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Objectives:
Understand primary concepts and structures of effective blended learning environment, one that is appropriately balanced with online and face-to-face activities and instruction
Promote student success through clear expectations, prompt responses, and regular feedback
Develop and deliver assessments, projects, and assignments that meet standards-based learning goals and assess learning progress by measuring student achievement on these learning goals
Course Website
The course website is the central resource and planning hub for students in a blended course. My Statistics website is hosted through Google Sites, a free tool that makes access instant and simple for students (no login required), supports a simple navigation panel, and allows me as a teacher to make changes as quickly as I can think of them. Since all content in the entire course is an original work, I decided to make the site open to the public and share all resources with a CC-BY-SA Creative Commons license.
All of the course objectives as listed within each unit's main page. This helps me frame the purpose of the content with a broad driving question and specific targets. By sharing this in the website with students, they know what they will be learning and how it connects to the broader themes of the course.
All course activities are listed on the page with the relevant content videos and practice. For example, the description of the cooking / taste testing activity is on the page that practices matched-pairs experiments, the supporting content of the activity. This organization works with the timing (we do both the activity and related content in the same period of time) and theme to make it easier for students to make connections.
All course content has video-based instruction to support it. Videos can focus on high level concepts with visual diagrams, or they could simply be tutorials for using a course tool. Video takes one of the former advantages of face to face learning (multi-modal communication) and moves it online, freeing up face to face time for projects, conversations, and checks for understanding.
Projects are listed on the website with a purpose, objectives, explanation, some examples, and how students will be evaluated. In the Blended Learning Environments course, I simplified the language and detailed specificity of the rubric to add student flexibility in the project. I also added more opportunities for teacher and peer feedback throughout the process of building their videos. Finally, I changed all formative assessments to follow a mastery-based approach where students can retake quizzes and strive for complete understanding (see more about my mastery implementation on my blog).
Reflection
I added my course website as the first item for my eFolio because it ties together some key parts of effective instruction: planning, delivering clear information, and checking for understanding. The website is a good reflection of how I think about this component of teaching and how I capture it into something that students can utilize at home or in the classroom.
Every semester, I revisit my objectives to make sure they are focused on content that addresses the changing needs of my students. During the Blended Learning Environments course, I made significant revisions to reduce the number of objectives to more clearly written and overarching goals. Objectives are still focused and clear, but the changes opened up additional avenues for achieving them that go beyond lecture and practice problems. I now use the same overarching goals on my content sections and my projects.
The website also hosts all of my course videos. I believe heavily in video-based instruction because of the different speeds and modalities it supports. Some students need to process every word I say in a mini-lecture, so they often pause the videos. Others cannot focus during a slow lecture, so they speed me up and hyper-focus as a talk a mile/minute (surprisingly helpful for students with ADHD). For any given topic, some students like to listen, others like to read, and many like visual diagrams and graphs that cover the key concepts. A well-made video provides all of these methods. As a teacher who likes to constantly improve my instruction, the style of videos I create and the tools I use (Screencast-O-Matic, and sometimes Airserver / Notability) make it very simple to replace videos. I have over 500 math videos on YouTube from the past 4 years because of how quickly I can remake an ineffective lesson.
One powerful measure of growth is to compare this website to past versions. Every semester, I copy the previous course site and begin editing based on new ideas and past assessment data / student feedback. By leaving the old site intact, I can look back at how the course evolved over the past 4 years. All units have been completely reorganized multiple times, the website became easier to navigate, nearly all videos are on their 3rd or higher iteration because I learned better ways to teach the concept, the course tools changed as the school moved to 1:1 iPads, and many other positive changes evolved. Not all improvements were linear -- some newer iterations were tossed out in favor of a previous way of doing things, but in the long run, all of the experimentation proved very powerful.
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