to finish up.  One thing that Alex encouraged me to explore further, and one thing that I realize is lacking in my course, are opportunities for student collaborative learning.  I did spend a lot of time racking my brain about the best ways to include these opportunities….with a group project or with discussions or with peer assessed/reviewed activities, but I honestly felt that in my course any of these things, aside from discussions, would have felt contrived (like a put together a group project just because I felt there should be groupwork online). As the course evolves, I hope the activities and the students shed some light on these opportunities for me.

I know its important to design effective collaborative learning experiences; the article Online Community of Inquiry Review addresses the issues of social, cognitive, and teaching presence and reviews the research on each. I found the section on social presence to have some very interesting points regarding community in the online classroom. The statement, “effective and open communication was necssary to establish a sense of community,” is not surprising to many, what comes next was more enlightening, “only after the social relationships were established and the group became more focused on purposeful activities did cohesive comments begin to take precedence.” To me, this speaks to the importance of establishing community early on with things like ice-breakers and introductions. I think that with social connections made, students will be more willing to engage in discourse that moves past the exploration phase and into resolution.

The review also notes to help students move into the resolution phase, instructors must design activities that allow students to engage in problem solving exercises. By providing a common goal for groups to work towards and complete successfully, instructors give students the opportunity to take part in each of the problem solving processes. Knowing all this, it is even harder for me to design an activity in my course that is good enough to meet these criteria and also meets my course objectives….but that doesn’t mean I will stop trying because I know there is change to come. And that makes the future of my course and my students’ experiences like a trip down the river….exciting.

Jess (4)

Okay, so now we are at the point in the course where we begin to hash out the details of the our online classes and put it all in moodle. Getting used to moodle and how it all works has certainly been the a challenging part of building the course, at the same time it has been fun to ‘play’ with the applicaitons in moodle and use the assignments, quizzes, and forums available for my course.

I have put a lot of thought into how to ‘arrange’ the course material and what is the best way to present the information and activities…making each module as similar as possible so students are not getting ‘lost’ or confused with the layout. Also, I’m continuing to rethink my traditional activities to fit the online class. For example, with my article review assignment I usually bring my students to the library and the research librarian does an excellent presentation on how to use the library’s online database system to search for articles. Now that I am putting this class completely online, I have to rethink that part of the assignment….I think I am going to use jing to show them how to access/use the database system.

Alex (my instructor) has challenged me to really think about my discussion questions as well. I don’t want to use ‘dead’ discussion questions because that will not spark a discussion, so I have rewritten some of my discussion questions to allow for more discourse among students. However, I am still having a difficult time coming up with good questions for discussion. I thought my original discussion questions in my course activities were really good and interesting, but my instructor thought they sounded more like mini-essays or written assignments….so, HELP! I need some suggestions on how to re-write or rethink these discussions (Share Your Thoughts activities in my course).

The feedback from Alex on my course activities draft also helped me think about the evaluation or assessment of the activities and assignments in my course. I have some reading requirements (from the text) and some video lectures that I want students to read and watch. I’m asking them to reference those materials in the discussions, but is that enough of an evaluation? Also, I have some reading response questions…assignments where they answer questions about the reading so I know they have read it; is this too simple? The quizzes also are meant to assess whether or not they have read the chapters. I’m not placing too much weight on the quizzes, assignments and final exam…the biggest portion of their grades comes in their final project submission…this is where I see how much they have learned because they are applying the information to a restaurant concept.

I just had a thought….maybe the best way to engage student discussion would be to have their project parts be the discussion post. Each student posts their part of the project, explains a little behind their thinking and then students respond to their classmates’ work offering praise or suggestions. Is this a better alternative to the essay-like questions? This way, I can see how they are interacting with the material and what thinking was behind their submission. One thing I do not want my discussions to be are ‘flat’.

Jess (3)