Final post design course

At the end of the design course, I can think of many topics that have caught my attention and caused much pondering. However, the most prominent is connectivism and how this new educational stategy affects culturally diverse course design.

Connectivism is a method of teaching that utilizes the e-learning environment to connect students to content, each other and their teacher. Inclusive course design utilizes all three methods of connecting the student and does so with respect and maintenance of differences and diversity among students and the teacher.

When I watched the You Tube about connectivism, I was excited and could see many possibilities. The networked student seemed to have access to it all! I still agree that connectivism is the key to a successful course design. However, it is possible that there are a couple of exceptions to the rule of connectivism. As I have been designing a course for people in Singapore, one problem that I have is that many sources and resources that I wish to connect my course participants too are American in origin. This poses an interesting problem. Google scholar and various other search engines can be configured to local resources or they default to USA sources. For myself, this is useful as I teach in both countries and I can direct American students to American resources and Australian students to Australian resources and cross germinate with these similar countries as students easily relate to literature from either country.

However, when locating resources for my Singapore course, I became acutely aware that I was locating mainly American resources, definitions and sites. I am not sure how this will be perceived and even whether it will be relevant to an Asian culture. Connecting students to local resources is not possible from Australia as I can’t configure to their locale. Language poses a bit of a problem as I am not sure how and what to connect my students too. I have read several resources about international education and the idea of an open world university as described in Atkinsons Presidential address at Nagasaki University in Japan in 2001. This address discusses the changing competitiveness of universities as information is becoming so easily accessible whether one pays fees or not and resides in the country or not. But what is also obvious when ones steps in the shoes of people from smaller nations, is that that education and information is dominated by those producing the information.

Ultimately, how students react will only be known in their responses and posts on the discussion boards and in assignments. Setting tasks that direct students to locate and present local resources will be an education for me as well. Those resources can then be built into future runnings of the course. This next step will place the course design closer to connectivism as I will be able to connect students to their own meaningful culturally relevant resources as well as those that may contrast with their perspective.

An important role that I must play is one of a culturally competent tutor who honours and respects all view points and maintains a safe environment to let students express what they really think and have learned about resources that I post. Student’s interactions with each other will be easy for participants, as they are likely to hold the same or similar attitudes and opinions. As the minority, even though I am the tutor, I must understand and access the group of students by consciously leaving pre-conceived ideas at my office door. After this course has finished I will have more knowledge about how connectivism works within international e-learning courses.


References:

Atkinson, R.(2001) Presidential Address: The globalization of the university. Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies, Japan, May 26, 2001. Retrieved March 20, 2009 from http://www.ucop.edu/pres/speeches/japanspc.htm
Germain-Rutherford, A., Kerr, B., (2008) An Inclusive Approach to online learning environments: Models and Resources. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 9(2), 64-85.

Morse, K. (2003) Does one size fit all? Exploring asynchronous learning in a multicultural environment. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 7(1), 37-55.

Saskatchewan Learning Resources. (2005) Chapter 2: Instructional models, strategies methods and skills, and Chapter 4: Making instructional choices. Retrieved May 15, 2009 from http://www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/sitemap/index.shtml

Designing online courses: Mid course entry

Trying not to drive students off a bridge with too much content

No-one was harmed in this image

Well it is June 28, 2009 and it is nice to know that this class is on the down hill slide as far as the length of the course goes. I have a feeling that the workload is going to steadily increase, but 1 out of 2 isn’t so bad!

My self selected blog topic is overwhelming students with content. When the tutor creates their own content, and connects students to existing content, the students has quite a glut of resources to select from. How overwhelming is this? I think that this is an important aspect of course design—quantity of content. Presenting content needs to be as flexible and consider as many different learning styles and knowledge levels as possible, to ensure that students will interact with the content.

In the course that I am designing and will teach, I am lucky enough to have my own original content. I will present this content in various ways, including HTML lecturette, PDF journal articles and captivate presentation. I am not sure, other than tracking and the assignments that I have set, how much students will interact, if they will interact, and how helpful my material will be. To ensure that I cover other viewpoints, I am loading PDF journal articles and various web links to the sites that are an original source, or at least really expert, or content rich sites. I was really pleased to see that my strategy of multimodal presentation of material and multiple sources for students to select material to interact with is supported in the literature (Academic Technology Center, 2007). However, one of the problems of providing a lot of content for students is that they become less likely to manage interacting with everything. However, to keep students abreast of the overall topic, one must post all views and resources. The student then chooses what to interact with.

I am interested to find out what students like and do not like. Aside from tracking file usage (which I love to do!), I am thinking about setting up an anonymous discussion topic and asking each week to name the best resources and the ones that were not used/engaging. That way maybe I can reduce the load a bit. It was interested to learn that just under a majority of academics track what their students are doing and interacting with online (Shank, 2003). I routinely track the class and individual students out of interest. I actually do it at least weekly when I run a class, and wondered whether I was too anxious to know what was going on in my classes. After reading Shanks article, I am quite satisfied that this is what I should be doing! Thanks for hat reference!

As Anderson 2002, so aptly points out, interaction between the students, content and teacher only occurs at a high intensity when the student is “personally active and engaged in the interaction”. So I am realizing that really excellent and multimodal presentation of rich content may only be selected as a learning experience if the whole class is connecting, interacting and in an upward learning spiral. Distance learning really needs people to form a positive connection. The facilitation class really taught us how to engage a student’s community—learners willing.

I look forward to learning more about course design, appropriate volumes of content, and managing what is delivered within a good online course.

Helen Bourke-Taylor

Design course post one

May 15, 2009

The design course has started and this course will involve the design of an overall course as well as application of online pedagogy that will create a significant learning experience for students.

I am using the course structure and resources to assist me as I create a fully online course to be run in second semester (in Australia) this year. We have learned about learning resources. We have learned about facilitation. This class teaches us to match up students learning needs with inspiring methods of material delivery and interaction with that material with other students and with the instructor. Selection of evaluation methods will be a key aspect of the course design.

My time availability for this class is completely crucial. I have very heavy work and study load. I will be looking to learn as much as I can by interacting with the class material, the instructor and the other students. Being a student in these courses has helped me to more fully appreciate learning objectives, materials and instruction strategies.

I intend to be brief but pointed in my efforts to benefit and contribute to this course.

Helen

Self reflection: Facilitation of week 4 (February 2009)

This is a picture taken two weeks ago in Sydney. These are my 3 children (Josie 8, Catie 6, and Seamus 3) standing in front of a giant prehistoric Australian Wombat. This creature existed with dinasours I believe and is considered 'megafauna'!

Now back to the course.....

During week 4 of the facilitation course, I co-facilitated the week along with my capable colleague Cynthia. The topic for the week was the pedagogy on online teaching and learning. I was reasonably confortable with this topic although made sure that I read the resources that were provided in the lecturette and accompanying documents. I discovered some new material and a different way to view the way that synchronous and asynchronous student-student-teacher interactions can offer different learning opportunities. Still, I didn't realize where I was on the learning curve (at the beginning) until our interaction with students began!

Cynthia and I decided to take a discussion board each and I found that I was completely involved in this discussion and was pretty astounded by the effort that it took to facilitate when you are just learning the material yourself. I was relieved that I only had one board to repond too. I did find it hard to respond to postings in a studetn centered way. I found myself thinking about the postings and the persons experiences. Just now I reviewed soem of those posts and I see that I was really responding like a student rather than a facilitator. In my own online classes, I find it easier to facilitate as I have mastery over the material as I did put it together, and I am the content expert teaching the class. When a student posts I can see where they are going and what else they might need to get there. This was not the case on the discussion board for this class.

Our synchronous class was a Wimba session that lasted an hour. Cynthia and I decided to make our session about pedagogy and cultural influences. The problem was that we did not alert our classmates to this interesting topic that we both felt motivated and somewhat competent to present and facilitate a discussion on. We prepared about 6 slides about ethnicity, cultural influences on pedagogy and deliviery of education; diversity among students and how all of this might be approached in the online environment.

The class started a little off kilter and I thought that this was because people weren't quite on our page yet. I recall the silences and did feel a little panicked, but just allowed some time for people to think. As the presentation continued, people did participate, although I did think that there was a little confusion on some topics and I felt that perhaps I was not as attentive to what people offered as examples. I listened to the archive and realized that I probably didn't do too badly, although I only understood the full conversation about what it meant to have an African American President to African Americans AFTER listening to the archive. I do find it difficult to think, listen and talk at once and this was an intense session. My colleague was disappointed in the session, and said that she thought it did not go well or as planned. I was a little suprised as I thought thta she had done well--certainly better than myself. We de-briefed with each other and the instructor and eventually decided that preparing the students for what was to occur was our major error.

So after these experiences I decided that I should facilitate again and have volunteered to take week 12. I have incorporated Wimba into the onlien class that I teach and therefore don't feel the need to do it again, especially since I will be trying to act the expert when I am really the learner! Hopefully I can do a better job with the discussion boards as I will have more time to think about responses!

That's all for now! Back to my thesis writing (UGH)

End of part two: Facilitation of online courses

This section of the facilitation class was about pedagogy of online courses; building community between students and including the instructor; the managerial role of creating and managing a easily navigated and stimulating course; managing the course as it is occuring and the technical role that we must all keep up with.

The pedagogy of the online learning environment is fairly similar to what I would see as a graduate or post graduate f2f class. Principles of effective teaching has some really important points that must be included for a class to reach the learner and be an enriching experience. Firstly the learner must be understood so that the teacher tailors material and the class to their needs. Further than this though, the learners potential and need for growth must be acknowledged and promoted through a full learning experience. Secondly, learning is a construction of meaning individualized for each learner. This means that the course must facilitate all sorts of new thinking (critical, problem solving, creative) and not just one dimesion that the learner may excell in or be very comfortable to them. Constructivism will say that learners create and define their own meaning about a situation. Thirdly, inline with these principles, the learning environemnt created by the instructor must be challenging and stimulating, always asking that bit more of the person. Finally the online class depends on a learner teacher relationship that is positive, supportive, respectful, engaging and fair (thats my one!). Studnets do need to understand that the instructor has time and resouirce limitations. The online environemnt can be a slippery slope for a teacher when the class is large and the studetns keen. Individualizing relationships with studetns takes time and resources. From the teachers point of view these thin out as the class expands in size. So lets say that 20 is a maximum for one facilitator. The other principle is the wider environmental context that exists for the student. The virtual world must be in sync with the real one or application of learning is limited.

There are many roles that the instructor plays in an onlien class and I think that those were covered in the previous post. However one of the most important is the social role of building community. Personally I look forward to more success with this. My experience with a class that I teach from a distance at present has been somewhat jaded by my inability to build community between the students. My relationship with most of them is good, however, they don't want to gel--there are groups and they have been hard to break down. This week I finally detected plagerism from one student. The student copies other student's posts and modifies them as her own. So another role of the online instructor is detective. If the instructor is not observant about what is going on in the class they will not see the real reasons for the breakdown between students. Of course I could not build community between studetns who were aware that someone was cheating. Web ct 8 will have a plagersim detection function for the discussion boards. Good!

Setting the stage invloves getting all of those features up and ready to direct people around the material and course in a quick and orgaized way. Somes function that need attention are a visually engaging front/cover page; orientation to the course in several formats; topical outline and syllabus with required evaluation tasks set out clearly; a calendar with due dates and cues to where studetns are in the course; ways to contact the instructor; discussion boards for course questions, topical boards, and social interactions between students. I'd like to add course goals to that list as the first course had those linked to each module and it was great to just select the icon and self check if you are keeping up and on target. Probably hard to set up.

Managing the course is a time consuming task that requires perseverance, frequent checking in in check email and discussion boards; prompt responses to students questions; measured and timely responses to content posts; directing studetns to material as per their learning experience and need; and ongoing positive regard and support for students.

Soem difficult scenarios that can arise are prolific posting (encourage more student repsonding to students); studetns who don't know what is going on (refer them to the resources and skill them up in successful online student attributes); and plagerism (turnitin) or google text blocks.

Another role of the online teacher is the technically savvy person. From understanding just basic functions (like using frontpage, or writing html correctly, which I don't find that easy incidently!) to be fluent in using the full capabilities of the programs that are available to many of us (Google functions, Adobe photoshop, captivate potential). We had a great wimba session about current programs and dicsussion boards with some great resources posted. Three of the best that I have bookmarked were

internet4classrooms (Tutorials as application to classroom scenarios as to how to use them)

UCR extension (lots of basic and more complex tutorials)

Online journal of distance learning education

Well I have moved forward with what I have learned. I find this class a very well connected and supportive class. I feel like other students really want to help me solve my class challenges and I am very interested to hear about their classes, successes, ideas and challenges too. Being a student in this sort of class has to be the best way to learn how to teach one successfully. I believe this to be true and self evident!

Facilitation course: End of part one

Firstly, it seems that the more one learns about the online medium, the smaller one feels. The amount of information and advice, along with new technology and new ways of running courses makes one feel like a tiny person unable to find comfort in a whopping chair.

Woops! Sometimes you are just going to wipe out!

This entry is to reflect on some key objectives and new learning that I experienced in January of the online teaching and learning course. Below I list some of the important ones for me, along with what I learned and need to learn more about. This is a reflection of what I have learned and a realization of the continued plight that I face to consider myself competent as an online instructor. Please note: these objectives (bolded) are copied out of the course syllabus for convenience.

Identify strategies to engage students in asynchronous discussion topics. We reviewed several great resources that teased out types of questions that extend students learning. Some were really great: Keys to succesful online facilitating and socratic questioning which gave detailed explanaitions of the types of questions to ask studetns to facilitate engagement in learning and the class
Develop effective responses to student posts to maintain and deepen student learning in asynchronous discussion topics.

Right back to those questions that clarify; probe assumptions; probe evidence, implications and consequences; differentiate between viewpoints/perspectives; and questions about the question.
Provide feedback for students in asynchronous discussion activities.

This I need to do more of in the week that I facilitate in (week 5). Generally I tend to selct material that I agree with or that extends me. Then I can conmfortbaly use socratic questioing to go a bit deeper.
Utilize synchronous conferencing tools to facilitate a 'live' classroom session.

Attended one class which was just great for building the class community. I spenta lot of time laughing! I fill facilitate a session this week.

Discuss the changing roles that instructors must address as they move from the real to the virtual classroom.

One resource was particularly good from my perspective as it spoke to the differences between conventional and contemporary teaching and all of the additional roles that teachers must develop in the online world.
Discuss the changing roles to which students must adjust to become successful in online courses.

Students need ot develop skills above those required in f2f learning including superior written communication; willingness to particpate and interact with peers, material and tutor; organizational and time management skills and a consistent approach to their work. they also need to develop some technological expertise.
Develop strategies for helping students successfully adjust to their new roles in the online environment.

This is achieved through an organized course with clear expectations; learning contracts and self education of the studenns about the skills they need to develop for themselves for success.
Access resources that will enable him/her to remain current in the field. Many were provided within the class by other students. I found google scholar most useful in locating journal articles and reliable pieces rather then many many web pages.
Use headings and horizontal rules to format HTML documents.

HTML is something that I am not so sure about. I use frontpage to create my code and alter web ct material. I am doing the tutorials, although obviously not carefully enough as I haven't go 100% yet!

Onwards with part 2 of the course...

Facilitation expectations

Well it is 2009 and the Certificate course has resumed!

Expectations for the week that I will co-facilitate with my friend Cynthia is Hawaii.
We have chosen the week that presents Pedagogy related to e-learning. My first concern is: How much of an expert will I be expected to be as well as actually facilitating the class? Surely I will be ready for this?

Faciliation can and does take many forms as one is faciliating the studetns interactions with learning objects, other students and the teacher/faciliator. So many options are available to faciliate interactions between students and teachers. These include the synchronous (WIMBA, Horizon) and asynchronous (email, discussion boards).

In preparing for this class, Cynthia and I will need to try out many of these synchronous forums, as we are not too familiar with them. We have a disadvantage of being off shore students in Hawaii and Australia. I think that this might push us towards asynchronous faciliation techniques during our weeks just due to sheer time zone issues!

Short but sweet,

Helen