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| Motivation Image of money found here |
The first course I took in the program was EDIT 760, which is kind of an overview course, covering how students and teachers do in the Blended and Online environment. I had some suspicions that not everyone would necessarily thrive in the setting, having worked with high school students for a long time, but I must admit I was a little surprised at how stark some of the data really was. This article reports that one recent study, for example, showed that the overall graduation rate for virtual schools in Michigan was around 35%, or less than half of the roughly 80% graduation rate for Michigan brick and mortar schools. I was, perhaps, even more surprised that this information was so plainly and starkly presented in a program which seems to be designed to promote this setting, though of course the scholarly approach requires that we face the facts, whatever they may be. Further, I suppose, the idea is to design quality courses which should, at least in theory, avoid these pitfalls, and bring out the positives.
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| That was his nest egg... Image of an angry leprechaun located here |
And so, when asked at the end of EDIT 760 to create a presentation summarizing the state of online and blended learning for stakeholders including students, teachers, parents, and administrators, I offered the position that YES, online and blended learning IS all "sunshine and rainbows", with the caution that sunshine can cause melanoma, and if you think rainbows are entirely positive, just ask the guy to the left about people raiding his life savings. He should probably diversify into a portfolio of low cost, broad index funds of stocks and bonds that matches his need, ability, and willingness to take risk. Still, if one uses sunscreen and avoids putting everything into precious metals, sunshine and rainbows can be pretty awesome, and that, again, is the point of EDIT 762... how to develop and spot quality blended and online courses.
Anyway, as a culminating task in EDIT 762, we were asked to put the tools taught in the course to use, and use one of a choice of rubrics to assess two different online courses. I chose to use the rubric designed by my group, reasoning that my involvement would clearly have ensured that the work is exemplary. As an aside, my wife sometimes tells me not to hide my light under a bushel. I'm not sure I even know where the bushel is, at this point. But, I digress.
For courses, I selected Virtual Virginia's Earth Science I, because in some sense it is the "competition", as I teach Geosystems (FCPS' fancy pants name for Earth Science...same SOL) in a Virginia school, and the aforementioned EDIT 760, because as I noted in the write-up for the course, I thought it would be amusing to assess the quality of an online learning course taught by the professor in charge of a program designed to teach me how to implement an online learning course. Very meta, and perhaps slightly less risky than assessing the course of the person assigning my grade. Not that I'd necessarily shy away from doing something like that.
Anyway, it was in some ways very easy, and in other ways, troublesome. As I commented to my group while we were developing the rubric, the problem is that it seems to me that usability and precision end up at cross purposes. If the rubric is made general and vague enough to apply to a variety of courses, it's usable, but that very vagueness makes the resulting grade almost as arbitrary as just eyeballing it and assigning a grade that feels right, which educators make sound professional by calling it "holistic grading" (see example video). On the other hand, making the rubric specific either makes it unwieldy, or only applicable to a narrow range of possible courses. Not very useful.
Our rubric tended towards usability (and vagueness), so it was in some senses pretty easy (as easy as pulling a grade from... somewhere), but that also meant it was difficult to come up with a meaningful rating at the end. In many ways, it was just my general impression of the course, and I didn't need a rubric do do that. My opinion is easily obtained just by asking... no rubrictrying to make things concrete and less arbitrary, so maybe our rubric wasn't as great as I initially thought? Nah...
required. Still, I do see the value of at least
COURSE SYNTHESIS
At the beginning of this course, we were asked to make a statement about our ideas of what constituted a quality course in blended and online learning. I took the opportunity to wax poetic about comic sans (a quality font), and complain about Microsoft Word (a terribly restrictive format), because that's just the way I roll, but I also noted that my view of a quality course was one that made accommodations for the differing abilities of students. This is probably because of my background as a special education teacher, and my experience that blending the Geosystems course I'm currently teaching has allowed me to provide accommodations and supports in ways I was not able in a traditional classroom setting. We covered Universal Design for Learning this semester in EDIT 767, and to me, that's the foundation of a quality course, so in that respect, my view on what makes a quality course has not changed much. Of course, my first thought when looking over UDL was "I've been doing this for 17 years as a special educator", so in some respects my view of quality courses has been the same for a while.
There was one area of quality covered, though, which I've been thinking about more as a result of the course, and that is the dimension of "learner to learner". One of the elements that has kind of gotten away from me as my new team teacher and I move the course online even more this year is that element of students learning from each other, and although I have always been an advocate of group work and interaction, the readings and videos for this course have caused me to refocus on building that element back in. At the moment, there's a tendency for us to have students working at their own pace, which is great, but we need to be intentional about creating opportunities for them to work in a community of learning, and not just watch the video, fill out the worksheet, do the sort, repeat.
In terms of assignments, while I wasn't really a fan of what authors might call the "frame" of the course, pretending to be in a professional organization, I do understand the reasoning. I can see, for example, how it provided a reason to encourage the aforementioned student interaction.
I did like the Burma-Shave poems. I've seen similar summarization strategies surrounding writing tweets, and I think there's some power there in making students think, synthesize, and boil down the most key concepts. It also engaged my creativity, which I enjoyed.
Writing a closing
Is sometimes mind bending
So I'll throw in these verses
In place of an ending
Online Learning Quality Assurance League
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| Oh... There it is Picture of a bushel located here |
For courses, I selected Virtual Virginia's Earth Science I, because in some sense it is the "competition", as I teach Geosystems (FCPS' fancy pants name for Earth Science...same SOL) in a Virginia school, and the aforementioned EDIT 760, because as I noted in the write-up for the course, I thought it would be amusing to assess the quality of an online learning course taught by the professor in charge of a program designed to teach me how to implement an online learning course. Very meta, and perhaps slightly less risky than assessing the course of the person assigning my grade. Not that I'd necessarily shy away from doing something like that.
Our rubric tended towards usability (and vagueness), so it was in some senses pretty easy (as easy as pulling a grade from... somewhere), but that also meant it was difficult to come up with a meaningful rating at the end. In many ways, it was just my general impression of the course, and I didn't need a rubric do do that. My opinion is easily obtained just by asking... no rubrictrying to make things concrete and less arbitrary, so maybe our rubric wasn't as great as I initially thought? Nah...
required. Still, I do see the value of at least
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| That's the way I... never mind... Picture of a Kaiser roll located here |
COURSE SYNTHESIS
At the beginning of this course, we were asked to make a statement about our ideas of what constituted a quality course in blended and online learning. I took the opportunity to wax poetic about comic sans (a quality font), and complain about Microsoft Word (a terribly restrictive format), because that's just the way I roll, but I also noted that my view of a quality course was one that made accommodations for the differing abilities of students. This is probably because of my background as a special education teacher, and my experience that blending the Geosystems course I'm currently teaching has allowed me to provide accommodations and supports in ways I was not able in a traditional classroom setting. We covered Universal Design for Learning this semester in EDIT 767, and to me, that's the foundation of a quality course, so in that respect, my view on what makes a quality course has not changed much. Of course, my first thought when looking over UDL was "I've been doing this for 17 years as a special educator", so in some respects my view of quality courses has been the same for a while.
There was one area of quality covered, though, which I've been thinking about more as a result of the course, and that is the dimension of "learner to learner". One of the elements that has kind of gotten away from me as my new team teacher and I move the course online even more this year is that element of students learning from each other, and although I have always been an advocate of group work and interaction, the readings and videos for this course have caused me to refocus on building that element back in. At the moment, there's a tendency for us to have students working at their own pace, which is great, but we need to be intentional about creating opportunities for them to work in a community of learning, and not just watch the video, fill out the worksheet, do the sort, repeat.
In terms of assignments, while I wasn't really a fan of what authors might call the "frame" of the course, pretending to be in a professional organization, I do understand the reasoning. I can see, for example, how it provided a reason to encourage the aforementioned student interaction.
I did like the Burma-Shave poems. I've seen similar summarization strategies surrounding writing tweets, and I think there's some power there in making students think, synthesize, and boil down the most key concepts. It also engaged my creativity, which I enjoyed.
Writing a closing
Is sometimes mind bending
So I'll throw in these verses
In place of an ending
Online Learning Quality Assurance League
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