Reflections from readings in Blenkit 2016

I have been following Blendkit for three years now, and have basically taken what I need and not completed. That has been primarily because I have been working solely in online course development. Now I am actively involved in reinventing a program from a purely classroom mode to one where the course takes place 50% online. This requires a different take on my current skill set. So Blendkit 2016 become much more directly relevant to my continued education. Over the next few weeks I will posting reflections here as part of the assignments for this MOOC, based upon the readings.

The reading for the first week is on the nature of blended learning and the differences between it and a standard face to face course. While I appreciate the theory and the approaches to hybridizing courses, I find that what works for me is a little different. I'm not  a systems guy as much as I am about individualizing the experience of creation for the instructor, differentiated design for the strengths and weaknesses of the faculty member.

Much like anything else related to education, there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to developing a blended/hybrid learning course. Based on the reading and my experience with faculty, the amount of blend and what is contained within it has a lot to do with instructor teaching style, what they find valuable in terms of the interaction that they want directly with students, and also their comfort level with moving content online in the first place.

The type of course components that are best suited for a blended approach are also dependent on the instructor, which is why I think that a systems approach, while valuable if you can get buy in from your faculty on a standard delivery method and look and feel, many times will not work. Some faculty will see more value in a standard lecture approach, with the study materials and some student to student interaction in the online component, while others will wish to flip their course so that the majority of their time will be spent reinforcing the content.

In our case, since we do not wish to deal with accreditation issues in our courses, blended means less than 50% online. At the other end of the spectrum one graduate course that I attended was entirely online with the exception of being bookended with face to face courses that acted as an introduction to the course at the beginning, and a wrap-up and in-person presentation of class projects at the end. Again, it appears to me that the decisions is based upon what works best for the subject matter, the curriculum, the faculty, and student needs.

Design is an important aspect that ties back to everything I have mentioned above. Leveraging what faculty do best in the classroom is important, as is meeting student needs realistically. There are potentially a huge number of factors that play into design.  I suppose in the end I am more of a broad conceptualization type of designer.

 There are so many potentially valid approaches to mixing online and face to face content and delivery that using a single prescribed approach won't work in most cases. As I have redesigned courses that are fully online using my own experience and best practices, practices that I have arrived at over the last twenty years, I  am frequently reminded that my approach, and for that matter any given standard approach to ID, does not fit all cases. It pays to know what your tools (theories, technologies, and social interaction) do best, but it also pays to be flexible enough to help faculty leverage what they do best.

Thank you Linda for reviewing this!

Flipped video and the value of asynchronous playback.

I had not thought about it this way: I have been working on adapting a program from classroom to blended/hybrid (20 years in this business and still not sure of a definitive difference between these two), and ran across the document below in a MOOC. It struck me reading this that part of the value added by recording parts of a classroom lecture and using this in the LMS is the ability to emulate what is done in an asynchronous discussion, but with video. Students have the ability to replay portions of the video to catch content and nuance that they might miss in the classroom. I think we all go into meetings or classes and from time to time miss critical ideas or cues because the cell phone vibrates or some other distraction occurs.

If lecture videos are chunked, and edited for relevant content, they become potentially a more valuable learning opportunity than a simple video capture by itself.


http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-flipped-classrooms

Interesting and accessible reading from Campus Technology on ADA standards for classroom AV

This area has been an interest of mine for some time, and I have read up quite a lot on ADA compliance in a number of areas, but this is one of the best short overviews, complete with graphics, that I have seen recently.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/11/11/decoding-ada-standards-for-classroom-av.aspx

Seven Keys to Effective Feedback

This article is very helpful in defining the difference between true feedback, advice, and evaluation. The specific characteristics of feedback provide a means of evaluating your feedback to students prior to providing it. The could be adapted to a rubric for student peer assessment very easily, with fields of goal-oriented, timely, actionable, tangible, and user friendly. It also could easily be the basis for a PD exercise or brown bag.

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept12/vol70/num01/Seven-Keys-to-Effective-Feedback.aspx

Teaching Adolescents How to Evaluate the Quality of Online Information | Edutopia

This is an excellent and very accessible article on helping middle school (and I daresay any other level) students evaluate online resources for relevance, bias, accuracy, and reliability. If you are experienced in this area then you will find little in this article that is not familiar, but Julie Coiro's approach was useful to me in thinking about how to structure a lesson plan on this topic.



Teaching Adolescents How to Evaluate the Quality of Online Information | Edutopia

Reading a lot of iconoclastic writing about instructional design this week.

Today was sort of a watershed for me in terms of coming to grips with instructional models. I'm out actively looking for employment again, having been a "house Dad" for a year and a half. Earlier today. Many, if not most of the positions out there in distance education are citing the need for deep understanding of a model of one sort or another. ADDIE comes up frequently, as does ARCS and some variation on Merrill's component display theory (or at least some portion of it) in the advertisements. I'm familiar with, and have used these. My problem with them in the past is that they are fairly rigid and do not necessarily account for the organic nature of the teaching and learning processes, or with the individual idiosyncracies of the instructor or the content? So I have been pondering whether or not I am the only person finding these inadequate for the way I work.

So I am reading the materials in BLENDKIT2014 and I run across this statement:

"Brent Wilson (1995), a pioneer in e-learning, has been cautioning online course designers about the  downside of a systems approach for the past decade: An environment that is good for learning cannot be fully prepackaged and defined A more  flexible approach will open the doors to more possibilities based on learner goals and needs. However, as pointed out by Bates and Poole (2003), “a flexible approach requires a high level of skill to be effective”."

Yes! That's it. A model is simply a set of guidelines, and a set that may not be completely applicable in every situation. So what can we do to make the model more closely fit the organic nature of the educational process?

Canned feedback in online courses. What educational theory does that?

I just ran across an example of a means of feedback that I found a bit disturbing, but perhaps necessary in some cases.

In the past when I have needed to give feedback on assignments in classes I am am teaching, I have individually crafted responses. I will admit to having reused phrases when running into the same issues in essays over and over. I tend to treat these opportunities as "teachable moments", and so there is a requirement on my part to address the issues in a personal manner reacting to the individual and what I know of them instead of just the question or issue.

My experience is based upon class sizes that were never in excess of 50 individuals. That is my caveat.

But what do you do when you are dealing with the work of say, 150 individuals and you only have so many hours in the day?

Apparently a popular answer to this is to create a document with canned responses to assignments or problems. It is simple enough to copy and paste from the document into the feedback section of the assignment or the discussion and then customize with student name and any other information that is pertinent. In addition some instructors use macros to insert specific feedback into documents. These are interesting ideas, though I am hoping to never be in a situation where I need them. In an online course that is built on a basic constructivist model the primary role of the instructor is that of guide and/or curator and/or facilitator and/or concierge, which demands individually tailored interaction with the students.

Given that the ideal class size (the last time I looked) in an online class was something in the late 20s to low 30s, I wonder if these larger class sizes can meet the definition of constructivist, or are they constructionist, or something else?