Wk 05 Reading Response #blendkit2015 Final Post in Series

Big questions at the end of week 05 of the Blendkit readings. Mainly, how do I make sure that my class is "quality" and will meet the needs of my students to learn what I am teaching. 

• How will you know whether your blended learning course is sound prior to teaching it? How will you know whether your teaching of the course was effective once it has concluded? (Ch 5 Blendkit)

Overall, the blendkit chapter provides many resources and looks at the various ways that we can determine whether a hybrid or blended learning class meets the standards for "quality instruction." Looking over this article made me think about how we work to support faculty at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Vermont. 

When working with the faculty at UVM who are designing or re-designing their courses into a hybrid format, I utilize many of the resources we currently use when looking over online courses for quality assurance. We have a few resources to help us guide faculty in this process. We focus on principles of Universal Design for Learning or UDL, look at how accessible the resources are for the course,  insure that the course and specifically the syllabus contains specific elements, look through the course structure and learning materials in the LMS - Blackboard, make sure that it is easy to navigate and so on. 

Making sure that students know what is going on in a non-traditionally formatted course (not f-t-f) is really important especially when there is a new class model university wide. In the case of Hybrid or Blended courses at the University of Vermont, we take it a step further and have developed a tool for hybrid teaching faculty to get feedback from their students a few weeks into the hybrid structure. The tool, a survey is added into each course designated as a hybrid and launched in week 5-7 to hear from the students.  Once the survey is completed by the students, the faculty member can take a glance at their responses and know if students understand that the course is "hybrid," and if they can find things or if they are lost when navigating the course. 

Since there are no widely accepted "standards of quality" for Hybrid courses, it is important to review the course plan with others. Other ways to gauge the quality of a course that is being developed or is "ready to go" is to run it by a peer - other faculty members who can give critical and supportive feedback, an instructional designer and also to get regular feedback from students during and after the course is taught. Most faculty teaching a re-designed or newly designed course will have to teach it a few times before it is "just right". Feedback is crucial to that process and involving students and others in that process upfront is helpful to making the course even better the next time around. 

Before faculty in the Hybrid Course Inititative Program (at UVM) can teach their course, they must present their Hybrid course plan to a group of their peers for feedback along with a sample learning object or tour of their course. This process allows for last minute ideas and vetting of the course before it is taught to give time for the faculty to do any tweaking before the beginning of the semester.

The resources provided in this chapter are some that I will revisit and share with my colleagues. I have listed a few that I found helpful, and a few that we have put together over at the UVM Center for Teaching and Learning.  

BlendKit Course: BlendKit Reader: Chapter 5

https://blended.online.ucf.edu/blendkit-course-blendkit-reader-chapter-5/ 

Quality Matters http://www.qmprogram.org/rubric

Monterey Institute Online Course Evaluation Project

http://www.montereyinstitute.org/pdf/OCEP%20Evaluation%20Categories.pdf

University of Wisconsin Milwalkee - Tips for Hybrid dev.

http://www4.uwm.edu/ltc/hybrid/faculty_resources/tips.cfm

University of Vermont, Center for Teaching and Learning - Accessible Document resources

http://www.uvm.edu/ctl/?Page=resources-teaching/accessibility/index.php

University of Vermont, Center for Teaching and Learning - Copyright & Intelectual Property

http://www.uvm.edu/ctl/?Page=resources-teaching/ip-copyright/index.php

University of Vermont, Center for Teaching and Learning - Online Course Design Guidelines

http://www.uvm.edu/ctl/resources-teaching/course-design/index.html

Week 04 Reading Response -

Playing catch-up on week 04 today.

This chapter helps with thinking about using technology and creating/planning learning activities in a blended course.

"In both the face-to-face and online portions of a blended learning course, technologies can play supporting roles in the ways learning activities are experienced and content is encountered by students." - Blendkit Ch 4 reading 

Great chapter on looking at the connection between the online and face-to-face(ftf) parts of a blended/hybrid course that helps designers and faculty "get our feet wet" in designing learning activities appropriate for each component of the course (ftf and online) cohesively.

I really appreciated the table that offered definitions and resources related to five different types of learning activities along with information about using technology and tools to facilitate these activities.

Littlejohn and Pegler (2007) in Preparing for Blended e-Learning outline five learning activity techniques based on Laurillard’s Conversational Model. They produce the following matrix: 

(Here is an image of the table (note - links are not active) check out the article for more info.)

This tool alone helps us see how to dive deeper when looking at how we actually engage students and for what purpose in selecting and utilizing learning activities. 

In this way, we also shift our way of teaching, to be more student-focused, or student centered learning.  This article also shares the specific roles for Teachers and Learners, notes on planning blended learning activities, the benefits of using technology and looking at creating/finding resources and how you the instructor finds their role in teaching a blended course. 

Week 03 #Blendkit2015 Chapter 03 re: Assessment

Thinking about creative and effective ways to assess student learning in Blended/Hybrid courses. Chapter 03 in the Blendtoolkit helps instructors/faculty think about how assessing a blended course may differ from assessing a strictly face to face class.

As I was reading this chapter, many things struck me. How do we access student learning? How is assessment connected to learning goals? What are the tools that exist to assist teachers in gauging how much students are getting out of class?

I am also reading a guide (paperback) called Assessing Student Learning by Linda Suskie. In this book I found a very helpful visual (figure 1.1 on page 4):

This process of reviewing how our learning goals (1) for class are connected to the learning activities (2) and then how we assess whether students learned (3) and successfully / unsuccessfully met the learning goals (4) feeds right back into the next time we try to teach, is all a "continuous four-step cycle.

This cycle reminds us that as we develop our curricula and then teach our students, it should all be directly connected and aligned.

Regardless of how we choose to assess our students, oral, written, multiple-choice, presentations, muddiest points, clickers, etc., it has to tie back to our original learning goals.  Some questions that come to my mind are, "did the student learn in this class? and if so, what did they learn? and ultimately, did they meet the learning goals and outcomes that I set for this course?"

In terms of how we assess our students, tests and exams are often used to determine how much learning occurred. But what are the ways to assess our students? Our reading from Chapter 3 in the Blendkit helps us distinguish between informal and formal assessment. Both of which are helpful in assessing student learning.

Determining when to insert formal assessment throughout the semester is a familiar process to many of us. You teach a unit or chunk of material, then you test "to measure students' progress" through exams and quizzes. This is a good way to break up the semester by setting landmarks on the schedule where students know they will be tested.

Informal assessment actually gives the faculty member an idea, throughout the semester, of how students are processing/understanding the course material. Faculty at the University of Vermont utilize JiTT or Just in Time Teaching strategies including low stakes iClicker questions sprinkled through lectures to engage students and determine what they understand and what they mis-understand. Especially when determining what students understood from the reading the night before class. Another technique called the "Muddiest" point, a mechanism for faculty to get student feedback about what they still find confusing after a lecture, is usually written on a piece of paper and put into a box or on a table at the back of the room allowing students to give anonymous feedback to the faculty or guest lecturer. This type of assessment assists faculty in meeting students exactly where they are in their learning.  

Formative and Summative assessment are another way to look at these type of assessments. Celt Tips offers a great explanation of both Formative and Summative assessment.

Some other questions that come up when thinking of formal assessment in the online environment are usually around fears of students cheating. Online LMS like Blackboard or Canvas, incorporate testing tools that allow faculty to randomize sets of questions so that students can get a unique test each time to deter online cheating. There are other features like limiting the amount of time that a student can take a test and how many times they can take it. Blackboard also allows you to set specific rules for students who need more time or have other accessibility needs.
Another way that some colleges and universities deal with the potential of online cheating it to pay a fee to have tests proctored in person or through a secured center online that records the student with video while they are taking their test. Test Proctoring is still taking off and has a $$ cost associated with this service, so some institutions of higher ed have not yet adopted this method.

Overall, it is good to know the LMS at your institution and what tools are at your disposal for testing and measuring your students' learning. The more ways you have to measure learning, the larger scope you have of what your students actually are learning.

Remembering My Center #Meditation #Mindfullness

This past week I taught a revised version of my "Keeping Your Cool. Managing Stress in Your Life" workshop on Wednesday, 3/4 and Thursday, 3/5 for the EDU@UVM professional development week event at the University of Vermont.

It was a wonderful opportunity for me to remember my stress toolkit resources and also to stop for a moment to check-in with myself.

My Three Steps to Building Resilience...

When feeling the effects of stress it is important for us to be able to:

1. Recognize the stress and its impact on us. Identify what and how stress affects us.

2. Reorient the perspective back to “me.” Focus on self-care.

3. Realize and utilize the resources around to help manage or minimize stress and its impact.

Here are a few blog posts I wrote about the Building Resilience and other tools that I share with participants, enjoy!:
Building your Stress Toolbox
Task Management & Setting Priorities for Projects - Large and Small

#Blendkit2015 Week 2 Reading Response

The reading for this week(2) in #blendkit2015 is on point. The questions posed in chapter 2 will really help course designers/faculty/instructors really think about what will work best for students; how much instruction they need and what will motivate them to do to their best work.

Having faculty/instructors: think about the variety of roles they embody online to help students, look at how students will express themselves in their work, figure out what works best in terms of asynchronously and synchronously expression, and focus on the importance of providing students with clear guidance for assignments; are all good follow-up points to focus on when thinking about and constructing learning activities.

Of course the starting point for creating learning activities and curriculum must always be using measurable learning objectives in order be able to assess them later.

My new phrase of the day: "Techno expression"coined by Kevin Kelly and Ruth Cox (2008)

See the linked guiding learning info graph to think more about this process:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/287174913713849844/

My First MOOC - #blendkit2015

This February, a colleague and I enrolled in the UCF/EDUCAUSE MOOC #blendkit2015 and as a part of the course, I have decided to share some of my learnings here on my blog.

This week we have been reading and learning about a few different ways of looking at designing and developing blended courses. Some of my initial impressions of this first chapter are: it is very complete and comprehensive in its approach to helping faculty and instructional designers understand and ponder blended learning (also known as hybrid or mixed-mode courses), the definition of blended courses is very similar to that of hybrid courses where I work at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Vermont.

According to chapter one on the blended toolkit reader, "Blended courses (also known as hybrid or mixed-mode courses) are classes where a portion of the traditional face-to-face instruction is replaced by web-based online learning. "

I like to think of a blended course as not just taking advantage the best of both learning environments, but also the synergy between the two when they are aligned to work in a way that helps students to meet the course learning objectives.

There are some very helpful resources and templates available in this blendkit course. I am looking forward to connecting with others involved in the MOOC through the campus course interactions, diigo groups and blog posts (I think there is even a LinkedIn group). Lots to look through and learn about. Thanks to all of the folks who put this together especially EDUCAUSE for sharing the info on #blendkit2015.