August 2020 – Lisa's Blog

LRNT 528 3-2-1 Blogpost

The timing for this course is remarkable – perfect to be taking a deeper dive into the nuts and bolts of facilitation just as the preparation for the Fall semester is ramping up.

The 3 thoughts or ideas that I have about digital facilitation are pretty practically based right now. (1) My goal is to work within a hi-flex framework, attempting to keep student need and availability at the core of my thinking, (2) finding my ‘voice’ as a digital facilitator, and (3) the desire to ensure that the teaching role (Vaughan et al., 2013) is available to be taken on by different students in different circumstances. This is the challenging one, as there are power and system pieces inherent in schooling that need to be approached to make this real.

The 2 main questions I have about digital facilitation currently are that, (1) I’m wondering about ways to create group cohesiveness within a predominantly asynchronous context. I know several ways in theory, and am interested to see how these play out in my own and my colleagues classrooms. And (2), as I’m working with first-year students who have a variety of skill levels with technology, I’m curious about how to make sure that the learning curve of learning the technology does not overshadow the learning of the content itself (Weller, 2020).

My simile about facilitation:

I’m seeing it like a garden. We (as instructors) create the soil conditions (preparing the course materials and planning) and plant the seeds (students learning). A lot of the growth happens out of our sight, but we need to believe it is happening and to look at the way the visible plant is developing to get hints at what is happening under the surface. We can control the watering (more information), the pruning (formative feedback), but we can’t control the weather (COVID, student life circumstances, etc). We can put row cover on for protection (support students through flexibility and through connections to student services) when there are adverse circumstances in students lives. We can recognize that they (students) each bring their own knowledge and background, and that even though we think we are planting carrots, a beautiful, vibrant and productive squash plant might grow.

References:

Vaughan, N., Cleveland-James, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in Blended Learning Environments—Creating and Sustaining Communities of Inquiry. AU Press, Athabasca University. http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/751

Weller, M. (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. Athabasca University Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01

Resource to share

Like many of you, I’m working currently to align my formerly in-person classes to fit online-only remote delivery for the first time, ever. With that has come exploration of Hyflex and Hi-flex (highly flexible) learning environments, and awareness that many of the students I’ll be meeting have limited access to technology or to bandwidth.

Over and over again, I’m reading that we should be gearing our courses towards the lower bandwidth students as much as possible. I ran across a great diagram today through a BCcampus webinar that I wanted to share:The image approaches some of the questions I had about what activities were going to be more appropriate for the incoming students. I particularly liked that the whole thing is visualized on this high/low immediacy axis along with the high/low bandwidth axis (click on the image to be taken to the slide deck. This image is on slide 12).

Reading through the BCcampus lecture linked above and considering this diagram has led me to choose a lower immediacy, lower bandwidth set of activites for more of the courses than had been there previously, including adapting one of the assignments to fit within that quadrant.

Hope all is going well with your development, and that you are finding the resources you need.

A brief reflection

I’ve struggled a bit with this course – not because of the content or organization, but because of my life circumstances right now. There have been several things that have taken the time I thought I had available away over the last 9 weeks, and some of them aren’t done with me yet.

This part of the experience has highlighted for me both how important organization is, and how profoundly important self-care is. Without those two things, I’m not sure where I’d be right now.

I’ve used reflective practice ongoing in my personal life. I have been keeping a journal as long as I can remember (the earliest one I have is from when I was 8), and have been a devotee of ‘morning pages’ since first reading The Artist’s Way (Cameron & Bryan, 1993) sometime in the early 2000s. Given this long relationship with the page, it only made sense that when I began my professional career that this would continue. In my first years of teaching, I took time to write after each class – what went well, what could have gone better or differently, and endeavored to make those changes. That frequent writing has become more sporadic in recent years, but my reading has become wider. Now I spend as much time reading as I did writing after class, and listening to podcasts that inform my work. Conversations with my co-faculty and articulation partners has become part of that reflective time, and given me a broader Community of Practice.

This digital learning project has been informative. There were new things in the discovery process, things that changed the end goal substantially. Thinking through ways to display and share my final Digital Learning Resource (DLR) has led to new ideas even yet, thanks to the recursive nature of reflective practice. Usually in my work, I co-create something with other faculty members and we change course along the way a time or two, but this was different in that the changes were reasoned and deliberate – I felt like there was less guesswork involved. Staying informed by the student/consumer voice has been so important. It’s been an ongoing learning that students’ goals for themselves are different than my goals for them, to the point where I’ve got a note on my monitor to remind me as I work.

I’ve been in conversation with other faculty members about this OER, about the implementation and roll out. We’ve embedded support for students into the first semester of school, and I’m so looking forward to implementing everything in a few short weeks.

References:

Cameron, J., & Bryan, M. (1993). The Artist’s Way. Sounds True Recordings.

Theory Informed Learning Design and Evaluating Digital Learning Resources

I realize that I’m a little late to this party – life has been rather large the past few weeks.

I’ve appreciated the time to really dig into one particular Problem of Practice (PoP) and to dig a little deeper in this course. My particular PoP is:

Students lose access to online resources at the completion of online courses.

This has been an ongoing problem expressed by students over time in our department. I teach in a first-year certificate program, and many students are returning from other careers, not having attended school in (sometimes) decades. They are simply not equipped with the executive functioning organizational skills needed to identify, evaluate, organize and develop an index space for the online resources they will want to have continued access to. Part of the solution to this is the explicit teaching of skills and the building of a customizable framework by introducing students to this in the first few weeks of their school experience.

I worked through the Bates (2015) chapter The nature of knowledge and the implications for teaching and, as good readings tend to do, it changed my thinking about what I’m doing. Originally I expected to come into this using Merrill’s (2002) Principles of Instruction. Working though the chapter reminded me that really, we aren’t using any one of these lenses exclusively, but combinations of them most of the time. It makes sense in my context with these students to do the explicit skill teaching in a more objectivist (Ertmer & Newby, 2013) manner. This will give the students the raw skills to build and expand on as they create their own resources. They’ll be placed in triads as peer support/accountability partners, which will have both the benefit of creating initial social bonds within the student groups, and setting the stage for some of the social constructivist (Ertmer & Newby, 2013) learning that will come later.

Once the students are acquainted with the basic skill set they will need, they’ll be supported to use and expand on those skills in different contexts and courses. I’ve been working with colleagues to design what this can look like.

And, although it didn’t make it into the diagram, Cognitive Load Theory is one of the lenses that I’ll be building this through, as well. Getting them started with discrete, targeted videos allows them to jump in at their knowledge level and not be overwhelmed by both learning how to use the utilities they will need AND using those utilities at the same time.

I was drawn to the CASOCOIME model (Patsula, 2002) of guidelines for selecting media as it includes some pieces that are more targeted towards international and cultural suitability. There are often international and indigenous students in our cohorts, and paying attention to what will work for them will be an important contributor to the success of this Digital Learning Resource.

References:

Bates, A. W. (2015). Chapter 2: The nature of knowledge and the implications for teaching. In Teaching in a Digital Age. Tony Bates Associates Ltd. https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/chapter-2-the-nature-of-knowledge-and-the-implications-for-teaching/

Ertmer, P. A., and Newby, T. J. (2013). “Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism: Comparing Critical Features From an Instructional Design Perspective.” Performance Improvement Quarterly 26(2):43–71.

Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(3), 43–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02505024

Patsula, P. (2002). “Practical Guidelines for Selecting Media: An International Perspective.” Useableword Monitor. Retrieved from http://www.patsulamedia.com/usefo/usableword/report20020201_mediaselection_criteria.shtm).