CEP 820 Reflection
In a couple of paragraphs, reflect on the critical design decisions and the critical pedagogical decisions you've made in the creation of your online course. Explain the theoretical foundations that have grounded your online course design process. Also, tell your audience (i.e., would-be online course designers) about the pitfalls you encountered and how to avoid making the same mistakes. Essentially, this entry would allow a colleague to benefit from your experience.
My LMS is what it is because of the instructors, lectures, readings, and labs in this course. I have worked harder on my LMS than I ever imagined and I enjoy it all. I began my LMS by choosing what could potentially be tools or features of the online course. I choose interactive tools like iBooks. The developer notebook was a great way to jot down our thoughts for creating our LMSs and looking back I see that some of the tools I first thought of are not a part of my LMS at all, such as, BrainPop videos and interactive diagrams. These never made the cut because of constraints such as memberships and lack of access on iPads. We choose our platform after filling in a comparison table of different platforms and defending our choices with good reasoning and examining other LMSs from past students. After this careful consideration, I chose Haiku. I decided not to go with Google Sites or Weebly because the exemplars were really good in Haiku, and I am already familiar with Weebly and Google Sites and I wanted to learn a platform intended to be an LMS by design.
The studies by Matthew Wicks in his National Primer on K-12 Online Learning helped to shape my understanding of what goes into an LMS. In this study, he looks closely at what online courses look like, how students communicate and interact with the teacher, what professional development looks like for teachers, if online learning really even works, and school policies at the state or school level which are needed when considering online learning. This comprehensive study helped me get the big picture and all the details of what to think about with my LMS. I began to shape my LMS with these ideas in mind.
We looked at rubrics for our own LMS development. We were given the chance to choose our own Rubric which is great because there isn’t one rubric for all types of learners or LMSs. I chose the California State Univ: Chico Rubric for Online Learning because it had some categories which matched well with my ideas of an LMS such as innovative teaching with technology. Later in the course we were encouraged to create our own rubrics for the students that will take our online courses. Both of these were really helpful in guiding my planning of the course and each lesson. Dr. Gardner Campbell gave us ideas to help clarify our ideals for assessment. Konrad Glogowski’s presentation allowed me to understand the assessments I do are strong. He said we need to make the goals clear and I have provided students with rubrics at the start of the course, well ahead of the assessment. He also said we need to make assessment conversational. I took this to mean we need to give students the chance to learn from each other. I often ask students to share their understanding on an assessment after they’ve tried independently. They can then do peer-to-peer teaching.
The live lectures in CEP 820 were a great way to get immediate feedback and also made us feel connected and not so alone online. These were especially key as we read about communication and collaboration in online AOT asynchronous online teaching and SOT synchronous online teaching. This is where my thinking began to change as to how I chose to set up my LMS. I had originally intended to have a AOT approach but as I read about asynchronous and synchronous online teaching in articles like this: Perspectives of Canadian high school distance education teachers: Elizabeth Murphy, María A. Rodríguez-Manzanares and Michael Barbour, my thoughts began to change and I saw the benefits for SOT. It was now that I began to take a hybrid approach to my LMS as well. I decided that if I was going to ask students to be temporally dependent then I could also offer some face-to-face contact, especially since they are only 8-10 year old students. This would allow for me to clear up any misconceptions and also to create a closer connection with the class and peers towards other peers.
I’ve created lessons that reach a wide audience because that’s how I teach in my classroom. However, it’s taken me some time to really understand what that means online. The peer feedback and instructor feedback in our Developer Notebooks has really helped me to groom my LMS to be more ready for a variety of learners than I could have ever done on my own. The final readings on UDA have really helped me pinpoint where I haven’t addressed multiple learners, such as creating a glossary of terms for those students who need more clarification. The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST): http://www.cast.org and The National Center on Universal Design for Learning: http://www.udlcenter.org/ help me to see what more I can do to accomidate all learners. I hope to also provide multiple ways to access the text such as making it possible to enlarge.
I have learned so much from CEP 820. I had no idea how to embed so many different parts of the web before I started this course. I pushed myself to learn how to manipulate iFrames to get just the right size and sometimes just the right content onto a page. I am grateful for being able to learn so much about online learning.
My LMS is what it is because of the instructors, lectures, readings, and labs in this course. I have worked harder on my LMS than I ever imagined and I enjoy it all. I began my LMS by choosing what could potentially be tools or features of the online course. I choose interactive tools like iBooks. The developer notebook was a great way to jot down our thoughts for creating our LMSs and looking back I see that some of the tools I first thought of are not a part of my LMS at all, such as, BrainPop videos and interactive diagrams. These never made the cut because of constraints such as memberships and lack of access on iPads. We choose our platform after filling in a comparison table of different platforms and defending our choices with good reasoning and examining other LMSs from past students. After this careful consideration, I chose Haiku. I decided not to go with Google Sites or Weebly because the exemplars were really good in Haiku, and I am already familiar with Weebly and Google Sites and I wanted to learn a platform intended to be an LMS by design.
The studies by Matthew Wicks in his National Primer on K-12 Online Learning helped to shape my understanding of what goes into an LMS. In this study, he looks closely at what online courses look like, how students communicate and interact with the teacher, what professional development looks like for teachers, if online learning really even works, and school policies at the state or school level which are needed when considering online learning. This comprehensive study helped me get the big picture and all the details of what to think about with my LMS. I began to shape my LMS with these ideas in mind.
We looked at rubrics for our own LMS development. We were given the chance to choose our own Rubric which is great because there isn’t one rubric for all types of learners or LMSs. I chose the California State Univ: Chico Rubric for Online Learning because it had some categories which matched well with my ideas of an LMS such as innovative teaching with technology. Later in the course we were encouraged to create our own rubrics for the students that will take our online courses. Both of these were really helpful in guiding my planning of the course and each lesson. Dr. Gardner Campbell gave us ideas to help clarify our ideals for assessment. Konrad Glogowski’s presentation allowed me to understand the assessments I do are strong. He said we need to make the goals clear and I have provided students with rubrics at the start of the course, well ahead of the assessment. He also said we need to make assessment conversational. I took this to mean we need to give students the chance to learn from each other. I often ask students to share their understanding on an assessment after they’ve tried independently. They can then do peer-to-peer teaching.
The live lectures in CEP 820 were a great way to get immediate feedback and also made us feel connected and not so alone online. These were especially key as we read about communication and collaboration in online AOT asynchronous online teaching and SOT synchronous online teaching. This is where my thinking began to change as to how I chose to set up my LMS. I had originally intended to have a AOT approach but as I read about asynchronous and synchronous online teaching in articles like this: Perspectives of Canadian high school distance education teachers: Elizabeth Murphy, María A. Rodríguez-Manzanares and Michael Barbour, my thoughts began to change and I saw the benefits for SOT. It was now that I began to take a hybrid approach to my LMS as well. I decided that if I was going to ask students to be temporally dependent then I could also offer some face-to-face contact, especially since they are only 8-10 year old students. This would allow for me to clear up any misconceptions and also to create a closer connection with the class and peers towards other peers.
I’ve created lessons that reach a wide audience because that’s how I teach in my classroom. However, it’s taken me some time to really understand what that means online. The peer feedback and instructor feedback in our Developer Notebooks has really helped me to groom my LMS to be more ready for a variety of learners than I could have ever done on my own. The final readings on UDA have really helped me pinpoint where I haven’t addressed multiple learners, such as creating a glossary of terms for those students who need more clarification. The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST): http://www.cast.org and The National Center on Universal Design for Learning: http://www.udlcenter.org/ help me to see what more I can do to accomidate all learners. I hope to also provide multiple ways to access the text such as making it possible to enlarge.
I have learned so much from CEP 820. I had no idea how to embed so many different parts of the web before I started this course. I pushed myself to learn how to manipulate iFrames to get just the right size and sometimes just the right content onto a page. I am grateful for being able to learn so much about online learning.