so my course has started… 14 enrolled, so far there are 9 that have shown up. One has dropped
i am concerned about several things.
I am not confident that i know exactly how certain things in the course are going to work – the gradebook, the discusion ratings. I just discovered how to make a custom rating scheme today and set it up, but i have no idea how it will work.
I finally got my rubrics finalized. It has been a challenge designing assessments for this Pass/Fail course. I don’t like it.
I have not gone in and tested yet with a student identity. (i confess – this is not good – so do as i suggest, not as i do).
No problems with using voicethreads and setting up the blogs. Except no one has done a video post… might be becuase they don’t have the hardware. I LOVE that they have interacted with each other. I had hoped they would. What i had not anticipated was that they would script and read their comments. And provide them in both audio and text formats.
I am not happy with how the written assignments had to be designed. I want to be able to attach files, reply to posts/have a discussion, add subject lines, and i can only do that with the discussion forums sort of… The problem is that i want to collect them all and then once all have been collected, then turn them back over to the students for review and comments…
I had to recreate the BB. The news forum is not working. The students can’t see the add new topic button and can’t see any of the reply links on the discussion topics. weird… So i hid it and recreated it and now they can see it. It is a bummer though becuase the news forum has an announcements block tied to it that is a nice feature. Unfortunately, that too is buggy and the see previous announcments link does not show anything beyond the current post.
some desicisions i’ve made:
i am using the topic summary pane for the course information documents. People read from left to right and this is important first information for the students to read, but after reading through this info. it takes a less important role in the course… and i don’t want it taking up the valuable course content real estate on the front page, so off to the left is the perfect location for this… it is there, visible throughout the course so that students can refer back to it, but it is not in the way of the current course content and areas of course interaction.
I am using the top center pane above the topic areas as a newsflash area. I want students to feel my presence every time they login immediately rather than having to go click on something to see an announcement. I will post daily announcements in this location. So, though there is a news forum, and a news area built into moodle, I will use this area to communicate on a daily basis with the course participants. I will archive these posts in the news forum, so that if they are missed, the course participants can see a running archive of each of my newsflashes. In addition, the moodle news forum forces subscription, which means every one will always get an email when anything is posted in the forum… I hate that, it is really irritating to get all these emails outside of the context of the course… a listserv is vastly different in nature from a course… i don’t understand why there is not the option to completely restrict course activity to the course location in moodle. I don’t want emails from my course as a professor or as a student. So that is why i also created the bulletin board in the class community are of my course. It is a space for non-course related communications, and it won’t force sending emails to everyone.. . my preference would have been to consolidate this area into one. So, since the moodle news forum is this forced subscription area, i had to come up with another area to meet the need of non course related communications for class community purposes. This is irritating because what this means for me as the instructor is that i now have 2 areas to tend to instead of just one and for my workload the result is more work. Another factor was that in the news forum, you only have 30 minutes to edit your post… reorgainze it, change the date… so if you are trying to set it up as a community area for students it’s narrow functional scope just makes that too difficult… you can’t organize posts, edit them, the date posted becomes an issue, etc.
course modules follow the course manual. I organized them logically into the three week workshop modules. Loosely the content falls logically as follows 2 weeks for each step in the Manual.
each module has a consistent structure. They begin with an overview of the activities for the module, followed by a discussion, followed by assignments or activities . every module also has an ask a question area and a reflection blog activity. Consistency is very important from module to module. the questions asked in module one will all post to the module 1 question area… this so that i can best manage and understand the questions posted. One discussion per module. Very important for workload reasons.
its all in the design.
i discovered that there is no where to “hide” documents in moodle… i have been creating documents and organizing them in what i thought were “hidden” topic areas, so that i could hyperlink to documents from other documents so they could be displayed how, where and when i want them to only. BUT, that is appearently not possible… so i have spent the last 2 days recreating each of the topic areas to accomodate that reality… which bites.
First i created my course information documents and tried to get them laid out in a location on the moodle coursemap that makes sense. I am using the course summary pane for that. I am having to use things in ways i don’t think they intended to get this to look and feel like i want. I don’t get the long center topic thing… it gets too long…you need advanced organizers to visually chunk the information… i am still trying to figure it all out. also, they call dicussions “forums” and respond-reply and modules – topics… so i ‘ve had to map, try to map analagous features and functions to what i am used to.
Then i started to try to outline the modules just to get a structure in… Along the way i have discovered better ways to do things… For example it is better to create a web page than to upload a file, cuz you can’t edit files on the fly… and they don’t contain the built in moodle page nav bars…you have to use your browser back button and you have to edit the original word file save it, upload it to the files folder, then create a link to that file… etc. with a web page you can just create it as a draft and edit easily. I started out using the glossary tool for the shared references, but decided to move that to diigo instead.
I started to think about the class community areas and decided that the main pane should be used as a newsflash area… you can’t move it and you can’t put anything above it, so i have now also also created a table in it as a navigation bar to some additional help type resource that would be too buried course info area… i will change the newsflash often and archive them in the news forum, which i renamed Bulletin Board… the way the news forum works is that you have to be “subscribed” to it which means you will get an annoying email anytime one is added, and you only get 30 minutes to add/edit anything to it, you can’t change the dates, so all my standard “announcement” type documents can’t really go in that space… it is hugely annoying… I have had to create a Bulletin Board to serve that function… its fine. I will live with it.
The other things i have learned or decided to do are to use the topics as Modules that outline the content of each content “chunk” of the course. I also will have a question area and links to the main course reflections blog in each module. I have learned to hide “topics” so i am putting documents in there and then linking to them where i need them… i really don’t get the label function for setting up the topic … seems like a lot of energy for text that does nothing. I am bummed that i can’t get a private discussion area with individual students easily… i am ending up using the coursemail feature for that… there may be another way to do this that i am missing, but i am not sure. I thought i might be able to use the assignment form for that, but none of the features that allow for private submission to the instructor result in the ability to reply back and forth in a forum type way… so i have to work around the private functionality of course mail to retain that needed privacy aspect… cumbersome!
I have also closed all the blocks that are extraneous and reorganized them into locations that make more sense to me… the news is in the upper right. under that is the people block, then the calendar, then the upcoming events… you can’t move blocks above the center block which is irritating… so that is why i made the nav bar table in that center block…
I created my class community module with links to the bulletin board and participant profiles. Oh, i have also begun to set up my exemplar course activity – link to a course for observation with MP3 files attached to use as side commentary as the participants tour the course… pretty cool. I have been figuring things out little by little in this tool as i go along…
Have i said i hate the subscribe thingy… at first i thought is was so stoopid, you know …i don’t want emails from my course management tool, every time an entry is made…errrrrrrrr. But i have reconsidered. I am not sure, i will have to ask the students. Now I think it will help keep track of the discussions. So, i have them all set to force subscribe…. we shall see.
1. The course is supposed to be 12 weeks long.
2. The course title is: Introduction to Online Teaching. so i have to make these assumptions to design the course and target the conent: the students are new to online teaching and learning ,they have not taught online before, this may be their first online instructional experience, they are interested in learning more about this, they may be thinking about developing and teaching an online course, or they may be asked to do so in hte near future
3. Content? I have been working with online faculty, doing research, developing a home grown course management system, working with large numbers of faculty, students, campuses, and instructional support staff for more than 13 years precisily on how to build an effective teaching and learning environment online… so i know this content… i am an expert in this…
First, there are 7 steps in my process… (i had a wonderful mentor when i first began in instructional design in the 80’s who introduced me to Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process, and how he made a career adapting that theory to the fields of organization, team, and leadership development. David Sibbet is an amazing man who had a profound effect on me and the person i have become in more ways than he will ever know. I am the instructional designer that i am today because of him and because of the understanding about “process” that i learned from him and have used over the years to “understand” the process of how to “develop” effective and satisfied online faculty, that can build and teach effective and satisfying online teaching and learning environemnts. I have had a lot of success with this… and it all comes back to my seven step process…)
So, my first design delema was how do i organize 7 steps (and an ice breaker, class community activities/resources, course wrap up activities, engaging content presentation, interaction, assessment and feedback) into a 12 week course… : ) As my architect would say, you can’t put 10 pounds of sugar in a 5 pound cup!!
The second challenge was using moodle. Now first you need to know that i have never built a course in a CMS that i did not design myself… (one of my first thoughts was … “i wonder if this is how my faculty feel when they open the course development application i designed for them?”) i am probably unique in the world for this …but it is none the less true… the first time i opened moodle and looked at i was frustrated like i am when i look at any of the commercial course management applications. I hate them. application developers not teachers designed them… and though they are very nice and intersting people (i have very nice colleagues that are app developers), they design from their context which starts with the technology, not the teaching…i have spent the last 14 years of my professional life (well at least 12) passionately designing a simple integrated teaching an learning environment that is flexible and designed according to my vision of what an online should do, feel like, look like, function, etc…
so, needless to say, faced with moodle, i had some thoughts like… how the hell am i going to make this do what i want/need it to do…
I also realize for the first time how tied to the my understanding and interpretations of effective online teaching and learning practices my design is… i mean i really didn’t realize that… and so faced with another tool, that does not have that underlying sensiiblity, how foreign, and out of water i felt… it is very weird… i always felt very strongly that the technology was just that… a tool and that it was the practices that mattered, not the tool. i am now faced with this rather uncomfortable realization, that the tool is much more integrated into the pedagogy than i realized.
I have loved every minute of building this course. It is the process – frustrating as it has been at times – that has been so satisfying for me and seeing what i can do with moodle. I couldn’t wait for work to be over, so i could get home and start to work on my course…. and now i can’t wait for the course to actually start, so i can see how it will work with students.
The first time i started using moodle, i just jumped into it cold, no documentation , just pushed buttons.
I guess i am just observing myself and how i do things. I don’t read manuals, or like to use instructions. I like to learn by doing. I also like to be shown. I MUCH prefer someone to show me how to do something. Then, as i am doing something, if i can’t quite figure it out, (and there is no one around to ask or show me) i will look up the step by step instructions on how to do it. But there has to be a specific thing i need to do and it needs to be in a real context – i need to have it be an urgent need to do accomplish something. In other words, the motivation to do the thing needs to be strong enough that i will do anything even look for and use instructions to achieve that end.
So this is how it has been with moodle for me… i have not used a specific manual… i just played with it, pushed buttons and figured it out. That is how I found the “gradebook” the other day. I just clicked buttons and tabs and set it up. I have nooooooooo idea if i did it right, how it works, if it will work. I did the same thing with the quiz, the survey and the written assignment collector… I have looked up a couple of things along the way. Just googled for instructions. That worked.
But I am not sure how to test things from the student perspective, so it is hard to write instructions and to really understand how this is all going to work. And there are some things i have not really figured out yet. I guess there is a tactile aspect to how i like to learn and an experiential aspect… and i like that. i really like it.
An Introduction and Machinima about SL: http://www.silverandgoldie.com/linden_congress.htm
A presentation on SL and SUNY explaining what i hope to do in the future.
To get started you have to do 2 things:
1. Join: https://secure-web2.secondlife.com/join/
2. Download: http://secondlife.com/community/downloads.php
Once you are in SL:
Find me in SL and send me an invitation to be friends – avatar name: Alejandra Subagja
my home in SL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/SUNY%20Learning%20Network/128/128/0
The Basics:
Navigation: walking, flying, using camera controls, creating landmarks, using the map, et home, force sun
Communication: chat, IM, history window, friends
Simple building tutorial: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ANGEL%20Learning%20Isle/18/165/29
Avatar:ng, inventory, free stuff
Some Second Life locations to visit (you need to have download SL and created your avatar to visit these SL locations):
Some internet Links on SL: