Developing an Online Course

In my searches last week for web material, I got lost in the TED lectures, listening to quite a few that interested me.  I also got lost in NPR, This I Believe, and youtube, looking at author interviews.  It was all fascinating to me–yet not exactly what I want for my students.  I think lots of interactive content is great, and I’m certainly not in the mood to reinvent the wheel, yet too much material that is interesting but not targeted to our course objectives won’t really enhance the course.  I’ll keep searching, of course, but I’d really like to keep my content tightly connected to my textbooks and our course objectives, and I fear that introducing too many other ideas/perspectives might not really add to their learning, but rather muddle it.

I do like to use author interviews for essays we’re reading.  Even if the writer is talking about something else, it helps that person become alive to them.  I think I might end up making more of my own narrated videos or presentations that stick more closely to our course content.

Tags: course objectives, TED talks, web content, youtube

In searching for available content, I was able to track down a few relevant TED talks and a number of youtube videos relating to Antarctic Science.  I’m hoping the video clips will complement the course lectures and add some visual interest to the course.  I’m writing my lectures as scripted powerpoint slides, so i think the video will be really important to bring in a more dynamic element to the course.

I also came across some video-recorded lectures that I considered linking to for some of the course topics, but unfortunately these were really a bit painful to watch, and often the slides were difficult to make out or were out of sync with the talk if presented as a separate frame.  So I definitely have a better appreciation for the concept of avoiding a videotaped lecture for online course delivery.

I found some scripted powerpoint lectures on the website for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research that might be useful, but it’s tough to find something that covers exactly the topics/level of detail you’d hoped to cover in a lecture.

I also came across some teachers tools for a geography-based Antarctica curriculum targeted for A-level students in the UK (most of the other teachers’ tools I’ve come across tend to target younger students) that have given me some ideas for student activities.   One of the issues I noticed with this site was that a number of the links to outside content were no longer functional, and that started to worry me about relying on existing content that is available online.  If a site goes down in the middle of the quarter, will it result in panic among your students?

Tags: online resources, TED talks, videos

I’m finding myself in a very strange position as I plan this online lit. course.  I am discovering a plethora of tools to use to make the course interactive and interesting, but I’m finding very little in terms of what’s already out there that I might swipe and incorporate into my own course.  I have found a number of online university lit. courses, but I don’t have access to them to see how they’re taught.   I am also feeling quite overwhelmed by the volume of information.  I’m going to have to have my hand held a bit more in designing this course than in my previous one, I think.  There are so many new things, and I haven’t been able to explore them in depth yet.  My goal for this workshop was to get a rough draft of the course planned out, then spend the next few months fine tuning and tweaking.

As for tools and tricks that have worked for me.  I’ve had students create blogs and personal journals.  The blog were great because the students could respond to each other in a creative way, post videos and photos, and post audio responses, and the journals were great for reflective types of assignments that only I saw, and there was no pressure to “look good” in front of the rest of the class.  I also use power point presentations with audio narration and an interactive true/false quiz that presents information in such a way that students can get an idea of what they already know vs what they need to learn.  This is great because I don’t spend a whole lot of time teaching what students already know.

I want to develop more interactive types of activities for the lit. class.  Discussion and interpersonal interaction are paramount to a good lit. class.  It will be interesting to discover just how I will make that happen.

A friend showed me the way to Khan Academy and a familiar feeling shot to my mind.  I am obsolete.  There are so many quality sources of information presented in quality ways, so what is the purpose of a University Instructor?  Motivate, Inspire, Sort the Information, Show How the Information Can be Used, Show Why One Should Care, Challenge the Student, Assessment, Different Styles, Provide an Engagement that is Human . . . . . . . Maybe nothing has changed.  People who want to learn will go after it, and those that do not?

My apologies if this is random, but whenever I see so many resources available or are reminded of how much more advanced research tools are then the one’s I use, I get this feeling of being Obsolete.  But then I think, nothing can replace the human imagination, except maybe the shortsighted nature of evolution.

Posted by Kathy Austin at Monday, April 23, 2012 9:56:14 PM PDT – I originally posted this to the Small Group Blog, then eventually figured out that I needed to post this to the Whole Class Blog. So . . . Here is what I came up with!

This was a rather frustrating exercise for me, but I did manage to find something useful. I searched the TED files and Merlot.org and came up empty handed. I hit paydirt in You Tube! And what did I find, but a TED lecture! Go figure. Anyway, I am always looking for better ways to deliver classroom content that is relevant to students. Since I am a teacher of teachers, this is particularly important for my students. They will need to take the methods I teach back to their own classrooms and make them meaningful to middle and high school students. The link I’ve included here is a fabulous way to turn education upside down and deliver learning to students in such a way as to meet them at their highly techno savvy level. This video by Salman Khan explains how educators might video tape a lesson for students to view at home, then have them do their homework in class where the teacher can help them! What a great idea!

Since the thematic unit I want to model involved different types of imprisonment using young adult literature, the link to British escape and elusive maneuvers will fit right in.

http://navigator.rafmuseum.org/results.do?highlight=27

I’ve taught a number of courses on campus (on and off for the last 13 years), and only 2 ecampus courses, and until recently, I would have absolutely agreed that discussions in online campus were much less stimulating than in-person discussions. However, recent experiences in two on-campus classes have changed my mind.

In these two courses, both of them upper division writing courses, I’ve treated the discussion like a hybrid event, requiring them to post ideas and responses to a given article on discussion board before we discuss it in class. The idea there is to jump start the conversation ahead of time, to require them to put some thoughts into words before we start class. My hope was to avoid the “warm-up” period in discussions, when students are trying to formulate thoughts and even remember what the reading was about (if they even did it). I didn’t expect this process to create instant magic, but I expected it add a little life and energy to our sometimes lackluster discussions.

What I found, instead, was that the online discussions were really quite good. I set word limits and point values, and students stepped up to the plate. (Can you tell I spent the evening at the little league fields?) Because it was a defined assignment with a grade attached, they put real thought into it and I was excited by what I saw happening on discussion board. However, when they came into the class, they were hesitant or even resistant to expand on their ideas, and to respond to each other in person. I even went so far as to make notes about who said what on discussion board, and then call on them in class to expound, and most of the time they wouldn’t even say as much as the original post. In other words, they did better in the virtual world.

I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, since they also spend a majority (?) of their social time in the digital world as well. I’ve just been pondering the implications of these two classes. Have students become just too uncomfortable with spontaneous F2F interactions?

My husband also teaches both F2F and online, and seconds my findings that students online often get much better discussions off the ground. I think this might say something scary about us, but as online instructors, we can surely use this to our advantage.

Tags: discussion board, graded discussion, online discussion vs. F2F

I have yet to experience teaching an online course, so comparing traditional lecture to an online course is beyond my experience.  For both venues I imagine one of the first priorities is to spark student interest and clearly define activities that encourage the student to engage the course content.  I like to believe that my own enthusiasm when describing the biological context (I teach biology courses) of a given subject, and how that subject relates to the student perspective, is one of the most significant ingredients to sparking student interest.  Given the tools available for inserting audio and video into presentations, I should be able to convey online, as I do during face-to-face interactions, my enthusiasm for the subject.

Writing activities that are clearly defined seems independent of the course venue, but providing feedback to students whom are struggling with a given activity seems to me to possibly be the most difficult without face to face interaction.  I find face to face interaction helpful in working through a problem with a student and in trying to understand what concept a student is missing, or how a student is thinking.  Google-hangout or skype might help with face-to-face, online interaction, so this may not be an issue.  Thus, I imagine that the main ingredients of a good course, sparking interest and clearly defined activities, can be achieved equally well for both online and a traditional lecture.Sp

Tags: F2F vs online education

Currently,  I am translating my on-campus version of FW315 (Ichthyology) for online delivery, and am certainly running into some challenges!  Chief among these is the fact that by necessity, this course is information-dense, and requires students to comprehend a set of foundational information that they need to succeed into subsequent courses in the curriculum, such as fish ecology, fish physiology, or my own 400/500-level Advanced Ichthyology course.   While this doesn’t prevent me from including some degree of synthesis and analysis in my course, it does mean that some of the learning objectives focus on lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy . . . if a student fails to comprehend the basic mechanisms of respiration and buoyancy in fishes in FW315, they’re going to struggle when they reach the 400-level physiology courses and need to apply that knowledge!

The necessary information-density of the course presents something of a problem for online delivery, because I find that the online format supports analytical and evaluative goals and assessments (discussions, projects and so forth) better than it does lower-level information delivery.  I am working to include a variety of discussion-board topics and activities that will help students engage with the information presented in the course, such as an opportunity to place fishes that live near them geographically in the context of the evolutionary family-tree of all fishes.   This is a good application/analysis-level assessment that provides some reward for digesting and comprehending a set of information-dense lectures on fish classification.    Even so, it doesn’t circumvent the need to present a ton of data and facts to the students that they’ll need to understand and apply in this and subsequent courses.

Even in my on-campus course, I sometimes feel like I’m turning a firehose of information on my students . . . . we cover evolution, ecology, behavior, physiology, reproduction, anatomy, conservation and other topics all within a single quarter’s course, with a taxonomic scope spanning more than 30,000 species!    I am hoping that I’ll still be able to teach this information effectively in an online format, but doing so still a involves a lot of reading assignments and recording of lectures, neither of which really play to the strengths of the online format (such as facilitating interactions between students).   Hopefully the course will still meet its objectives and prepare the students for higher-level classes that more closely target the pinnacle of Bloom’s pyramid!

For me, one of the biggest differences in taking part in Foreign Language Learning (FLL) online vs. F2F is really the move that the instructor must make from “sage on the stage” in F2F to “guide on the side” (a quote from one of my grad school profs). In my view, my job is to provide students with the tools necessary to build knowledge and solve issues on their own, rather than simply conveying information to them. This is a helpful exercise for any FLL instructor, as it becomes more an more the model that students need to be able to develop skills on their own in any classroom setting.
Thus, to me, F2F and online classrooms should not be that different. Ideally, for a foreign language instructor, experience in both settings should inform teaching and materials development in such a way that brings the best of both worlds to all students. Here are some priorities that I have tried to follow:
1) Online and on-campus FLL courses should function in parallel.
2) Online students should be provided with enough contact to supplement time spent in class for live use of the target language.
3) All students should be able to use technology to reach out to the target community in a way that is useful and enjoyable for the student.
What this ends up meaning is that my courses should be similar in everything but physical setting, and that students should be able to move seamlessly from on-campus to Ecampus and back. For the instructor, it means innovating in the realm of online tools as well as in developing contacts within the target community that the students can access. On a more complicated note, it is also important for the instructor to be aware of laws and regulations regarding student privacy (e.g. FERPA), so that the students’ online experiences are both engaging and safe.

Tags: Foreign Language, Guide, Parallel