Tag Archives: 509

OLTD 509 Reflection 2 – Summary of Learning

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OLTD Learning Outcomes:

  • Become familiar with common terms, definitions and elements related to online environments
  • Understand, design and commit to student success in online learning environments
    • Share engagement strategies and tips
  • Critically assess and evaluate resources for best practice in online learning

OLTD 509 Critical Challenge Question:

  • How can you select emerging technologies which fit your developing philosophy of education?

Evidence to Support the Learning Outcomes and the Challenge Question:

Reflection to Support Evidence:

My evidence is a mind map capturing the content and discussions of the seminar I facilitated with Charlene Stewart and Lisa Lewis, as well as the two seminars I attended. The mind map contains quotes from discussions, as well as links to resources shared by the facilitators or participants of the seminars. The mind map was created using the free cloud tool mindmeister, which allows you to view and explore the map from the link provided above. The seminar I helped to facilitate is coloured white, while those I participated in are coloured yellow. I have also included the summary blog posts from the seminars I participated in.

Throughout the duration of this course, I was exposed to a variety of emerging technologies and the teaching strategies associated with them. In all of the seminars, all of the participants shared a variety of perspectives and resources associated with the topic, increasing the depth of the topic exploration. Every seminar allowed me to develop an understanding of the terminologies and considerations around each technology and its use in the classroom. In all seminars, I was given the opportunity to consider the technology in my own context. My summary blog posts discuss the emerging technologies in my own context and from my own philosophy of education.

Although my context is highly specialized and is removed from teaching, I found ways to take away information from all seminars that could potentially have a positive impact on student learning. Being exposed to all of the discussions happening within the public Google+ group throughout the course also helped me to understand the breadth of emerging technologies and appreciate the need to evaluate and contextualize them before “jumping in”. The discussions our cohort had in Google+ highlight how unique each teaching situation and group of learners is, which further underlines how important it is for educators to remain grounded in their philosophy of education.

Understanding and critically evaluating emerging technologies for their use in the classroom is critical. As technology evolves so will the knowledge, skills and attitudes students will need to be successful in their lives. Educators must be able to keep pace with the changes in technology to best meet the needs of the students in their classrooms, and be critical of the technologies in order to protect their students as well. Educators on the “front line” of technology adoption must generally be prepared for resistance, and need to be able to collaborate with supportive professionals to encourage change to happen within their schools.

OLTD 509 Reflection 1 – Seminar Planning and Co-Facilitation

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OLTD Learning Outcomes:

  • Plan learning opportunities most suitable to the strengths and challenges of a variety of environments
  • Develop and design intentional learning activities suitable for the appropriate environment and the learner
    • Select strategies and resources appropriate for environment, learners and learning outcomes
  • Undertake engagement with environments through online facilitation for effective learning
    • Moderation and mediation
    • Understand how to build rapport and manage groups
      • establish relationships with learners and families
      • build teacher to student rapport
      • engage in building learning communities and communities of practice
  • Critically assess and evaluate resources for best practice in online learning
  • Develop practical and technical skills in all phases of concept, development, design, implementation, etc.

OLTD 509 Critical Challenge Question:

How can you inspire, initiate and implement sustainable integration of emerging technologies in your own practice, and in the practice of others?

Evidence to Support the Learning Outcomes and the Challenge Question:

Reflection to Support Evidence:

The evidence I have chosen to support the above learning outcomes and critical challenge question includes a PDF copy of the Google Doc that was used to plan the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) seminar, as well as the website that was created to host the seminar. My co-facilitators were Charlene Stewart and Lisa Lewis. The Google Doc was used as an outline, to discuss and curate our seminar during the second week of the course, and the website was used to deliver the seminar during the third week of the course. Our seminar participants were given editing privileges for the website so it could become an artifact and reference document after the seminar was over.

While planning the seminar, Lisa, Charlene and myself discussed the various strengths and weaknesses of presenting our materials in a variety of ways, including through Google+ (both public and private groups), VIULearn (D2L) and in the format of the website. It was important to us that we designed the seminar in such a way that participants didn’t have difficulty accessing material and wouldn’t be overwhelmed with the amount of material there was. We felt the website allowed us to organize the materials to make them easily accessible to participants.

The limit to the website was the interactivity, so we had participants post to the website to capture information, and then share it in Google+ to allow for more ease when discussing. Both the website host (Weebly) and the discussion area (Google+) have been used in the past by our participants, which informed our decision to use them. For us, it was important that the participants engaged with the material and not spend a lot of time learning a new tool. In this way, we were very deliberate in our choice of learning environment, and very mindful of our learners.

The Google Doc used to plan the seminar shows the evaluation and collection of materials, the making of decisions on presentation and the planning of the seminar. I feel that it displays a growth in my ability to negotiate and understand the challenges and strengths of different environments and strategies for developing materials online.

The website presented demonstrates part of the engagement our participants had with the seminar. Although it does not contain the entirety of our interactions with our participants, I believe that it shows our attempts to create a positive learning environment with a strong facilitator presence. I also feel that the website, as a collection of the “visible” learning, shows that our seminar was able to create an interesting dialogue between our participants. Based on their summary blog posts (linked on the “Activity 4 – Summary Blog Post” page of the website) our participants engaged with the materials enough that they were able to consider how the seminar related to their own contexts.

I also feel that the Google+ discussion area demonstrates, to a certain extent, our engagement with the seminar participants and the building of a small community focused on discussing BYOD in their own practice. I believe that I was able to contribute to and engage with the seminar participants in a way that supported their engagement with the seminar.

Being able to plan, design and develop learning activities that take both the learning environment and your learners into account is challenging but is necessary in order to create an effective learning experience. It is also important to be able to assess how appropriate an environment is for your chosen activities, so you can leverage appropriate technologies that support, rather than hinder, your learners.

Developing effective moderation and facilitation skills will become more important to me as the landscape of training and support shifts in my position. There is an increasing interest in leveraging our existing technologies in new ways to support our faculty and students, which will likely involve more online and distance support and training. Supporting faculty communities of practice will become a larger part of my role. In these situations, building relationships, trust and rapport with and between participants will be the key to success.

All About Virtual Labs – Summary Blog Post

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Science! by Andrew Huff. CC BY-NC 2.0.

Science! by Andrew Huff. CC BY-NC 2.0.

Virtual labs were a hard sell for me. I’ve always been a hands-on person – from my technical position to my fiber art hobbies – I like manipulating the world around me and seeing what it does. High school labs were the reason I was originally drawn to Science, and a big reason I chose to do my B.Sc. If it hadn’t been for the move to Nanaimo, I would have kept my job as a laboratory technician and continued to work in research Science.

When starting this seminar my idea of a virtual lab was limited in scope. Although I have trolled through the internet looking for some virtual labs, I hadn’t been able to find anything really good (I realize now that was probably in part due to poor choice of key words in searches). A lot of the virtual labs confirmed my worst fears – “virtual lab” either meant a lot of reading and some quizzes, or it meant a series of clicks while watching pre-set animations play. There was nothing inspiring about virtual labs – it would be better to film an instructor doing a demo.

After this seminar I realize there really is some good stuff out there, and more of it is available without a major capital investment then I appreciated. I really saw the power some of the simulations had to allow student to manipulate the virtual world, and to think, questions and “do” outside of the pre-set animation box.

Before this seminar I knew that virtual labs would be able to accomplish teaching the “what” of Science education – the content. Now, I see that the right virtual lab can also accomplish the “how” of Science education – thinking and acting as a scientist. I know, and can clearly see from our wiki review, that not all virtual labs are created equally. There are some virtual labs that knocked my socks off, but there were a few that I really didn’t like.

The final piece about virtual labs that I’m still not sure about is the lack of interaction between students in the virtual space. Charlene Stewart discussed this point in her blog post, Teaching Science the Virtual Way. Throughout the OLTD program I have really realized the importance of having a course community, and right now I see virtual labs as being very isolated. Given that there is more emphasis on collaborative learning, there needs to be some attention paid to how to build collaborative virtual experiments in the online environment.

This seminar really helped me “turn a corner” on virtual labs. Although they are still more individual activities, and care must be taken when selecting them, some virtual labs allow students to behave as if they are in a real laboratory space and drive their own learning, which is very powerful.

Disruptive Innovation in Blended Learning: Summary Post

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The “Disruptive Innovation in Blended Learning” seminar came at a very interesting time in my department. My colleague and I are writing a proposal for a conference presentation later in the summer, which will focus on how the Centre has (mostly) kept pace with the updates to our current LMS (Brightspace by D2L) and how we handled the change from version 10.2 to 10.4 last summer. The beginning of our talk gives some statistics on our university – pointing out we are small enough to be able to be agile and responsive to change, unlike the bigger universities in the US. The bigger universities have to have much more complicated change management procedures in place to keep pace with technological change.

Compared to the pace of change possible in a K-12 school, however, we are moving at a glacial. Many of the schools featured in our readings made big changes quickly and shifted practice within a couple of years to something completely different. I know there are a lot of factors at play, including size of staff and student population, but the excitement generated by these radical shifts and strong results is hard to resist!

In my specific context, I am in the unique and terrifying position of supporting online learning for many instructors, and that can involve some serious pedagogical questions. It is easy to say “this is how I would do it” but a lot more difficult to give information and let someone decide what will work for themselves and their students. Additionally, I don’t have a lot of opportunity to try these models out for myself so recommending something is difficult.

I have helped to build online training courses, but never a blended one (although, hopefully there will be one in the next year). Given that my audience will likely be adults, perhaps teaching faculty, I would likely follow a flex-type model. I think this approach allows enough flexibility in scheduling, while still allowing for direct group instruction when needed. In the case of working with teaching faculty, group instruction would more like a group conversation or jigsaw, as opposed to “direct instruction”.

I think many of the “fully online” courses I have built were intended to be enriched virtual courses – instructors or students complete what they can alone, and come to our Centre for support (phone, email or face-to-face) when they need additional support. Many faculty would prefer direct 1:1 support over group courses or workshops, so this seems like a model that we might push toward more. It is difficult to support the range of skill levels we do, especially when people who are just starting to use the LMS generally require at least an hour or two of direct orientation to the system. I think that if we could really leverage the enriched virtual courses that are already built we could reach more people more effectively.

My struggle with enriched virtual is that it is difficult to know if and when you should approach someone and ask if they need help. The courses I have facilitated have been entirely optional, so there is a fine line between helping and intruding. It might be interesting to blend an enriched virtual model with an optional “flipped” style stream – having a set “coming together” time to air grievances and talk about issues and successes with using the system. I think it is really important to make sure faculty get a chance to talk together and build their own support networks, because otherwise it is difficult for someone in my position to move away from being a “sage on the stage” when it comes to working within an LMS.

Although radical change may not be possible university-wide, I think there are opportunities to shift how my department handles support and training for the better. I’m not sure how happy our clientele would be if we changed overnight, but I really think to serve them best we have to start making small, meaningful changes.