What does instructional design look like? Post 4 – Creating a Pattern & Flow for the Course

This is the 4th in a series of blog posts outlining the collaborative process of designing an online course for the first time from scratch. You can read the other posts here.

Photo by Eduardo Olszewski on Unsplash

Prior to this meeting the instructional designer reviewed the contents of module 2 and put together a listing of ideas for how the content could be conveyed. The agenda for meeting 4 included:

  1. Overall questions
    1. Consideration of a “flow for the week” (see details below)
    2. What is the grading structure for the course?
    3. How do you assess participation? (I wrote a blog post inspired by this discussion here.)
    4. Plan for synchronous meeting sessions 
    5. Zoom room link details for incorporation in Canvas site
  2. Check in on Module 1 Progress
  3. Discuss Module 2

This week’s discussion focused on the importance of creating a repeatable weekly course structure or flow that students can use to plan their time. We settled on the outline below:

  • Sunday – new module content (for week after the current week) is released and previous module assignments are due by 11:59 pm (not including discussion activities)
  • Sunday, Monday & Tuesday – Complete module reading and initial discussion prompt
  • Wednesday – Complete responses to online discussions
  • Thursday – Synchronous session online (via Zoom) from 4 – 6 pm
  • Friday & Saturday – Complete assignments to be submitted by 11:59pm Sunday evening.

This information was included on a page titled “About this Course” in the Canvas site under the heading “Structure and Time Commitment”. The professor was also able to share the grading scheme prior to the meeting which allowed me to incorporate this information into the About the Course page as well as create assignment groups to correspond with the different grading category percentages.

It was determined that the synchronous sessions would provide a time when the faculty member could address various topics in a more flexible format that would allow her to adjust and respond to student feedback that occurs earlier in the week through discussion forums, activities, and entrance tickets. The team also formalized the integration of the Zoom room into the Canvas site and discussed setting up a test scenario during j-term that would allow the faculty member to practice using breakout rooms and other Zoom room functionality.

Course content was not yet ready to share so the team decided to focus their work on getting as much of the course structure and repeatable components in place prior to the end of the year so that content could be loaded into the course relatively easily. This shifted the heavier time burden from the end of the year to the beginning of the year. After looking at my projected future workload, I explained that I would still be available to support Anne but since time was budgeted to be more heavily used in 2018, I could not ensure that other priorities might come online at the start of 2019. This conversation highlighted the importance of planning, time-lining, consistent communication, and expectation-setting when working collaboratively on course development projects. In the end, workload did not pose any problems moving forward, but given the unpredictability of each semester – it was important to have this conversation early so there were no surprises.

Anne planned out extensive curriculum development and loading over the course of the month of January and meeting times were set and confirmed. No outstanding action items were set for Heather as most of the outstanding work was to collect course content before additional design work could begin.

Vulnerability, messy learning & research — How can we be better?

Picture of a sunrise

Every new day is a new chance to learn.

A synopsis of chapter 8 “Teacher Learning” of How People Learn.

This chapter of How People Learn (HPL) focused on ways that teachers continue to learn once they are in their own classroom and how those compare to what we know about how people learn. The authors categorized the opportunities for learning for practicing teachers into three buckets:

  • Their own practice
  • Interactions with other teachers
  • From teacher educators in the schools (HPL, p. 191)

What I found most intriguing about this chapter is something which I have personally noticed about my teaching practice: the impact that being a parent has on my ability to teach. The authors noted that teachers “…learn about the intellectual and moral development in their roles of parents” (p. 192). This is not to say that a person without children cannot teach, however being a parent provides a unique longitudinal perspective of children’s development over years rather than semesters that can significantly impact an individual’s understanding of where a student might currently fall on that developmental spectrum.

The learning opportunities for teachers were also examined using the framework of learning environments that I discussed in my last blog post here. As a refresher those environments were:

  • Learner-centered
  • Knowledge-centered
  • Assessment-centered
  • Community-centered

I was most interested in the section on being knowledge-centered as it focused on the ways in which teacher prep programs impact this centering. For a little personal background, I attended an undergraduate college with a primary focus on education majors (k-12) that was founded as a teacher’s college. I was an English major with a focus in Secondary Education, however I was friends with several students in the Elementary Ed and Early Ed degree programs and I found it fascinating to see the differences in our curricula. The difference in comfort-level with specific subjects was very interesting. In my quick summary – it appeared that secondary ed majors were trained as specialists in content and generalists in pedagogy, whereas the El Ed and Early Ed majors were specialists in pedagogy and childhood development and generalists in content. It was satisfying to see this observation reflected in the HPL authors’ inventory of challenges facing teacher prep programs:

“4-year undergraduate degrees make it difficult for prospective elementary teachers to learn subject matter and for prospective secondary teachers to learn about the nature of learners and learning” (HPL, p. 202)

Consequently many student teachers feel vulnerable in various components of their student teacher placements. As the authors note:

“Learning involves making oneself vulnerable and taking risks, and this is not how teachers often see their role” (HPL, p. 195)

I immediately thought of all of my observations when I was student teaching and teaching in high school and how those lesson plans were always my least ‘risky’. I wanted to be in complete “control” of those lessons and project a classroom that “looked like good learning”. The problem is, in my experience and through much of what I’m reading in HPL, students often learn the most in very “messy” environments.

“When they [teachers] encourage students to actively explore issues and generate questions, it is almost inevitable that they will encounter questions that they cannot answer — and this can be threatening” (HPL, p. 195).

Raise your hand if you want to tell a student “I don’t know” while being observed by your direct supervisor. This is especially true if the culture of the school does not support the significance of this type of learning.

“Beginning teachers are especially influenced by the nature of the schools in which they begin their teaching” (HPL, p. 204).

Lastly, the authors attention to the way in which educational research is detached from classroom practice demonstrates one of the most wide-reaching negative impacts on the teaching profession as it is seeded at the beginning of most teachers’ careers.

“…a message is sent to prospective teachers that research in education, whether on teaching or learning, has little to do with schooling, and therefore, that they do not need to learn about the findings from research” (HPL, p. 202).

The example that always springs to mind is the many times I have heard teachers talk to other teachers and students about learning styles. In 2008 Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork authored an article titled “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence” in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. In their paper they outlined the research methodology that would be required to prove or disprove the science of learning styles and concluded that “…there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number” (“Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence”, p.105).

In 2017, in an article titled “Evidence-Based Higher Education – Is the Learning Styles ‘Myth’ Important?” in the journal Frontiers in Psychology by Philip M. Newton and Mahallad Miah, the authors point out that “…a substantial number of participants (32%) stated that they would continue to use Learning Styles despite being presented with the lack of an evidence base to support them…” (“Evidence-Based Higher Education – Is the Learning Styles ‘Myth’ Important?”) which reinforces the authors of HPL’s stance that teachers are taught that

“…educational theory and research have little to do with classroom practice” (HPL, p. 203).

So my question to you – how does this change? Why don’t we listen to the research?

How unexpected opportunities can inform practice

This post is the first in a series of posts based on course work completed for the class Education as an Advanced Field of Study that I completed at Northeastern University.

This annotated bibliography item reviews a case study that developed during the progression of an environmental studies class that connected students with professionals in the field. The findings may be helpful to faculty who are interested in learning more about how to integrate practitioners of certain expertise levels into coursework for a connected class, as well as how sharing the results of unplanned teaching practices can be beneficial to all.

Meretsky, V. J., & Woods, T. A. N. (2013). A novel approach for practitioners in training: A blended-learning seminar combining experts, students and practitioners. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Volume 13, Number 3, 48–62. Retrieved from: http://josotl.indiana.edu/article/view/3123/3605

The authors of this case study were concerned with the disconnection between academic areas of study and the context in which the taught skills and knowledge are applied. Through their design of a blended course format professional practitioners in the US Fish and Wildlife Service regularly interacted through videoconferencing with graduate students in the area of environmental science. Data collection and analysis was qualitative and relied primarily on surveys given to students, practitioners and participants. Since the authors also served as the instructors, or facilitators of the course their thought process behind the design and adjustments to the course was included as well.

Since the authors were also intricately connected to the design of the course being studied, I had hoped to find some self-reflexivity which would better define the impact of Meretsky and Woods’ values on their evaluation of the blended seminar. However, since the case study grew out of the initiation of an outside agency, and Meretsky and Woods acknowledged that their data collection occurred based on the “unexpected opportunity”, it stands to reason that the authors retroactively recognized the importance of the experience in connection to existing research on situational learning, experiential learning and cognitive apprenticeship. Results from practitioners and students indicated that on a very general level the interaction was positive and from students’ perspective added value to course. The authors included many details about logistics, opportunities and challenges of the course which coupled with the general data collection indicate a positive area for future study.

This piece helped to inform me about a different concept of blended learning. Ideally I had been searching for more experiential based application of blended learning, however since the study included some unexpected collaborations between the agency practitioners and the students, I found it relevant to my focus. In particular the organic development of the collection of information indicated how unexpected opportunities can inform learning practices by chance, and how logistics and environmental concerns can inadvertently increase attention and usage of hybrid learning collaborations.

Web Page Editing in Drupal

Worked with Human Resources staff to organize web content and provide interconnected links and attachments to ensure that users could find relevant information through multiple information pathways. Created several new pages with instructional information (how to-s) for different processes in HR. Concentrated focus on ease of use and ready access to a variety of information pieces. Tracked usage stats via Google Analytics.

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