Designing Online Learning

Course Description

Students will practice designing online lessons for meaningful learning outcomes such as knowledge construction, building models, knowledge transmission, and community building and working collaboratively.

Reflection

The primary thing that I learned in this course was that when dealing with online learning everything needs to be explained in detail and in multiple ways. When I am teaching in person, I can read facial expressions and body language to gauge whether the instruction is connecting with the students. As an intelligent designer of online learning, I must anticipate every pitfall, question, and difficulty.

One difficulty I had with this class was the idea of "Do Learning." The portion of the instruction in which I must teach the students how to use the tool. Recently, I have been making the students teach themselves especially since I am often learning at the same time that they are, and they often will discover features that I was not aware of. This co-learning seems to work the best. I do have some students who do not share my enthusiasm, so I should at least incorporate some elements of the "do learning." At the very least I need to provide them with links to the places I go to find answers. I am often told that my students are digital natives, but I don't think that is always a good thing. As an immigrant I don't take everything Internet for granted and exercise my rights and freedoms frequently. The students however take it for granted and only hang out in the corners of the Internet where they feel comfortable. As a teacher I must take responsibility for pointing them in the right direction and showing them how to get there.

Below you will find a link to the website I created in this class which takes the students all the way through the process of analyzing a modern film for the elements of the heroic cycle. The second link is to a text based game I created for assessment. Granted this may be the nostalgia talking, but I am very proud of the effort, skill, and creativity I put into this game.

Online Learning Website

Epic Hero Game Assessment