This lesson was originally created for 9th-12th grade high school students in response to the shift to emergency remote learning in Spring 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before students could start learning new content, they had to learn how to be an online learner. This includes good time management skills. The lesson was delivered as a HyperDoc for asynchronous remote learning and featured some aspects of personalized learning: students had control over the place, path, and pace of learning, while I set the time of completion for over the course of a week.

We reimagined the lesson to allow for more personalized learning by giving students the opportunity to master some time management strategies at their own pace. Students choose how they will explore and evaluate various time management tools, calendars, and charts in relation to their individual needs and learning styles. As students reflect on their learning goals, they evaluate the effectiveness of their choice of self-selected time management strategies and tools. They discuss the pros and cons of each other’s methods and deepen their understanding of managing online learning. The lesson blends elements of two styles of personalized learning: mastery and problem-based learning. Students demonstrate mastery via utilization of their curated time management strategies, as they tackle the problem of how to be a successful, self-regulated online learner.

As students build knowledge, they will have both synchronous and asynchronous opportunities to connect with the teacher, content, and each other. Students will engage in learner-learner interactions as they provide input during the engage activities. They will benefit from teacher-learner interactions as the teacher uses presentation software and video conferencing software to gather student ideas and demonstrate to students some strategies they can use for managing time. Students will continue to build knowledge through learner-content interactions as they explore additional tools and resources for managing time. There are more learner-learner interactions in synchronous and asynchronous discussion forums, where students evaluate their peers’ outlined schedules and offer suggestions for improving time management. After constructing and sharing their knowledge, students asynchronously and individually hone metacognitive thinking skills when reflecting on the development and implementation of their learning plans.

By shifting to online instruction, the educator is able to provide more personalized interactions with the students to help guide their thinking and promote self-efficacy. The original lesson had only learner-content interaction; no opportunities for learner-instructor or learner-learner interactions were provided through the asynchronous HyperDoc. In the reimagined lesson, students build confidence as they successfully navigate and explore the resources provided. Through questioning and discussion, the teacher can guide students to personal strategies for individual students instead of utilizing a one-size-fits-all approach.

Affordance analysis is a conceptual tool that we used to make decisions about what model blended and online learning would work best to deliver our content and what e-learning tools would support our learning goals. By carefully designing lessons that consider technological affordances, the ownership of knowledge transfers to the student and learning becomes more meaningful. In our design, we considered the affordances of each tool against the learning goals of the reimagined lesson. We selected tools for the reimagined lesson to support multiple affordances: temporal, synthesis, spatial and navigational, aesthetic, technical, and media.

The process of selecting the right tool for the task (learning goal) has become a mainstay in my professional practice. During remote learning, an educator can easily become overwhelmed by the multiple, new flashy e-learning tools that come out on a daily basis. It is so easy to say "I want to try this" without considering whether the tool is actually supporting your students in getting closer to their learning goals. Will affordances such as accessibility, usability, shareability, etc. be a bridge or a barrier to the transfer of knowledge and the development of habits of mind? In the online and blended classroom, additional affordances to consider are the interactability and personalizeability of a tool: will I be able to use a tool to promote online learning interactions and does the tool give my students the ability to control the time, path, pace, and place of learning?

The lesson redesign process empowered me to transform a lesson, which I had thought was an "online learning" design, into something that was much closer to the actual models of blended and online learning that we learned about. Each model has its benefits and limitations. For example, the COPLS model, which was implemented in EDIT 764, works best with experiential learning that is supported by a mentorship. In another example, flipped learning works best when all learners can access online or offline content outside of the classroom.

Models of blended and online learning are not static, standalone entities. Teacher-designers have the flexibility to choose the model or blend of models that meet desired learning goals. Our reimagine group chose to combine synchronous and asynchronous models to attend to learner interactions and personalized learning.