I am relatively new to Moodle. I've played with it a few times over the last couple of years, but I'm more familiar with Angel, and I am using Blackboard extensively now as part of my work as a course designer.
There are several things that I really don't like about Moodle. One is the fact that it does not allow the learner to easily move from one page of content to the next. Angel pages include NEXT and PREVIOUS buttons that lead the user naturally from one page of content to the next, making it easier to create a lesson that guides the student from one activity to the next, much like a textbook. Angel also includes an outline view like the structure in Moodle, so students can easily jump to specific content if they wish.
Another fault with Moodle is the fact that a rubric cannot be assigned to a discussion forum. Rubrics are a great tool for both the student and the instructor, because they can be used to let the student know what the expectations are and make choices about which parts of an assignment are more important than others. For instructors, it streamlines the grading process, allowing the instructor to focus on one aspect of the assignment at a time, using a more objective system to grade assignments more consistently. Moodle does support rubrics for some assignments, so it would make sense to include them with discussion boards. The workaround I found was to create an assignment that is used solely to grade the discussion boards.
One of the major drawbacks to the online platforms I am familiar with is the fact that it is hard to present content as anything other than a page of text. External content can be linked into the course, but that requires the use of tools that are not native to the LMS. Not only does this make it more difficult to create content for a course, but it also makes it harder to maintain the content over time.
I believe that in another two or three years more interactive learning tools will be incorporated into online learning systems. The goal should be to have a course that replaces a traditional textbook but which is more interactive than ebooks as they exist today. I know that publishers are trying to create tools like this that can be embedded into an LMS, and I have used a few of these tools in the past. Some of these tools are good and cannot easily be replicated by an instructor or course designer, but they increase the cost of the course to the student. Incorporating social media tools into the content would also allow students to interact with each other more spontaneously than the current discussion boards and wikis do.
My goal is to create a course that allows students to access the content easily from any device, regardless of size, something that no LMS I am familiar with has been able to achieve. While I do not think that full-sized computers will not disappear completely, I think it could be useful if a student can load up the instructional content into a handheld device, allowing them to access that content from anywhere. They can read and work with the material wherever they happen to be, including waiting in a doctor's office or carpool like, or while commuting to and from work. After going through the content, a more traditional computer can be used to complete and submit assignments.
Eventually, what we now consider online learning will be the standard method to access learning content, replacing printed books. Classrooms will become centers that allow students to discuss the material they have learned outside of the classroom, with less reliance on lectures and formal instruction. Instructors will become content specialists who act as a repository for information about the subject as well as a guide to lead students through the learning process.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Instructional Content in an Online Class
I have been developing online classes for more than ten years, and over that period of time, the concept of "instructor presence" has evolved significantly.
In the early days of online courses, an online course was typically created as an extension of an instructor's classroom version of the same course. Even today, many online classes include videos of an instructor standing in front of a blackboard (or whiteboard) lecturing to a classroom of students, with the idea that creating a video to replicate the classroom experience is the best way to make sure that online students have the same classroom experience as the on-campus students. Even without videos, the content was created by the instructor who intended to teach the class, allowing the instructor to embed their personality into the contents based on the style of their prose.
While we have moved away from this model to some extent, the fact remains that most stakeholders in the educational process believe that the instructor should be fully engaged with the online class, in the same way that a classroom instructor is. Adult students in particular often feel the need to have an authority who can provide details about what they are expected to learn, with guidelines on how they will prove that they have learned the material. Malcolm Knowles's proposals on the features of androgogy focus on student-centered learning, which requires that students be provided with all of the information and tools that they need to succeed, but David Grow's Staged Self-Directed Learning model suggests that there is a broader range of student engagement patterns, based on their readiness to learn (Stravredos, Chapter 2). In either case, the presence of a human instructor can be a vital part of the learning process, even when the course takes place fully online.
In parallel, though, the content of an online class has shifted from being the digital recreation of a specific instructor's class to that of an online textbook of sorts. Instead of each instructor creating their own class online, the concept of "cookie cutter" classes is becoming pervasive. In this model, a subject matter expert--often with teaching experience, but not always a full-time instructor--is hired to develop the course content, while an educational technology expert publishes the content to an online course. That course can then be duplicated and assigned to different instructors, so that the school can offer multiple but identical sections of the same course, and to ensure that the course is the same from one semester to the next.
Under this model, the content of an online course has moved from being the creation of a specific instructor that is imbued with the presence of that instructor to a much more neutral presentation of the core material, not unlike the way a textbook would present the same concept. The material is presented in the third person, rather than from a first-person experience, and the students are represented as an audience, rather than as participants in the learning event.
As both an instructor and an educational technology expert, I would like to see a change in this perspective, but I also wonder what the final product would look like.
I do think that the "cookie cutter" model is a good one. As with any human endeavor, there will be individual teachers who are more or less good at presenting the material and engaging students--whether the class takes place in a real classroom or a virtual one. From the students' perspective, having a core set of content that includes the correct material and the same student assessments helps ensure the quality of education for each student, regardless of who the instructor is. From the instructor's point of view, more time is available to engage with students and provide rich feedback for the assignments, because less time is spend developing content or planning lessons. The administration benefits because they can compare quality of instruction much more easily across sections and from one semester to the next, making global assessments and achievements easier to measure for accreditation purposes.
That said, the end result is often a dry, crumbly cookie in the mouth of the students. The online course presents them with stale content that creates a certain amount of distance between the instructor and the student. This gap can be bridged by the expectation that the actual instructor will add personalized content to the course, like introduction videos, frequent participation in discussion boards, scheduled live chats, and similar tools that present the instructor to the student as a live person, rather than as a bot of some kind, but the time required to generate this content detracts from the reasons for using the cookie cutter model in the first place.
The reason behind the depersonalization of the content is somewhat of a mystery to me. I do understand that the instructional voice of the content may be significantly different from the personality of the actual instructor, but in that sense, it really isn't any different from using someone else's recipe to bake a batch of cookies that are then presented as a creation of the cook, not the author of the original recipe. If the instructional content is presented more as a conversation between the instructor and the student--using first and second person pronouns--it seems to me that the student will be more engaged with that content. The fact that the personality of the author may be completely different from the personality of the actual instructor is not that important. Most online students have little direct interaction with the instructor over the course of a term, and those that do will determine the instructor's real personality from those interactions more than from the instructional content of the course. I think that a student has the capacity to understand that while the contents may be someone else's "recipe," the presentation of that content in some way represents the instructor who is actually leading the class.
Over the last few weeks, my job has required that I generate instructional content for online courses. At the beginning of this process, I used a conversational tone in my writing. While I avoided the first person, I purposely chose to use second-person pronouns as a way of pulling the student into the situation I was describing, and presenting the choices that the learner would have to make in the future. When that content went through the editing process, however, all the second-person pronouns were stripped, and replaced by abstract nouns like "developers" or "people"--words that create distance between the learner and the context.
I realized this week that the content I am currently creating is devoid of the conversational tone I started with, and much of the content sounds like what the student would read in a textbook instead. I am not convinced that this is a better approach to creating content for adult learners. I think it is more important to create an instructional presence in the online classroom, even if that presence is not identical to the personality of the actual instructor. This creates a conversation between the student and the content, which is better than a "sage on the stage" lecture from a podium--which in itself creates that distance between the instructor and the student, even when they are in the same room.
In the early days of online courses, an online course was typically created as an extension of an instructor's classroom version of the same course. Even today, many online classes include videos of an instructor standing in front of a blackboard (or whiteboard) lecturing to a classroom of students, with the idea that creating a video to replicate the classroom experience is the best way to make sure that online students have the same classroom experience as the on-campus students. Even without videos, the content was created by the instructor who intended to teach the class, allowing the instructor to embed their personality into the contents based on the style of their prose.
While we have moved away from this model to some extent, the fact remains that most stakeholders in the educational process believe that the instructor should be fully engaged with the online class, in the same way that a classroom instructor is. Adult students in particular often feel the need to have an authority who can provide details about what they are expected to learn, with guidelines on how they will prove that they have learned the material. Malcolm Knowles's proposals on the features of androgogy focus on student-centered learning, which requires that students be provided with all of the information and tools that they need to succeed, but David Grow's Staged Self-Directed Learning model suggests that there is a broader range of student engagement patterns, based on their readiness to learn (Stravredos, Chapter 2). In either case, the presence of a human instructor can be a vital part of the learning process, even when the course takes place fully online.
In parallel, though, the content of an online class has shifted from being the digital recreation of a specific instructor's class to that of an online textbook of sorts. Instead of each instructor creating their own class online, the concept of "cookie cutter" classes is becoming pervasive. In this model, a subject matter expert--often with teaching experience, but not always a full-time instructor--is hired to develop the course content, while an educational technology expert publishes the content to an online course. That course can then be duplicated and assigned to different instructors, so that the school can offer multiple but identical sections of the same course, and to ensure that the course is the same from one semester to the next.
Under this model, the content of an online course has moved from being the creation of a specific instructor that is imbued with the presence of that instructor to a much more neutral presentation of the core material, not unlike the way a textbook would present the same concept. The material is presented in the third person, rather than from a first-person experience, and the students are represented as an audience, rather than as participants in the learning event.
As both an instructor and an educational technology expert, I would like to see a change in this perspective, but I also wonder what the final product would look like.
I do think that the "cookie cutter" model is a good one. As with any human endeavor, there will be individual teachers who are more or less good at presenting the material and engaging students--whether the class takes place in a real classroom or a virtual one. From the students' perspective, having a core set of content that includes the correct material and the same student assessments helps ensure the quality of education for each student, regardless of who the instructor is. From the instructor's point of view, more time is available to engage with students and provide rich feedback for the assignments, because less time is spend developing content or planning lessons. The administration benefits because they can compare quality of instruction much more easily across sections and from one semester to the next, making global assessments and achievements easier to measure for accreditation purposes.
That said, the end result is often a dry, crumbly cookie in the mouth of the students. The online course presents them with stale content that creates a certain amount of distance between the instructor and the student. This gap can be bridged by the expectation that the actual instructor will add personalized content to the course, like introduction videos, frequent participation in discussion boards, scheduled live chats, and similar tools that present the instructor to the student as a live person, rather than as a bot of some kind, but the time required to generate this content detracts from the reasons for using the cookie cutter model in the first place.
The reason behind the depersonalization of the content is somewhat of a mystery to me. I do understand that the instructional voice of the content may be significantly different from the personality of the actual instructor, but in that sense, it really isn't any different from using someone else's recipe to bake a batch of cookies that are then presented as a creation of the cook, not the author of the original recipe. If the instructional content is presented more as a conversation between the instructor and the student--using first and second person pronouns--it seems to me that the student will be more engaged with that content. The fact that the personality of the author may be completely different from the personality of the actual instructor is not that important. Most online students have little direct interaction with the instructor over the course of a term, and those that do will determine the instructor's real personality from those interactions more than from the instructional content of the course. I think that a student has the capacity to understand that while the contents may be someone else's "recipe," the presentation of that content in some way represents the instructor who is actually leading the class.
Over the last few weeks, my job has required that I generate instructional content for online courses. At the beginning of this process, I used a conversational tone in my writing. While I avoided the first person, I purposely chose to use second-person pronouns as a way of pulling the student into the situation I was describing, and presenting the choices that the learner would have to make in the future. When that content went through the editing process, however, all the second-person pronouns were stripped, and replaced by abstract nouns like "developers" or "people"--words that create distance between the learner and the context.
I realized this week that the content I am currently creating is devoid of the conversational tone I started with, and much of the content sounds like what the student would read in a textbook instead. I am not convinced that this is a better approach to creating content for adult learners. I think it is more important to create an instructional presence in the online classroom, even if that presence is not identical to the personality of the actual instructor. This creates a conversation between the student and the content, which is better than a "sage on the stage" lecture from a podium--which in itself creates that distance between the instructor and the student, even when they are in the same room.
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