Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture: Webinar Reflections: Reframing Visual Arts Instruc...

Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture: Webinar Reflections: Reframing Visual Arts Instruc...: Wow!  That's all I could think after last week's exhilarating webinar, Reframing Visual Arts Instruction with VoiceThread .  This was the se...

Reflection #2- Administration and Evaluation

This course has alerted to a variety of factors involved in the administration and evaluation of online programs. In particular, the articles on scalability provided me a much more comprehensive sense of the various factors (and tradeoffs) involved in growing online initiatives. Expanding online initiatives for example may result in limiting instructor interaction with students. In previous classes we have learned about the centrality of “social presence” and ways that the instructor needs to create community among participants. It does seem important to create highly interactive learning environments where participants feel vested and willing to take risks. That degree of interaction can be compromised in large programs that cannot sustain a small student instructor ratio. Of course, one of the central benefits to scaled-up programs is increased profitability, higher enrollments, and the ability to expand what may be a high-quality initiative for a larger group of learners. Those goals might be a central part of institutions’ strategic planning that are premised on developing online initiatives that are not just localized but broad in scope and create a greater impact. This notion of balance between connecting with individual learners and expanding programs to reach more learners, (but having less personalized contact) strikes me as a central dilemma many institutions need to deal with when thinking about administering and developing their online programs.

Reflection #1: Administration and Evaluation

So far I have been thinking tentatively about an evaluation plan for my e-learning initiative. I haven't yet determined the exact scope of my initiative. Part of this initiative is a new online course that I am developing within my universities educational technology program. This course is entitled “Educational Innovations” and focuses on school change and professional development. The course has a strong emphasis on using Web 2.0 tools and understanding how Web 2.0 can prompt teachers’ professional development. This course will probably comprise the focus of my evaluation plan. However the course itself is situated within a larger program that will likely become increasingly online with several of the core courses being offered in a fully online or hybrid format. In that sense I'm interested in developing an evaluation plan that has a broader scope focusing on the whole program.
From the group activity we completed this past week I became increasingly aware of the importance of beginning with a set of clearly identified goals and using these goals to give shape to the evaluation plan. Though this makes sense I suspect that a common pitfall of many initiatives is that the evaluation plan is actually performed ad hoc without being clearly derived from the learning goals of the program. So, I'll need to give thought to the essential goals of my initiative especially as they pertain to online teaching and learning. Overall I would like for students to gain confidence, efficacy, and an increasing disposition to use a variety of Web 2.0 tools to fuel their own professional development. The evaluation plan will need to emphasize the process of students exploring a variety of tools as they become more globally connected in their discussions of teaching and professional development. I know I will need to give more coherent shape to these notions so they can be crafted as measurable evaluation questions. In that regard I'm learning that the role of the evaluator and role of a researcher is very similar: to systematically collect evidence around a clear set of goals/questions and then to analyze that data in terms of the original questions. The framework identified in the Sanders & Sullins (2006) is very helpful in identifying a technical process for developing these questions and embedding them in a systematic data collection plan.

Reflection #2

Part I
I do plan on implementing the e-learning initiative that I developed for this course. Currently at my institution we are working on developing several elective courses that students could complete as they complete degrees in either educational technology or curriculum and instruction. This course would be intended as an elective for students who have a special interest in educational innovation, school reform, and/or professional development for teachers. Some specific challenges that would be involved in actually implementing this course would be to ensure that the course content is consistent with the broader program in which students are enrolled. We would want concepts to overlap among courses and within the overall program so as to make sure that the course goals fit into the larger program goals. I think that type of alignment is possible but we would need to take a careful look at overall program goals (especially if there are students from different programs who enroll in this course).
I also think that, as is the case with any new initiative, successful implementation would require the collaboration of several colleagues, both academic faculty and technology specialists. Since the course is designed as a partially online experience it would be important to involve support personnel to make sure that faculty who are new to online teaching would have access to the technical support and resources that would be required.

Part II
I did find the templates helpful in this course. One of the reasons they were helpful is that when planning online initiatives they serve as a reminder to be very explicit, detailed, and sequential in the design of all activities. Having a template serves as a reminder and a prompt to include all of the different steps and components that are necessary to ensure optimal student learning.
One recommendation that I have is to continue to incorporate the notion of “enduring understandings” throughout the course. There was focus on this notion in the first template that was completed; however the notion of enduring understandings wasn't as prominent as the course developed and we completed our broad plan and session directions. I think it would be helpful to focus heavily on that concept (enduring understandings, big ideas) throughout the course and to make sure that all the templates include specific reference to these. In that way I think students would be made even more aware of the importance of having a coherent design based on a set of understandings around which there's been careful reflection and revision throughout the course.

Reflection #1: Instructional Design

For my e-learning initiative I am interested in developing the framework for a graduate course that would focus on the relationship between information and communications technology (ICT) and educational /school reform. This course would be designed for practicing teachers and educational technology specialists in K-12 settings. In particular I want to develop a course that prompts students to examine the particular contributions that ICT can make towards larger school reform by considering the following essential questions: 1) what kinds of learning environments and educational technologies are best for supporting innovative educational technology programs; 2) what kinds of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments underlie effective reform efforts and 2) what are the characteristics of professional development programs that help sustain lasting and robust school reform?

I bring some knowledge (at fairly novice level) of some asynchronous and synchronous tools that can help engage students in these questions. Most of these tools I have become exposed to in the context of this program at JHU. I plan to conduct this initiative in a “blended” format meaning some meetings will take place in person and others will take place online. I plan for the live sessions to be conducted with a web-based conferencing platform I’ve been using, similar to Adobeconnect, that enables live video and audio conferencing. I would plan to have regular meetings with participants using this platform I’d plan to use some common asynchronous tools such as Voicethread. I'm impressed by the multimedia flexibility of voice thread and its user-friendliness. I would enable students to post reflections and collaborate with each other using voice thread while still providing other text-based forms of asynchronous communication such as blogs and wikis. Another tool I am intrigued by and gaining some familiarity with (although there is much to learn!) is Second Life. Second Life is a virtual 3-D environment that allows users to create an avatar and interact within an environment with other individuals. I see how Second Life environments can be used to support innovative professional development for educators by having visited some amazing Second Life site such as the ISTE site. I might plan to use Second Life throughout the course in order to help create a social space where participants can interact and gain access to additional resources related to educational technology and professional development. These resources would be selectively chosen to help students understand the relationship between ICT , professional development, and school reform.

Reflection #3

There are several ways in which this course impacted my conceptions of the role of a facilitator of online learning. Looking back, I think my preconceptions framed the role of the facilitators as those who works by themselves, in relative isolation. I think this preconception comes from my experience as a teacher in high school and college settings where much of the planning is done individually. But it is clear to me that given the technical and managerial complexity of facilitating online learning instructors need to work collaboratively with other. Online instructors need to work within their organization/institution to gain to the resources and support that they need. Given the nature of online learning the technical requirements of facilitating an online experience often require a fairly high level of support. For example, at my own institution we recently transitioned from Blackboard to Moodle as the primary course management system. For all instructors this required close consultation with personnel from the technology services department. New training modules needed to be developed and many instructors needed to have access to individual consultations and debugging/ problem solving as they developed competence in the new course management system. Online instructors required even more support from technology services since their courses rely so heavily on technological components. In general it seems that online instructors need to work closely with support personnel in their organization to have necessary support and resources in technical areas that might be outside of their area of expertise.

Another preconception that was altered in this course has to do with the significance of developing community and teaming strategies. I had envisioned online learning has taken place primarily in individual interactions between students and the instructor. That is, most of the learning experiences in online environments that I had envisioned involved students completing work as a "independent study" and receiving feedback from the instructor but not necessarily engaging in much interaction with other students in the course. Several readings and class discussions have made me more aware of the significant role that the instructor has in building community and ways of developing ongoing and meaningful interaction among the students. In fact, the conduct of this course that relied heavily on student exchanges in the discussion board demonstrated how community can be built around student exchanges with each other. That can be important as students build knowledge and learn to become more attuned to each other's contributions. I think that as students become more familiar with each other and trust develops they become better able to challenge each other's ideas and help each other think in analytically deeper ways. I have also noticed that dynamic happening more and more in this course and expect that it will continue in future courses. In general, it seems to me a significant aspect of online learning involves the collaborative generation of knowledge that occurs when the facilitator designs many opportunities for students to collaborate and develop a healthy learning community.

Reflection #2 Facilitating E-Learning

In preparing my colleagues to teach an online professional development course I would be sure to focus on the various teacher roles in a virtual environment that can include four categories: pedagogical, social, managerial, and technical (Berge, 1995). I think these four roles are critical for instructors to be able to grasp the variety of functions that they will need to perform. These roles include effectively facilitating discussions, promoting social interaction and effective collaboration among participants, organizing and managing the logistics of discussions, and technically managing tools and the environment so that learning occurs in an efficient way. By focusing on these roles it will help instructors adopt a framework that will enable them to be flexible in their teaching and embody effective teaching practices. These practices involve setting clear expectations for learners, being able to facilitate high levels of critical discussion, and effectively diagnosing student understandings.

Another topic that I would emphasize include strategies for enhancing the instructor’s social presence. I would want to convey the abundant research that indicates that teaching presence is a significant predictor of students’ perceived learning, satisfaction, and sense of community. Social presence is essential to creating effective online environments and encompasses many strategies that the teacher does to create a community of inquiry. By teaching the rational for and strategies to enhance social presence, all participants within the online learning environment stand to benefit and their engagement and depth of learning will likely be enhanced.

Finally I would want to address various tools that can be used to promote synchronous and asynchronous forms of communication. Most successful online learning experiences incorporate a variety of learning strategies that enable learners to connect in live time through synchronous interactions and connect asynchronously through tools such as blogs and discussion boards. I would emphasize e various tools that can be easily learned and implemented that would help instructors use effectively both synchronous and asynchronous strategies. For example, many web 2.0 tools such as Voicethread enable multimedia forms of interaction but are not overly complex for instructors or students to learn. By incorporating a variety of asynchronous and synchronous tools instructors would have a larger repertoire of strategies they could employ depending on their particular learning goals and the needs of their students. Attending to this variety of tools would help prevent instructors from over-reliance on a limited number of their favorite strategies. While it would be impossible to cover every available instructional tool, focusing on some of the best current asynchronous and synchronous technologies will help provide instructors a framework to be able to make the best choices given their particular instructional contexts.