Final Project for the Course

Just a quick post: Here is my link for my final project.

Reflection for Week 6

In this week, we looked at two articles with some diverse topical matter.  The first article was “E-Learning and Constructivism: From Theory to Application” by Alex Koohang, Liz Riley, and Terry Smith.  This article was consistent with all the various articles on Constructivist learning theory (Vygotsky, Wiggins, etc), and did a good job of illustrating the process of providing real-world activities giving students a chance to build their learning with necessary scaffolding.

This article was much in line with what I already do in my classroom.  While the terms have changed over the years (project-based learning, inquiry learning, understanding by design, backwards-designed lessons), I have always used this design of learning for my classroom.  That includes my e-classroom as well, where students have a central understanding that is the key for learning, by which all projects, activities, and scaffolded lessons hang off of.

My current class uses as its “Big Idea” the concept of understanding how SCORM-based lessons serve in the big picture of online learning instructional design.  Though the course focuses specifically on the learning of one SCORM-based tool, the steps of learning how to use the tool is merely the scaffolding to get to the central concept.

The second article, “Cybercoaching: Rubrics, Feedback, and Metacognition, Oh My!” by Naomi Jeffery Petersen, was much more important for me, because this is where I want to improve my online teaching.  It is not at the “design” stage of assessment.  Rather it is at the assessing stage of assessment.  While the article does mention how you can design assessments to be a part of the different stages in the learning process (I will adopt the term Harmonic Feedback Loop), it goes beyond that to show some of the actual assessing strategies in action.  The inline commenting and tracking feedback are important steps I need to incorporate into my class.

Another article not in the class that feeds into this discussion is an article by Marshall Goldsmith.  He coins the term feedforward, as opposed to feedback, and it reinforces the sense of the harmonic feedback loop as being a method to propel future action instead of critiquing past action.

Also this week, we developed pre-class surveys for our classes, to gather information about our participants that we would use to better our instruction.  Though I’ve created these for my courses before, I have not used the tool Survey Monkey to do so (I’ve used Survey Monkey for other purposes, though).  Survey Monkey has lost some of its capabilities, though, as you can no longer create custom urls and are limited in the amount of responses you can gather.  I still remain a fan of Google Docs because of the ease by which you can share the gathered data (in graphical form) with your class.

At any rate, here is my survey for the week.

Reflection for week 5

This week, we have shifted to begin work on our final project.  We have taken our initial brainstorm that we did with our Inspiration maps, and now we are creating a more succinct plan.  For this week, this means identifying our course objectives (including the key verb) and aligning them with the levels on Bloom’s taxonomy.  As a further step, I was asked to add information on the assessment strategy and tool used.  In so doing, I have added those columns to the taxonomy.  This is the first step in what will turn out to be a more fully developed instructional design plan for the course.

As I reflect on this process, I have some mixed thoughts.  On the one hand, when it comes to the educational concept of instructional design, I very much like the activities so far.  They are sequenced and process-oriented, and they are doing a good job (for me at least) of keeping everything tied together.

On the other hand, I am realizing I was mistaken about the central intent of this course.  I had signed up thinking that this was not an instructional design course, but rather a course that helped students understand how to give in-class assessment, feedback, and evaluation.  That is not the case, as we have focused solely on looking at tools that can be used for assessment, and planning the design of assessments that are aligned with instruction (elements of instructional design).  I was looking for more about “This is how you assess student group work”, or “This is how you give feedback on student forum posts”.

I have included a link for the assessment taxonomy for this week, which is a word document.  Again, this link will only be available for those in our course.

Week 4 Reflection

This week saw the completion of our mid-term project, a digital toolbox being completed in groups.  The work required each group member to research one tool, illustrating its benefits, drawbacks, sample implementations, and targeted lessons.  The tools were then woven together with a summary by one of the group members.

For this task, I chose Exam Builder, which as you might guess, is an online testing program, where you can create simple select-response quizzes for students to take, and where the answers are automatically assessed for you.  There are quite a bit of features that go with the reporting and summary of the quizzes.

It is not for free, though.  A 50-student license will cost you $650 per year.  I was interested to see how it compared to Moodle’s built-in quiz module, the Hot Potatoes quiz module, or the content-developing Lesson Builder’s quiz features.  My end conclusion was that, while neat, it simply wasn’t worth the money.

My fellow group members looked at two other tools that I have used before, Live Journal and DimDim.  With both of those tools, I had originally tried them out and used them as I was dabbling in the classroom, only to replace them with the more well-known products (Blogger and Adobe Connect Pro) respectively.  It was interesting to see some of the new features those programs contained that I wasn’t aware of… it has been a while since I have used them.

This is a link to our group’s toolbox (although, the document is part of the course, and so it might not be reachable unless you have username/password access).

Reflection, Week 3

This week, we looked at the variety of assessment strategies that exist for the e-classroom.  While the primary focus was on awareness that so many strategies exist, we haven’t yet examined which ones you should use, or more importantly, how to use those assessment strategies effectively.  I’m looking forward to this discussion.

One specific strategy we looked at this week was concept mapping.  We hand hands-on practice with this, developing our own concept map using the Inspiration software (my project is below).  Though we didn’t discuss the resource in class, I found the research gathered by the Thinking Foundation on concept mapping intriguing.  They looked at the implemented use of concept mapping in several schools in the UK (and elsewhere), chronicling how the implementation occurred and the effectiveness of the implementation.

In summary, the thinking foundation saw concept mapping giving students access to higher thinking skill development across all the schools they worked with.  Implicit in several studies was that the use of thinking maps made assessment an easier process for teachers; they were able to see student ability to connect concepts together to know, in a formative matter, whether understanding exists or whether further instruction is needed.  The speed by which teachers and students alike could create concept maps make them a seamless assessment type.

The concept map below is a map of a future class of mine; I will be developing a 1-credit professional development class for e-learners on the use of a lesson-creation tool Lesson Builder, which create SCORM-compliant lessons with built in interactive assessments.  The map showcases the central objectives, lessons, activities, and assessments of the course (it is a rough draft).

 

Reflection for Week 2

This week, we looked at blogging in the use of an online course.  Blogging serves as blend of both instructional activity and assessment tool, and additionally, it is in an authentic environment.  With many free blogging platforms available out on the internet (and with many LMS tools having built-in blogging features), it is an easy tool for students to access.  Thus it is a very versatile part of a course.

In our readings for this week, we focused primarily on the experiences of teachers and how they have used blogs.  One things I’m on the look for are some specific uses of blogging and how assessment will be determined.  For example, in this course, students such as myself blog with reflections once a week, and other participants are to read the blogs, but most student-to-student interaction takes place in the discussion forums.  I’m curious to see some examples of classes that use peer-assessment in blogging effectively and arbitrarily.

E-Portfolio Assignment: Introducing Richard Denhart

I also would like to welcome Richard Denhart.  In visiting with him, he pointed me to the program he works at, the Madison Media Institute, which has several interesting programs related to digital media (such as music production, sound systems, graphic design, and movie animation).  He has mentioned he has taught online for a few years, but as a self-taught instructor, he is “interested in finding out how to do it!”

For more from Richard and other classmates, you can check out our course wiki.