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

• Wk 1 - DIY - Blendkit 2016 - blended learning blueprint - COL 140 - POTB - Graph - James Buckingham - ver 1 (pdf) 

My module schedule 

•  Wk 2 - DIY - Blendkit 2016 - Module Schedule_COL 140 POTB - James Buckingham (pdf) 

My  review of assignment / module interaction (instructions)

• Wk 3 - DIY - Blendkit 2016 - Module interaction (detailed) - COL 140 POTB - James Buckingham 

My creation of a detailed Module for students

• Wk 4 - DIY - Blendkit 2016 - Module Page - Assignment B - compare contrast - James Buckingham

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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

• Week 5 - Quality assurance in blended learning
• Week 5 - reading reaction   
• Blended Course Implementation Checklist
• Self Assessment & Peer Review Rubric
• The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Blended Course Review Rubric  

review examples (found in reading) 

• The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Blended Course Review Rubric
• Blended Course Self-Assessment/Peer Review Form rubric  
• Blackboard’s Exemplary Course Program 
• CSU Chico’s Rubric for Online Instruction
• Sample - portfolio  
• Sample - portfolio - Arroyo

FINAL result

•  Wk 5 - DIY - Blendkit 2016 - Preparing Course Checklist - James Buckingham (PDF)

Week 3 - reading reactions (before / after reading)

This week was a bit of a disappointment but perhaps it should be viewed as reassuring too. Much of what was said and written was largely already known to me prior to taking the Course. A few new approaches and perhaps a refresher on ideas that I hadn't come into contact in quite some time. 

Table of contents

• Focus Question 
• Objectives 
• Questions to Ponder 
• Notes from reading 
  • Not a whole lot new learned here 
  • There were a few bright spots however
    • non graded multiple choice quizzes
    • presenting video examples or explanations 
    • presenting non credit, online practice exams 
    • key online assessment tool features 
      • T/F alternative
    • informal assessment design checklist 
    • one sentence summary 

Focus Question

How will I determine students are learning?

Direct creation of learning artifacts by students that demonstrate their understanding of concepts through their application of concepts to realize something. Ideally whatever is produced is authentic in the sense that it invites application to a situation / simulation similar to one where these same skills and concepts would need to be applied. 

 Authentic assessment—assessing student abilities to apply knowledge, skills, and attitudes to real world problems—is not only possible in an online environment; it is getting more popular. (Thompson, n.d.)

Objectives

After completing all of this week’s activities, you should be able to:

• Determine  assessments appropriate for the learning objectives you’ve established in your blended course
  • assessments are aligned with learning objectives; methods lead practicing skills and competencies that are to be tested in assessments (everything connects) 
• Revise existing course documents as appropriate based upon assessment decisions
• Configure online quizzes for your blended course
  • self directed, formative assessment quizzes 
• Create written student instructions for each graded assignment in your blended course 
  • checklist

Questions to Ponder (before reading)

• How much of the final course grade do you typically allot to testing? How many tests/exams do you usually require? How can you avoid creating a “high stakes” environment that may inadvertently set students up for failure/cheating?
  • How much of the final course grade do I typically allot to testing? For the most part, it has not been determined by me but by those responsible for the course syllabus. However, as a rule, I would want to opt to have assignments weighted equally throughout the course and also have assignments be sequenced in such a way that they build upon earlier assessments and build towards subsequent assessments. 
  • I've learned that putting more than 20% weight on any one assessment typically means making it "high stakes".  The draw back? Performance anxiety - a one off "disaster" can effect a student's final grade - thus explaining the "high stakes" nature of it. We want students to demonstrate their learning and unless managing "stress" is considered an important part of the assessment, a learning objective, then it should be minimized as much as possible. How to avoid it? Simple. Don't make one assignment so high stakes. Another option is to design an assessment so that it is ALSO a learning experience. Even invite students to make notes or drawn on notes that they think will help support them in the completion of an assignment - perhaps even make this a group / collaborative activity so they once again, engage with course contents, negotiate understanding and meaning prior to completing the assignment. Invite students to even use these notes to help them complete an assessment.

• What expectations do you have for online assessments? How do these expectations compare to those you have for face-to-face assessments? Are you harboring any biases?
  • I think that I should value online assessments as much as any other assignment that is given in a face to face context. However, I can imagine a healthy dose of skepticism from peers and supervisors (even students) who believe that when done sight unseen, students are inclined to "take advantage" of the situation to round up help and thus undermine the validity of the testing. Yet the few articles that I've read, surprisingly indicate that the incidence of cheating online is not even marginally significant when compared with that in a face to face context. 

• What trade-offs do you see between the affordances of auto-scored online quizzes and project-based assessments? How will you strike the right balance in your blended learning course?
  • Trade offs with auto scored online quizzes? Immediately what springs to mind is how objective testing is essentially inviting practice in lower order thinking skills (memorization, identification, classification) but far less likely to be taxing higher order thinking skills. However, any course of study does require a basic competency in the discourse of its subject and these sorts of online quizzes become useful for both ensuring students make them a focus of study and for monitoring student success in understanding them. Project based assessment would be far more welcomed for its ability to promote application, judgement and synthesis of concepts and thus promote higher order (critical thinking) skills. But the caveat with them is in how much more time they require to be reviewed and assessed. In a MOOC with participants that number in the 100s or even 1000s, this is just not feasible. What then needs to be entertained is the use of peer review with a clear and comprehensive rubric - perhaps supported by an instructor's own reflections and guidance (thus the peer assessment also becomes yet another "learning / application / judgement experience"). The balance? Between what is humanely possible for the instructor and what is most beneficial to the students - essentially choosing the "biggest bang for the buck".

• How will you implement formal and informal assessments of learning into your blended learning course? Will these all take place face-to-face, online, or in a combination?
  • My (yet to be identified) blended learning course would definitely see a combination of the two and ideally with one supporting the next. By this I mean that the concepts studied and learned for one assessment are continued / built upon / reapplied / reinforced in subsequent assessments so there is a cumulative reinforcement of them.