No, not exactly. As we all know very well, the first version of a lesson, activity, assessment or unit we create is far from finished. These are all works-in-progress, and constant improvement will be inevitable in the future of this online course prototype. And I wouldn't have it any other way!
I am so proud to show you all the progress of my course, which has been built in Moodle with links to other educational web tools and platforms, facilitating multiple learning styles and needs. As a reminder, you can read my course profile here. This prototype includes the learning outcomes in the Patterns and Relations strand of Mathématiques 8 (fransaskois version). As you can see in the course walk through videos below, I can not show everything off in only 5 minutes!
During the creation of this course, I watched at least 20 how-to videos about different aspects of Moodle, from the basic adding of content, to creating badges and using adaptive release functions, to building a question bank from scratch and using the random quiz generation tools.
Since my rationale behind the course is to offer self-paced autonomous learning opportunities for students who needed to fill gaps, I had not given much thought to the communication aspect of an online course. During our discussions in class, readings, webinars, and in large part thanks to the variety of courses my colleagues presented, I came to realize the importance of incorporating some kind of dialogue into the learning process in my course. I added some "Three Act Math" activities inspired my Dan Meyer, and a requirement to post and respond to the discussion forum in order to complete each of the modules. After watching the webinar with David Chandross, How to Design Learning Games Using Online Platforms, I was also inspired to add a bit of gamification/competition to the course by creating badges that students can earn only by successfully completing certain tasks. The logic behind this is that students will potentially be motivated to complete more of the activites more quickly to be the first of their friends to earn a badge. If someone had told me a year ago that this winter I would record myself teaching a lesson to be posted (even privately) on the Internet, my reaction would have been: ​But I ended up recording over 90 minutes of (only slightly awkward) lesson footage, and used most of it to create EdPuzzle interactive explanations of the Pattern and Relations topics in Math 8. As I said, this course is far from perfect. As it stands, there are learning activities housed outside of Moodle, meaning the grade or results are not seamlessly integrated into the Moodle gradebook. For a teacher, this means either manually inputting scores from these activites, or not counting them towards a student's final course grade. Next, I would love to explore some of the more interactive quiz question styles that are available in Moodle, such as drag-and-drop matching, which could potentially lead to less of those external activity links for assessment. Overall, I have come so far in my comfort with and appreciation for technology as a tool for learning, connecting, assessing and creating. I am proud of the course I have created in Moodle, and of all the activities on different websites (EdPuzzle, FlipGrid, GoFormative, Genial.ly) that I would never have had the courage to design and share without the supportive community of learners and educators in EC&I 834.
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This past week being sick has thrown me a bit off-course, and I am slowly catching up on my tasks. Remember the junk drawer from my second post? This blog post is coming to you from that place!
The importance of communication and social learning can easily be lost in an online course, as I have most certainly noticed in my own prototype. Our discussions in class on March 9th reminded me that even in a self-paced, gap-filler style course, the need for students to talk through their thought processes, ask questions, confirm their ideas and interact with the lessons is crucial for learning. I think I had already set up some components to be interactive (EdPuzzle lessons) and given one opportunity to talk through logical reasoning (FlipGrid activity), but I admit these are one-sided and not dialogical in nature. I do have the Course Forum added and imagine that being a place where students can pose a question and the teacher or other students can answer and have some kind of asynchronous discussion. The forum does have a bit of a phoney feel to it, as opposed to a breakout room so I tried to come up with some way that students might be able to have specific conversations at specific times. I wanted to replicate some of the “brain break” activities that I would use in class, but that could still be powerful asynchronously. I am going to experiment with Open Middle Math and Three-Act Math activities, and forum posts where a student must respond to the prompt before seeing other student responses. Then, they can comment on each others’ proposed answers. Since the course is asynchronous and self-paced, it will require some coordination on the teacher side to ensure that a few students are ready for the interactive piece around the same time. It won’t be necessary to have students online at the same moments, but I think it would work to manually reveal the activities when the time is right, then hide them again for the next influx of students. This process could even be adapted quickly to a synchronous breakout room activity if the prototype evolves into a fully online course. As far as assessment, the activities are all required to be completed in order to complete the module, so meaningful feedback must be provided. I have the text feedback option activated on each item, meaning I will be writing a comment for each activity completed. In the forum, it will also be important for me to monitor responses and give immediate feedback on those discussions. **Discalimer: I must apologize to my fellow classmates for the tardiness of my post this week. I have been sick and sleeping for the better part of the past three days.** Our task this week was to explore a particular aspect of online learning that interests us. After our discussion last Tuesday evening touching briefly on assessment, and with the next round of report cards coming up at my school, I have been obsessing about evaluating student learning, and how to ensure academic integrity when students are learning and completing tasks at home. In my other grad class, we briefly discussed the online proctoring software ProctorTrack, which is being used in several courses at the University of Regina this academic year (The Carillon). Then on Saturday morning, I attended a webinar through Let’s Talk Science, which focused on Artificial Intelligence and Big Data collection/use. I spent Saturday afternoon reading and searching for more information about the use of AI to monitor behaviour during remote testing, and the dangers of participating blindly in Big Data collection… a rabbit hole of sorts. Saturday evening, I was overcome with fatigue. Assuming I had just filled my brain with too much information, I put my notes aside and went to bed. Unfortunately, I barely got back out of bed until Tuesday morning, doing so only to make sub plans Sunday night and go for a Covid test Monday afternoon. Results still pending at publication of this post.**Update: result = negative!!** The main questions I sought to answer this week were:
Online proctoring software has seen an increase in popularity, obviously due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, these types of services are not exactly new. Dimeo, 2017, wrote about higher learning institutions adopting these programs, and the potential concerns about privacy and AI capabilities. Now that most university students are learning remotely, “e-proctoring was deemed necessary to keep the integrity of our programs and degrees”, stated Associate Dean of Arts at the University of Regina, Joseph Piwowar (Tamelin, 2020). Research shows that these programs do appear to deter cheating, similar to a live proctored setting (Dimeo, 2017, Langenfeld, 2020). The Artificial Intelligence technology used by this software uses the student's camera to monitor their behaviour during the test such as looking away from the screen, leaving the computer, taking a longer than normal period of time to answer a question, having another person in the room, and so on. The camera is also used to assure the identity of the student taking the test using a variety of metrics. But what about students with special needs or situations, such as parents of young children or pet owners? If a student is interrupted, it could register by the proctoring software as potential cheating behaviour. And what about privacy issues? Shae Sackman, a student at the University of Regina, was particularly concerned with what could be done with this information. “If you have test data for 100,000 students and you decide to say, racially profile those students and break them into what patterns are visible in different ethnicities you could very easily develop tests and exercises that would perhaps favour a certain kind of profile of person. Say Proctortrack partners with Pearson, who is a large, unethical educational institution testing company that issues standardized tests and assessments.… We’re literally paying to build a database of info on us to be used for unknown purposes later.” (Tamelin, 2020) Being aware of what personal data is being collected, by whom, and for what purpose are central ideas to the adoption of any sort of technology for educational purposes, including assessment. For post-secondary students and institutions, this should be clearly explained to and understood by adult learners. To me, things get much more complicated in the K-12 system, where any data gathered would be the personal information of minors.
Advice about structuring online courses and assessment can perhaps address some of the concerns about academic integrity without the need to adopt an online proctoring service. Several main ideas were common throughout my reading this week, from an article in a peer-reviewed journal to online education blogs, ranging from K-12 to Post-secondary settings (Bendici, 2020, Klein, 2020, Theodosiou & Corbin, 2020):
During our synchronous class time this past week, we shared the shells of our online prototype courses, including one full module of content. I was blown away by the quality and variety of courses, platforms, lessons and assessments created by my classmates! I was in a group with Christina, Jocelyn, Leah and Darcy, who have all done such amazing work with their courses. I was grateful for the discussion we had, and comparisons we made about the way different platforms are laid out.
As discussed in a previous blog post, my course prototype, Mathématiques 8 is designed to offer gap-filling content for middle years math students in the Fransaskois system. For the first deadline, I had created lessons and activities for one learning outcome in the Patterns and Relations strand, 8RR.1. My course is housed in Moodle, hosted by my friend and colleague Daniel. This platform has far more features than I have utilized at this point, and I am continuing to research ways to improve the student and teacher experiences in this LMS. After sharing my progress this week, I will focus on the following aspects over the next month of development:
I have some reservations about working in Moodle, after seeing the Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams courses that my classmates have designed. I use Teams in my school, and I appreciate how the courses I saw are fully housed within the platform, including meetings, communication, lessons, activities, and assessment and gradebook. From a teacher standpoint, it is easier to have everything in one place, especially when it comes to reporting. Students in this age group and their parents are able to navigate it easily. I also prefer the colourful social media look of those platforms, easy customization with image, emoji and GIF options. I know that Moodle is customizable, but I do not have the coding knowledge and skill required to do so at this time. Despite these minor qualms, I will continue to build my course in Moodle because I feel a great sense of ownership over this material. I have never created content like this before and I am proud of what I have learned and accomplished so far. I am motivated to increase the quality of my course content, and to learn more about the functions available in Moodle for assessment, record keeping and reporting. |
A note from Heidi:I adore teaching and learning, irl. I'm up for the challenge of designing effective virtual learning spaces for my students! Please follow my uphill journey with educational technology here. Archives |