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My very first semester in the ETEC program during the spring semester of 2018 I took ETEC 6253 Distance Learning. Little did I know at that time how instrumental my time spent in that course would be to my success as an instructional designer in the fall of 2020 right in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
My final project for that course was to develop a Blackboard-hosted distance learning course entitled; "Identifying and Analyzing Variation for Process Improvement." Essentially, the content for that course was an outgrowth of some parts of an on-site Six Sigma Greenbelt course I had developed and delivered several times for a company in 2015 - 2017. Of course I had to make modifications to much of the content, and the associated activities to format it for online delivery. The premise of the course was to develop a blended course that could be delivered via an online learning platform with on-site project work and activities done by the students.
Opportunity to build upon the ETEC 6253 Distance Learning Experience
Opportunity to build upon the ETEC 6253 Distance Learning Experience
Fast forward to Summer of 2020. I had been poised to go to a company in Wisconsin and teach the course to some of their employees from Wisconsin, Indiana, and Mexico. Two weeks before I was set to drive to Wisconsin, I received a call asking me if it would be possible for me to teach the class via distance learning due to COVID. I said that I had indeed done some work towards migrating the course to online but it would take me a couple of months (turned out to be very stressful months!) to get it done. After receiving a contract I identified an online learning platform, Thinkific, and develop a lesson plan for the 40 hour course, ending up with six- four hour zoom sessions and a series of sixteen one hour online sessions. The online sessions consisted of a mixture of recorded presentations, quizzes, written materials, and animated videos that I had developed. I also recorded the live Zoom sessions and uploaded them after each session for the students review.
Launching the course
Launching the course
Before we launched the course, we had to experiment to try to find the mix of technologies that would work with the available resources. For example I found that my internet connection was adequate to Stream Zoom if I disconnected our ROKU and prevented our security system from uploading clips in the middle of the live stream. But I could not use the Prezi-Video application concurrently with ZOOM, the combination maxed out my bandwidth and computing capacity. It was a good thing we did some pre-testing!
I learned what a weather man feels like working in front of the green screen.... a large portion of my teaching was to demonstrate the various types of brainstorming activities and meeting facilitation techniques utilized in leading a Green Belt project team. I accomplished that by building a large white board in our spare bedroom and arranging my "studio" around that backdrop. Then I practiced keeping eye contact with the camera while writing and placing sticky notes. All told, this was quite a learning experience, and I am certain that first semester of ETEC 6253 Distance Learning made it much more successful than it might have been without the course.
The skills that I used in developing this blended course, and handling the physical setup, as well as working distantly with the various people to get it launched were instrumental in its success.
The live Zoom Sessions were recorded and made available on the Thinkific Site at the end of each session. Many of those sessions consisted of live demonstrations on how to facilitate a team brain storming session with wall charts and post-it notes. Those included doing an opportunity tree, stakeholder analysis, diagramming a process, and prioritizing using a necessity feasibility chart.
During the live Zoom sessions, I could interact with the participants in each training site. My training partner would monitor the written feedback and alert me of questions or discussion via cell phone.
They had installed "Owl" video systems at each location that did a good job of tracking who was speaking and zooming towards that person. But I did have to pay strict attention to the Zoom highlights when someone started talking.
The live Zoom "recording studio" consisted of a spare bedroom set up with a white board and a work station. This location was chosen due to the lighting from two walls of windows as well as proximity to the modem/router. Previous tests with Zoom had shown that I needed a direct connection rather than trying to stream over my wifi.
The working area was tight during this initial six week course due to the focal length of the external web cam I was using. I have since upgraded to a Cannon EOS 70D that allows placement of the camera further from the instructor. That lets me have more maneuvering room in front of the white board.
I incorporated introductions to the various lessons using the idea of "Why is this important?" videos. I also supplied an array of training videos that I developed as stand along instruction, such as the one you see on the right.
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