- What are the 2-3 most important concepts that have impacted your thoughts on student engagement and retention during this course?
One concept I found helpful was the idea that it may be more effective to try and help students connect to the course of study/topic, more so than trying to help students make personal connections. I like the idea of helping students connect to the ‘we’ more so than the ‘I’. I can relate it ideas of how to create a movement, such as make meaningful stories, connect people to the cause, create a shared purpose, show members real world impacts. This is not to say creating personal connections is not important, but no the most critical aspect.
I also appreciated the different classifications of of social presence, specifically that I could gleam students responses to get a sense of the levels of interactions. I do not see myself comparing every sentence a student writes to the category examples, but I can see the knowledge that there are different categories helping to better interpret what is being said in discussions.
Lastly I appreciated the various principles associated with multimedia creation. I found that I connected with many of the examples given, I believe that I am already incorporating them to some degree in my materials. I had very positive student feedback around how I organized my presentations and the ease of going through them. Seeing this principles helped reinforces these habits even more.
- Discuss your rationale for implementing 1 or 2 course facilitation strategies to increase student retention and engagement.
This is a little trickier. I am only involved in teaching one online course, and all of the content has already been created. That being said, I do want to follow through with creating and posting an online introduction video. One reason for this was reflecting on the lesson indicating that students felt the course was more personal. I want to help make the courses I am involved in more personal. I remember being involved in an online course and the instructor did weekly or bi-weekly videos. They were often filmed with him sitting on a beach somewhere, talking about some of the material we were engaging with that week and how he thought about it. I remember really appreciating that, and want to do something similar.
- Identify 2-3 specific goals that you would like to achieve in light of what you have learned about social presence and creating effective educational media;
- make sure that your goals are SMART,
- identify strategies you intend to use in order to meet your goals.
I want to meet with my co-OLFM by the end of the summer 2019 and discuss ways to incorporate more engaging video content into the course
I want to meet with my co-OLFM by the end of the summer 2019 and discuss was to add non-text material to the current only-text material
– I can reference content learned through these courses as why I want to do these things
– I can reference past times where my co-OLFM as indicated they have thought about making changes