Online/Blended learning and me

This blog post is part of the series on a course called Open Networked Learning, specifically for the course offered in Autumn of 2018, abbreviated as ONL181. This blog post is about my reflections on topic four of the course that deals with Design for online and blended learning. In this post, I will talk about how my current course is delivered and why in near future there a need to develop an Online/Blended learning for the course.

Problem and Opportunity

I am currently teaching a course that is given in a classroom (this course is final year course, and optional, also called elective in some universities). It is a very practical course involving a lot of hands on. It is a software design and development course and hence it is designed with learning activities that consist of a lot of practical exercises and tasks (five mandatory tasks, 2 optional tasks). In fact there is no written exam for the course, instead, it has a project element to it, where everything the students have learnt will be demonstrated. There are 9 lectures as well.

It is completed in a single learning period, where students are expected to spend 20 hours a week. A learning period in Sweden is about 9 weeks, including the examination period. (the last week usually dedicated to exams and no new learning happens. Our course lasts only 7 weeks, the strategy behind this is students get a good buffer for their other exams (students study 2 subjects in each learning period) and a buffer for late submissions. The schedule is simple, 5 tasks for 5 weeks, each weekend is the deadline. 2 weeks for the project work.

Sounds straightforward? It’s not! The two optional tasks, they could be deal breakers. I will explain why so. The course uses a software tool, that is very specific and there is a very high chance that no one would have used it before. The learning curve is long and the optional tasks are meant to help with the learning of this tool. When the course was first given, the first two weeks was overwhelming for the students, because of the above-mentioned tool constraints. There is no second way to address the issue and the feedback from students reflected this. Well, there is, then I have to change the learning outcomes to state “You will learn how to use a new tool”. I am pretty sure, learning a new tool is not the learning outcome anyone would like to sign for (the context is this course, of course, there are university courses that teach the use of tools as it is an important lesson, Ex: CAD design tools.).

This year, however, was our best outcome in terms of student performance and feedback. Thanks to a mandatory course in their curriculum, everyone who came in had an exposure to the tool and no one had to do the optional tasks, instead, they dived straight into the tasks. Wonderful feeling and everything is good you say? Well, it’s not. The mandatory course is cancelled from next year. Soon, it will be back to square one. I say soon because there is 1 year between when the mandatory course is taken and when our course can be taken. For next year, we are ok, but from the year after, we have to address the first two weeks and the optional tasks issue.

Ok, that is a very long story to make one point. Prerequisites for any course are important and my personal feeling is, this is very important to consider when designing a course, from my own experience as a student, I am convinced addressing how students satisfy the prerequisites and how we as teachers can help them. I am convinced Online/Blended learning fits very well for this scenario.

Online/Blended learning design

Are there models for designing such courses? I learnt few of them, Five Stage Model by G. Salmon that covers all aspects of the course design, ICEBERG for student retention and Community of Learning (CoI) for group works and collaboration. One thing that I found common in all of these models is the social presence of both teacher(s) and students and teacher immediacy (also referred to as teaching presence). Baker, 2004 showed that teacher immediacy contributed more to affective and cognitive learning then student presence (students knowing each other well).

It is clear that online facilitation plays an important role to achieve this immediacy. This article, Online Facilitation Techniques has a very good overview and well suited to use a cheat sheet when designing your own courses.

Coming back to my optional tasks into questions, below is what I plan to do to the course to address the issue. Let me call it the course prerequisite.

Following are the changes to the course prerequisite:

• Make very small bite-sized videos, instead of lengthy videos of the optional material that is currently 2 very long text documents: This solves the problem that sessions are long and often students lose interest. The bite-sized videos will also help students to catch up on them when they have short bursts of time, such as when travelling. The bite-sized videos are easy to cross-refer to when describing the tasks, our task description (handout about what the students are to accomplish ) has various hints in them, along with the hints, we can add a cross-reference to these videos.
• Have quizzes, multiple-choice ones: This helps with the need of giving continuous feedback and facilitator can also optionally keep track of the progress of the students and intervene when needed with motivating words. The bite-sized videos help here too, if a student gets a question wrong, we can always cross-refer to a video that has the solution/explanation.
• Online discussion forums (this is applicable to the main course too): Some form of the forum will be necessary for participating students to ask questions and seek help. As a facilitator, one thing we have to do is to make sure the forum is clean. For example, student A asks a question, student B then answers “This is a repeat question, maybe you should first learn to do a search for existing answers before blindly posting a question”. This is a NO NO. The facilitator must make sure that student B is told nicely that this is not allowed by showing an example answer, “I believe that the answer posted at xyz link may answer your question, it also has a nice discussing thread that could help too”. The offending comment should also be removed. By the way, answers such as the one B gave, are very common and I see them often, one such place is StackOverflow. Talking about rude posts and how to deal with them on a platform, here is an interesting thread, on StackOverflow!!

Changes to the course to incorporate the prerequisite material above:

• Regular contact with the students: Send occasional emails and keep them updated about the resources that will help them. Before each lecture send them a reminder communication about what videos they must see and what quizzes they need to submit before the lecture, based on the feedback you receive from the quizzes you know what your audience is like and this will help to deliver the lecture accordingly.
• Face-to-Face office hours: Schedule some human contact hours, this is often done by many online course teachers, often referred to as AMA (ask me anything) sessions. These can be online and can be recorded and archived (good question asked? Convert the question and answer to bite-sized videos and you have yourself a material for FAQ section). These can be more than two of 60 minutes each in the first two weeks and limit to two the weeks after.

Before I end the post, I think making engaging content is very necessary, and not having just voice over but also your self-video will help. For example, the videos we have seen in the course by Gilly Salmon, here and here, videos by Kay Oddone here and here. One way is to record yourselves with a camera on the computer (Ex: Kay Oddone videos) or use what is called green background technique to inset just yourselves and not your background in the video (Ex: Gilly Salmon videos, I think she used this technique). You will be amazed at how easy it is to make green background videos, see here if you are interested. There are many royalty free green background videos if you want to get very very creative.