Melanie Jennings's List: Advanced EDC Training Course

• Often problems re-surface because teachers only have enough time to manage the problem, but not truly solve.

  • ...because we are not limited by the length of the school day.

  • Online teachers may have an advantage over f2f teachers in finding enough time to "meet" to solve instructional problems.
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• In other words, the best ideas are a mash up of the team’s ideas. Ideas are like Legos or Tinker Toys. Individual ideas can be combined and built into a great idea.
• Believing you have the answer or the solution before you are even sure of the real issue is a failure of many PLC teams. Teams must learn to question their assumptions, their ideas, their data, and their plans.
• Most Principals, “…like to start with the big picture and then work out the details. In improvisational innovation, teams start with details and then work up to the big picture.” 

  • Not just principals - me too... Have a hard time allowing freedom in the big picture!
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• great online courses are defined by teaching, not technology

  • And the type of teaching necessary for "great" online teaching is is in large part quite different from the type of teaching necessary for "great" face-to-face teaching.
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• In our view, an excellent online course is one in which the student is able to focus on the course itself and the medium of delivery becomes transparent to this process.

  • How far are we from reaching this reality (the medium becoming transparent to the process)?
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• allowing them to construct their own understanding of the subject material.

  • This is a difficult concept for me to grasp. Maybe I'm holding on too tightly to *control* of the learning outcomes. Does "allowing them to construct their own understanding" mean that students may leave with an incomplete understanding of the content I'm charged with teaching them?
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• There isn’t someone standing nearby to offer comment and clarification. Communication is often asynchronous and commonly in written form. In the classroom, if an instructor is losing the class because a lecture is dragging, he or she can change gears or topics, pick up the pace or suggest a quick break. Not so in the online world.
• At the same time there needs to be another pathway that provides more detailed background material for those students who either want or need more information about a particular concept.

  • Multiple pathways - or multiple approaches to the mastery of a single concept... Very difficult to achieve in a face-to-face setting. Online learning is ideally suited to this!
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• It is not just another learning environment, like a separate classroom down the hall; it is a categorically different learning environment.
• Simply taking material that was developed for classroom delivery and directly porting it into course management programs such as WebCT or Blackboard tends neither to be effective nor recommended
• The roles for both students and teachers are changing in the online world (Collins & Berge, 1996; Sieber, 2005) and one of those changes is that the instructor role is moving from provider of content to designer of student learning experiences

  • I hope I'm up to this challenge - "designer of student learning experiences."
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• students actually contribute to course content

  • From my experience teaching online high school courses, it seems we are far from this. Maybe it is our current approach? Maybe we have not provided the scaffolding necessary for students to learn to participate in content creation meaningfully (as in more than a lackluster answer to a lackluster discussion question).
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• Even if they have been successful in class, lengthy lectures don’t tend to work online.
• Originally her approach was to integrate previously successful best practices but had evolved into a “smorgasbord of jazzy supplements with little thought placed on their value, role and importance within an education context” (p. 7). Mandernach also discovered that despite the outward, tech-savvy appearance of her course, the pedagogical effectiveness had actually decreased.

  • AMEN! I love technology as much as (or more than) the next person, and I have taken a course just like the one described here. It was pure distraction - long on "cool," short on content.
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• masters of effective feedback
• Specific aspects of online teaching that are reported to contribute to enhanced learning and student satisfaction also include: quick turnaround time by instructor on email and assignments (Hopper and Harmon; 2000); frequent and engaged contact and individual feedback (Anderson, 2006); having goals and objectives that are clearly stated (Carr-Chellman & Duchastel, 2000; King, 1998; Orde, et al., 2001; Sieber, 2005) and detailed enough to clarify “what the student should be able to do, the conditions under which the student should produce the desired behaviour and how well the student must be able to perform it” (Ellis & Hafner, 2003, p. 643); great communication skills (Hopper and Harmon, 2000; White, 2000); regular use of student names (Aragon, 2003) and the capacity to be real and genuine (Aragon, 2003; Beaudin & Henry, 2007).
• It is through sustained communication that participants construct meaning (Garrison, et al., 2000) and come to a more complete understanding of the content.

  • Is this the case with all students? I don't learn this way. I'm not trying to be a "Negative Nelly" - just want to avoid painting all students with a broad brush.
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• It is also important to emphasize that community will not happen on its own.
• Those new to designing and delivering online courses tend to quickly gain an appreciation for the magnitude of the process.

  • Truer words have never been spoken! ;-)
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• Online educators must be ever critical of the technology relied upon to engage students in learning. It is only through constant evaluation and examination of the tools that we use that we will continue to make sound pedagogical decisions for their implementation.
• In an online course, students need to be able to find everything they need to be successful learners and how to do so easily.
• Ideally assessment should provide diagnostic feedback that helps “the student to improve learning, the teacher to improve the instructional process, and the institution to improve its curriculum, support services, and infrastructure” (p. 16).
• One is to provide exemplars of the course assignments.
• Perhaps the most common of these provide direction on being effective self-guided learners. Unless the students in an online course can manage their time and provide some degree of self-motivation, they tend not to do well in a virtual course environment.

  • Do students actually read these guides and tutorials - the ones that help with self-guiding, time-management, and motivation?
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• Another little extra is the inclusion of brief audio clips. There is something particularly connecting and compelling about hearing a voice.
• Of course, the inclusion of additional resources in websites and online courses requires an understanding of the issues of fair use and copyright (Pitler, 2006).
• One thing in particular they need to find is a well-developed and articulate study guide (Carr-Chellman & Duchastel, 2000; Ko & Rossen, 2004). The guide is the student’s link to things such as content, assignments, group activities, and is the tool that leads the students through the course.

  • I tend to like to have this "study guide" through the course in one place only! In the EfE courses, those can be found separately for each session and are available throughout the course. In some classes I have taken, the instructor, with good intentions of providing assistance to students in a number of places, obviously failed to update all those places when revising the course before recycling it for the next semester. Much, much, much conflicting information! Very confusing! If I keep it all in one place, I will avoid this problem of incomplete course revision.
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