As I will be away in Toronto this weekend with my family to watch the Blue Jays lose, I have been busy reading over the past couple of days to try and get ahead. This weeks readings confirmed two things; Firstly, I am in the right Masters program because I am really enjoying the readings and finding them very informative; secondly, that the online course that I currently teach is lightyears away from where it should be to engage and inform my students 
.
George Veletsianos’ chapter on digital learning environments gave me pause to think about how to improve my own online learning environment, but there is sooooooo much to consider when designing (or redesigning) a course. Bansford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) provide a nice summary and a good guide by suggesting that the environment be learner, knowledge, assessment, and community centred (as cited in Veletsianos, 2016, p. 245). But then Veletsianos (2011) had to suggest that we should provide learners an opportunity to engage with transformative learning experiences by incorporating intrigue, challenge, reflection, and engagement outside of the course into the design (as cited in Veletsianos, 2016, p. 247). Not enough to consider? Wilson and Parrish (2011, 10) also would like you to incorporate design fundamentals, challenge the learners by crafting the learning experience to include interactive media, and make sure that your design inspires learning (as cited in Veletsianos, 2016, p. 248). This task seem’s almost too overwhelming, it’s no wonder that many faculty cringe at the thought of redesigning their courses.
After reflecting on these readings, I realize I really need to work on incorporating all this great knowledge into my own online course as we go through LRNT 521, otherwise I fear it will just be another thing on my ‘to do’ list for the future that will never be accomplished. I think I will start with little changes that make sense to my course design and that encourage the building of community, such as allowing my learners to co-develop their assignments and assessments to give them more ownership of their learning (vanOostveen, R., DiGiuseppe, M., Barber, W., Blayone, T., & Childs, E., 2016, p.9).
I also realize that I need to just go for it (as Angie’s suggested in the ‘Ask the Instructor Forum’) and I will try to be conscious of this as I work on my digital plan and identity. As a person that crave’s structure however, I really enjoyed Helen Beetham’s (2015, n.p.) blog post regarding the 6 elements for digital capability, and just for fun (insert sarcastic comment here) I decided to rate myself against the teacher profile…I think I will do this again in a few months and see what has changed.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uccVnWKryG9ErzB2Vy_jl8aLIlhZSK63_LWbH3xxBC4/pubhtml
Ok enough serious conversation. I am going to try and interject some fun here with a Quizlet. If you haven’t used them before they are very easy to build and are a pretty good self assessment tool for your students. Try and beat my time of 19.2 seconds! (Drag the correct answer over the question to make them disappear)
https://quizlet.com/141556404/match
PS…If anyone knows how to properly embed HTML into the wordpress blog I would greatly appreciate some help…I can embed the code and it looks like it works, but when I save the post it disappears…
References
Beetham, H. (2015, Nov 10). Building capability for new digital leadership, pedagogy and efficiency [blog post].
vanOostveen, R., DiGiuseppe, M., Barber, W., Blayone, T., & Childs, E. (2016). New conceptions for digital technology sandboxes: Developing a Fully Online Learning Communities (FOLC) model. In Proceedings of EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2016 (pp. 665-673). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
Veletsianos, G. (2016). Digital learning environments. In N. Rushby & D. Surry (Eds), Handbook of Learning Technologies (pp. 242-260). UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Steve,
The Blue Jays won! You and the family must be their lucky charm!
Have you considered giving your learners an online survey after the 2nd or 3rd class?
I myself would give my learners an online Instructor Self Evaluation survey (Google Forms) and get a sense of feeling on how they are doing (very similar to how Elizabeth Childs did with us). By getting the information sooner than later, the course and course notes can be changed and adapted to the current group of learners. As well, all learners do learn differently, so sometimes, I may need to change the style of instructing too. At the end of the course, the learners have to do another online survey, but this time, the online survey is the institution.
In my first year of teaching, I would get a copy of comments at the end of the course. When the second course came along (new set of learners), I took the comments and did what the first group of learners asked. You can imagine, where I am going with this. The second group of learners wanted a different style of teaching, which I had originally done for the first group of learners. That made me realize I needed the survey comments sooner than later, hence the form that I created that would help me help the learners learn more.
Here is a link to my Instructor Self-Evaluation Form, and I hope this would be of some use too:
https://goo.gl/forms/hhMbVETWRGErMHPD2
Michael
Yes it was a great game, my daughter got Marco Estrada (her favourite player) to autograph her hat, pretty fun!
I have given my students a survey, but nothing very formal. Good call that each group of students is different and therefore has varied needs. I really like your google form survey, I think I will incorporate it into my next class…would you be willing to share it with me as an editor so I can import it and customize a bit?
I took your challenge and beat your score of 14.0 on the quizlet… after 4 tries lol.
Nice! Guess I’ll have to get back at the quizlet!
It’s interesting you chose the word ‘challenge’, when I issue these quizlets to my students as challenges they become super competitive, but it also encourages them to learn.
Have you tried ‘Quizlet Live’?
Cool, I’m going to look for a way to use these quizlets in my class too!
For html code, do you click on the Text(HTML) tab in the top right when you’re composing a post?
Hey Sean,
Once you have signed up and created a study set, open it up and click on the 3 dots, it should give you “more” options and from there you can get the embed code.