Education blog
Lay of the Land
Lay of the Land
My final blog post for Dr. Rob Power's course, Teaching and Learning in an Online World (EDUC5199G) will be a response and reflection on the post-course (student satisfaction) peer-review feedback received, and how that feedback could be used to make improvements to my Online Teaching Module, and online teaching practice.
Slade (2017) identifies the following questions that need to be answered in order for instructors to evaluate their performance and processes, and hopefully improve them in the future.
What did I want to accomplish?
What did I actually accomplish?
What did and did not go well?
What am I going to do differently next time?
I will be using a slight modification of Slade's framework along with MOOBRIC (Northcote & Seddon, 2011) and the student feedback that I received in Week 12 to reflect on my Online Teaching Module.
What worked well? What didn’t work? What needs to be revised or improved (before teaching the module again)? What skills do you need to work on to better meet the needs of your online students. How will you use the information gathered from your personal reflections and student satisfaction surveys.
Course outline was clearly labelled in the getting started unit. The topics for the course were laid out in the outline,
Interactive group work and discussion was used to support social presence and cognitive presence. Teaching presence was included by providing different ways to reach the instructor and through synchronous learning.
In the course, there was group work set up throughout the course so this created an opportunity for collaboration and provided the building block for online community and both social and cognitive presence. Through group collaboration, transactional distance is reduced.
Additional resource links or readings would be helpful for those who want to learn more about the topic or having a hard time understanding the material.
It is difficult to reading the material on the slides since the font was a little small. Once the Google Classroom (Google, n.d.) was full screen, the font was fully readable. The headings or subtitles were a good size but the actual, necessary information on the slides were difficult to read due to the size of the font when the slides are not in full screen mode. Some slides lack any attention grabbing colours or pictures; most slides were just white with black text. Adding themes or pictures that relate to the learning would make the slides more enjoyable and create visually pleasing format.
I need to give very specific, detailed instructions for each area. Specific dates on how the classes will flow from week to week were not present which would make it clearer for the students so they know the topics for that week and what they need to work on.
Navigation through the course once you are in the right spot is pretty easy to navigate through but some pages had 2 links on each page with only instructions for the first link but no mention what to do with the second link. For example, in the “Getting Started” area there is a page with the introduction video on it and beside the link for the introduction video is another link for “Welcome slides”; students may miss the welcome slides since they are not instructed to click on them. The same is on a page about “google meet” and “google docs”; there is directions for the Google Meet (Google, n.d.) but not for the google Docs (Google, n.d.). I suggest separating all of these so they each have their own page for clarity.
There was no link found to the York Region School Board’s Student Services and Resources.
What I found especially helpful was the opportunity to listen to my peers and learn about how they had designed their Pilot Module. Rich Freeman has an amazing You Tube channel where he has recordings of all his synchronous lessons from many years back. I would like to work on would like to work on my digital editing skills.
Tammy Gerard has extensive resources on Quizlet (Quizlet, n.d.), which she uses to gamify learning in her classroom. I would like to learn more about how to gamify my classroom by creating activities on Quizlet.
The role as an online teacher does not end on the last day of a module. It is important to reflect on course content and activities, and how the course went overall. One of the most valuable sources of information to guide this reflective process is the feedback I receive from students. This feedback can be used to continually improve the course in combination with a strong understanding of my students' profiles, needs and interests.
Google (n.d.),. Google Classroom. [Web page]. https://classroom.google.com
Google (n.d.),. Google Docs. [Web page]. https://docs.google.com
Google (n.d.). Google Meet. [Web page]. https://www.googlemeet.com
Freeman, Rich. (n.d.) [You Tube Channel]. You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0MlFjC4Mj_fhrF8NRFtc0A
Northcote & Seddon (2011). MOOBRIC: A self-reflection rubric of Moodle skills and knowledge (online teaching, course design).[Web Page] http://moodle.amberwell.net/moobric_latest.html
Quizlet (n.d.),. Quizlet. [Web page]. https://www.quizlet.com
Slade, Tim (2017, July 16). How to conduct an eLearning project retrospective. [Web log post]. Tim Slade. https://timslade.com/blog/elearning-project-retrospective/