Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Portfolio - First submission

The first draft of my Blendkit 2016 "Blended Learning Designer" portfolio has been submitted.

http://j.mp/Blendkit2016_Portfolio_1stdraft

My concluding statement 


One of my main reasons for taking this course was to learn more about blended learning and how it might be similar and yet different from online or distance education. What I have discovered is that many of the same issues such as learner engagement, alignment and quality control exist and many of the same methods to designing instruction are shared as well. Something that I sensed from earlier readings was the ease at which blended learning can be implemented in a traditional face to face setting, certainly when compared to realizing either online or distance education. This is especially so in educational institutions where more and more classrooms support connectivity and more and more students have connected devices outside of class. The course has simply confirmed this.

But it certainly seems apparent that designing blended learning instruction so that it is effective is no small challenge either. The course has given me at least an introduction to some of blended learning's current issues and challenges (measures of effectiveness and quality). It has also given me a deeper practical understanding of what is involved in realizing blended learning (via the adapting of a course that I am teaching now to blended learning). I think it has also given me greater confidence to assume a leadership role in following up on the recommendation that I made in my online and distance education feasibility study - namely to promote blended learning design because it is much more viable for the University College to do so.

I would also like to pursue blended learning design further. This became apparent after my recent reading of Arney's e-book "Go Blended" (n.d.). In it, Arney suggests that blended learning needs to be more than a way to promote effective technology integration in traditional education, that it has the capacity to realize what seems like something of a "Holy Grail" in education - differentiated or personalized instruction.


Arney, L. (n.d.). Go Blended. Retrieved March 28, 2016, from http://www.goblended.com/about
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Saturday, April 9, 2016

Portfolio assignment

Plan for completing Portfolio 

  • read Portfolio assignment 
  • review what has been accomplished via DIY assignments 
  • review what has been accomplished via weekly reflective writing
  • review Portfolio examples 
  • complete portfolio

read Portfolio assignment

Purpose / Objective 

The objective of the portfolio is to demonstrate you have mastered the concepts to design a blended learning course. The portfolio requirements are six core criteria based demonstrated through course design artifacts and accompanying reflection statements. We highly recommend you use the DIY projects in the BlendKit2016 course as the basis for the course design artifacts to be included in your portfolio.

The portfolio will be submitted using Canvas "Assignments." Feel free to preview the assignment instructions and scoring criteria now.

If you are curious about those who will be reviewing your portfolio submission, please see the List of Portfolio Reviewers.

Method 

For your course portfolio you should submit the following items:

1. Reflection Statement

Create, and submit as an artifact one substantive written reflection statement.
    • This statement should contain sections addressing each criterion in the rubric.
      • Course Expectations (clear start; online v. f2f; communication protocols; required materials)
      • Learning Objectives (course-level; unit-level; balance of higher order & lower order; student-friendly wording)
      • Learning Activities/Content (activities aligned with outcomes; student-to-student; student-to-instructor; student-to-content; content aligned with activities; content aligned with outcomes; media content functional)
      • Learning Assessment (variety; impact on final grade; scoring criteria; grading communications; balance in/formal)
      • Technology Tools (purpose; instructions; support)
      • Ethical/Legal Practices (UDL; accommodations; permissions; privacy; academic misconduct)
      • Blended Implementation (Extra credit!) 
    • Taken as a whole, your reflection statement should describe the overall organization of your course and make evident the connections between face-to-face and online components, interaction, activities and assessment.
    • Make sure your statement “connects the dots” between the course components and any documents you submit to represent your course. Refer to specific documents in your written narrative. Please don’t leave the “connections” to our imaginations!
    • While your course design artifacts should stand on their own as much as possible, the written reflection is your opportunity to reveal anything about your design thinking that is not evident in your documents.

2. Course Design Artifacts 

    • Attach documents that represent the blended course you are designing and that fulfill the criteria in the rubric. (You may submit multiple files.)
    • Some items we might expect to see are your syllabus, course content, activities, and assessment plans.
    • If at all possible, your documents should be complete enough to stand on their own in fulfilling the rubric criteria. However, you will supplement them with the written statements in your reflection.
    • Again, you will find the BlendKit2016 DIY tasks (Links to an external site.) helpful in creating your course design artifacts for this portfolio, and we suggest strongly that you work on these tasks throughout the course so that you will have less new work to do during the portfolio submission/review period.

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Portfolio Submission Directions, Template File, and Sample Submissions

  1. Save your artifact files with a clear naming convention.
  2. Specific file names should be used when addressing the file in your in your Reflection Statement.

Template/Checklist FilePreview the documentView in a new window (click to open)View in a new window - This file is an optional resource to guide you through the expectations and grading protocol for the portfolio.

Sample Submissions

From 
BlendKit UCF. (n.d.). University of Central Florida (UCF) and EDUCAUSE Certificate: BlendKit 2016: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer. Retrieved April 9, 2016, from https://learn.canvas.net/courses/898/pages/university-of-central-florida-ucf-and-educause-certificate?module_item_id=141633

  

review what has been accomplished via DIY assignments 

My course blueprint
My module schedule 
My  review of assignment / module interaction (instructions)
My creation of a detailed Module for students
My creation of a detailed "preparation" checklist (what still remains to be done)

review what has been accomplished via weekly reflective writing

review Portfolio examples



complete portfolio





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Friday, April 8, 2016

Week 5 - DIY - Assuring Quality in a Blended Learning Course

Reflections 

The Week 5 DIY activity essentially asked me to assess what I still need to do to make my proposed Blended Learning Course operational. Now I'm actually currently teaching the Course and thus I'm really not in any position to apply much of what it is that I'm proposing just yet. This may seem a bit of a cop out but in fact, I have found applying the whole exercise to work on a course that I'm currently teaching most instructive and may do the same with other courses in the future. Now to get to the actual "doing" of this, I found both checklists provided by Blendkit2016 designers to be comprehensive and most helpful. Much of what I have listed is in large part from these but in some instances is adapted or perhaps interpreted slightly different by me.

However, I thought there was one major omission. Noticeably absent was any focus on learning more about students - to build some sort of a general student profile. By this I mean knowing more about students background, motivation etc. in effect building a sort of student profile. This information would be beneficial in guiding me in the design of instruction. To make this more clear, the absence of such information increases the risk of me making potentially incorrect or false assumptions about my students when designing my blended learning instruction The more that I can know about my students, the more likely I am to be successful in designing materials, and interactions that are meaningful and purposeful for them. This is certainly not feasible to do for each student, but is important enough to help support student interest and motivation in such course design. Such an exercise also ensures that students are at the focus of my instructional design and not actually "just" administration or management. This would apply for any course whether it be in a face to face, fully online or blended setting.

I noticed that there is still a tremendous amount of work remaining to help make this happen, especially on the "online aspect". Notable here is the need to create and design online resources that will be engaging for students yet also producing meaningful data on students such that I can learn just what students have been learned. This is an area - learning analytics - that I would actually relish looking at in more depth. The exercise also draws to my attention the need to really carefully review the alignment of all modules with learning outcomes to "increase the chances" of their efficacy and effectiveness. 
Background

Will target my current POTB COL 140 course at Zayed University for blended learning.

POTB attempts to take the current regular COL 140 - English Composition 1 Course that is given over a regular 15 week period and to compress it into 7 weeks. This puts significant pressure on students (and me the instructor) to cover the same material / syllabus but over a much shortened time frame. The use of blended learning strategies may permit students to engage with course concepts more frequently, in a manner that is more engaging, and at a time and place more convenient to them (outside of class). 


Interactive strategies (tools) that I am likely to use
  • real time collaborative document / lesson plan (etherpad - example, Google doc) 
  • interactive video + reading comprehension, sentence writing (Edpuzzle - example)
  • synchronous paragraph writing (Padlet - example,  etherpad)
  • synchronous sentence writing (Today's Meet - example)
  • class review (Kahoot) 
  • vocabulary development (combination of Google form - to collect student written definitions; Quizlet - taking student written definitions to author a Quizlet); test via Blackboard Quizzes (using Question pools)
My course blueprint
My module schedule 
My  review of assignment / module interaction (instructions)
My creation of a detailed Module for students
---------------------------------------------------

Plan for completing Week 5 - DIY
  • read Week 5 - DIY assignments
  • review reading 
  • review my notes 
  • review examples 
  • complete Week 1 - DIY assignments 
read Week 5 - DIY assignments

Our final week’s development tasks are deceptively simple. In a nutshell, you’re going to finish developing your blended learning course and get ready to teach it. This is not something you are likely to accomplish in one week! However, you can certainly make a personal to-do list of items you decide that you need to complete prior to the beginning of your course. To that end, we’ve provided a couple of tools to help you get started:
  • Blended Course Implementation Checklist [pdf file; size=101kb]
    This is actually three checklists in one! Divided into Before the Course, During the Course, and After the Course sections, these to-do items should be a good starting  point for you to create your own set of action items. While the items provided are based upon lessons learned from many blended learning courses, only you can decide the items that are important to you.
  • Blended Course (Self-Assessment)/Peer Review Form [pdf file; size=1.3MB]
    There is no substitute for collegial dialogue with other instructors to get ideas to improve one’s teaching, regardless of modality. However, we offer this review form to you to share with a trusted colleague in the hope that it may facilitate such a helpful conversation. Most of the criteria included focus upon course design, but one additional section is provided on items that can only be observed once the course is underway. We suggest that you invite your trusted colleague to visit both the face-to-face and online portions of your blended course at some point during the academic term. You might also find it helpful to use this form as the basis for a self-assessment prior to teaching your first blended learning course. The form may be completed electronically or printed for completion by hand.
review reading / resources


review examples (found in reading) 

FINAL result
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Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Badge Inventory

Click on anyone of the badges below to learn more about how they were earned.
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Week 4 - DIY - Develop Content/Assignment Pages for Your Blended Learning Course

Reflections 
This took an incredible amount of time to complete - much more time then I ever anticipated. What made it difficult? The nature of the course that I'm hoping to adapt for Blended Learning. The course is COL 140 POTB (part of Term B). Essentially it is taking the regular COL 140 and trying to accomplish all of the same objectives but in half the time. What I find myself trying to do is find ways to maximize student / teacher contact time (not lecturing) so that I meet the needs of students both in and outside of class and in a short time. This means shifting more activities to be done individually for completion "outside of class" and then using this work for follow up discussion as a class or in small groups while "in class".

Complicating things is the nature of the assignments in the Course and course objectives. Focus is on Summary Paragraph writing for one part of it. Here the focus is on in-depth comprehension of a reading, in-text citations, identifying the topic and main ideas, and paraphrasing to improve comprehension.

The other focus is on learning about and practicing to write paragraphs in different rhetorical modes. While many of the same skills required to complete summary paragraph are needed here as well (paraphrasing, comprehension), the real focus is on organizing ideas, and using compare and contrast syntax. So as a result, each of these "parts" acts as a module yet it may not be possible for students to complete these modules one after the other but instead they may be required to complete them concurrently. Thus the example that I have completed ONLY represents one module - compare and contrast paragraph - which students would be expected to complete concurrently with the summary paragraph. One saving grace is that teaching / learning about the summary writing paragraph part would only really need to be taught once and then repeated .. thus reinforcing the process. This would make it easier to complement the rhetorical paragraph Assignments.


Background

Will target my current POTB COL 140 course at Zayed University for blended learning.

POTB attempts to take the current regular COL 140 - English Composition 1 Course that is given over a regular 15 week period and to compress it into 7 weeks. This puts significant pressure on students (and me the instructor) to cover the same material / syllabus but over a much shortened time frame. The use of blended learning strategies may permit students to engage with course concepts more frequently, in a manner that is more engaging, and at a time and place more convenient to them (outside of class). 


Interactive strategies (tools) that I am likely to use
  • real time collaborative document / lesson plan (etherpad - example, Google doc) 
  • interactive video + reading comprehension, sentence writing (Edpuzzle - example)
  • synchronous paragraph writing (Padlet - example,  etherpad)
  • synchronous sentence writing (Today's Meet - example)
  • class review (Kahoot) 
  • vocabulary development (combination of Google form - to collect student written definitions; Quizlet - taking student written definitions to author a Quizlet) 
My course blueprint
My module schedule 
My  review of assignment / module interaction (instructions)
 
---------------------------------------------------

Plan for completing Week 4 - DIY
Goal - to articulate your strategies for a well-integrated (face-to-face + online) blended course and to produce modules (i.e., HTML pages that present content, provide access to assignment instructions you created last week, or both) for uploading to the online portion of your blended learning course.
  • read Week 4 - DIY assignments
  • review reading 
  • review my notes 
  • review examples 
  • complete Week 1 - DIY assignments 
read Week 4 - DIY assignments
  1. Blended Course Integration Chart (Links to an external site.) [docx file; size=26kb]
  • Create Module Pages (Links to an external site.) [pdf file; size=758kb] - This document provides step-by-step instructions for creating your module pages and includes an example module. The following files will be useful to you in completing the steps contained in the above document:
  • Module Template (Links to an external site.) [docx file; size=12kb] - To get you started on your module, this is a template page you may use to create your module document. Feel free to modify this page to fit your course needs.
review reading / resources
review examples (found in reading) 
FINAL results submitted 
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Sunday, April 3, 2016

Week 3 - DIY - Blended Assessments of Learning

Reflections 

Good exercise.. Demanded a detailed review of assignments. I had to rationalize their nature, sequence, and design ... especially as to how they built upon one another and addressed the learning objectives as stated in my course blueprint and module design sequence. To do this correctly, would require a great deal more time then I was in a position to give. The iterative nature of this activity that the Blendkit 2016 - Chapter 3 materials eludes, certainly becomes evident. I have also come to realize just how rich and powerful the interactive video strategy that I have only recently discovered and implemented is going to be. This assignment opened my eyes to this. It also forced a more detailed examination about how it can best be administered.

Note that I can also see tremendous value in using webbased screencasts to show students (especially second language learners)  how to get started on a project or assignment - whether that is in a face to face or online context. The multi modal nature of them plus the 24/7 access to them helps make instructions so much more clear to students and at a time and place of their convenience. As a result, I have begun to experiment with recording any "how to" (demonstrations) that I have done in class. I have also the luxury of seeing when and how frequently they are being used. Student response to them is almost always excellent too. 

I also wanted to note the pragmatic side of using objective based quizzes. They certainly have the capacity to lighten an instructor's marking load albeit typically for low level cognitive skills (though the examples presented in the Effective Assessment Examples article seem to suggest that this not always be the case - worth a follow up). But what I find such quizzes are especially useful for is how they better support trial and error than when done via an in the class activity. However, I've also come to learn the need to design these in such a way that they do NOT support random guessing. I have found that I can do this by only giving students access to a final score of a quiz .. so they are not clear as to which questions they got incorrect. The quiz also needs to be based on a battery of questions thus giving students a chance to redo the quiz but with little likelihood of getting the same questions. It should also be set up to support a minimal mastery rate (e.g. 80%). I have found that the strategy promotes frequent use of an online quiz and as a result, the quiz in effect becomes more than an instrument for collecting scores, but a learning activity in itself.


Background

Will target my current POTB COL 140 course at Zayed University for blended learning.

POTB attempts to take the current regular COL 140 - English Composition 1 Course that is given over a regular 15 week period and to compress it into 7 weeks. This puts significant pressure on students (and me the instructor) to cover the same material / syllabus but over a much shortened time frame. The use of blended learning strategies may permit students to engage with course concepts more frequently, in a manner that is more engaging, and at a time and place more convenient to them (outside of class). 


Interactive strategies (tools) that I am likely to use

  • real time collaborative document / lesson plan (etherpad - example, Google doc) 
  • interactive video + reading comprehension, sentence writing (Edpuzzle - example)
  • synchronous paragraph writing (Padlet - example,  etherpad)
  • synchronous sentence writing (Today's Meet - example)
  • class review (Kahoot) 
  • vocabulary development (combination of Google form - to collect student written definitions; Quizlet - taking student written definitions to author a Quizlet) 
My course blueprint
My module schedule 
 
---------------------------------------------------

Plan for completing Week 3 - DIY

  • read Week 3 - DIY assignments
  • review reading 
  • review my notes 
  • review examples 
  • complete Week 1 - DIY assignments 
read Week 3 - DIY assignments
  1. Create Assignment Instructions [pdf file; size=102kb]For each graded assignment through which you will assess student learning,  use this process to create written assignment instructions to share with students.
  2. Configure Online Quizzes [pdf file; size=78kb]Online quizzes are one of the most common assessment methods employed in blended courses. If you decide to employ online quizzes in your blended course, use this checklist to work through the logistics of setting up your online quizzes.
  3. Revise Course Blueprint, Syllabus, and other course documents as appropriate.As you work through the logistics associated with your online quizzes and other graded assignments/assessments, you may find that you want to adjust your original plans as articulated in your earlier documents. Revising them will allow you to stay focused on designing one, consistent whole.
review reading 
review examples (found in
FINAL results submitted 
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Saturday, April 2, 2016

Week 2 - DIY - design for interaction

Reflections 
It's not entirely clear to me if the "Module Interaction Worksheet" is to be completed separately or is to be used to inform the refinement / revision of the "Detailed Module / Course Schedule". I've chosen to do the later because I found it more useful. I've also included the course expectations doc and the weekly schedule. All very useful. The module interaction worksheet forced me to make a detailed review of how the various interactions that I hope to include would be tied directly to the course objectives and specific in-class activities. The basic premise in my design was to take what is a highly unusual course - essentially condensing a regular 15 week course into 7 weeks. I've looked at Blended learning as a way to extend the classroom time, to increase the level of interaction students have with course concepts, and thus hopefully improve their chances of success. However, I confess that it would certainly be a demanding course and only those students who attended to all of these assignments would benefit from it. 


Background

Will target my current POTB COL 140 course at Zayed University for blended learning.

POTB attempts to take the current regular COL 140 - English Composition 1 Course that is given over a regular 15 week period and to compress it into 7 weeks. This puts significant pressure on students (and me the instructor) to cover the same material / syllabus but over a much shortened time frame. The use of blended learning strategies may permit students to engage with course concepts more frequently, in a manner that is more engaging, and at a time and place more convenient to them (outside of class). 


Interactive strategies (tools) that I am likely to use
My course blueprint
 
---------------------------------------------------

Plan for completing Week 2 - DIY

  • read Week 2 - DIY assignments
  • review reading 
  • review my notes 
  • review examples 
  • complete Week 1 - DIY assignments 
read Week 2 - DIY assignments
  1. Creating Course Document Drafts: Schedule, Syllabus, and Protocols: Instructions, examples, and templates [pdf file; size=144kb]
    Draft these course documents with an eye toward how interaction will take place throughout your course. Within the instructions are example course documents and links to blank templates for creating your own pre-web course documents.
  2. Module Interaction Worksheet: [Word doc; size=33kb]
    While the course documents above will reflect your intentions for interaction in general, this worksheet will allow you to think through the interactions in one module (e.g., one week). You may continue the process for as many modules/weeks as you like.
Discovery
The use of 

 review reading 
review examples (found in
FINAL results submitted 
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