- What are the most important lessons you gathered from the course?
- I enjoyed the section constructing alignment between assessments and learning outcomes. I found it a good foundation to have in approaching course/assignment design, and have already used it in my own teaching.
- I took value from the engage section, specifically in how it discussed creating a group identify is likely more successful in building engagement compared to building social connections.
- I enjoyed the experience of working with wordpress. I didn’t stress the limits of what was possible with it, but the chance to do so with this course helped me gain more confidence in considering using web pages as a delivery or assignment modality.
- How has your thinking changed as a result of completing the course?
- It is interesting to consider the three main categories of think, engage, and teach as core components. The course used different language and terms to describe concepts that I have encountered in different forms, but I appreciated the online focus of the content. I wouldn’t say my overall thinking has changed, but it has become more refined. Going over the SOLO taxonomy and exploring the different verbs and levels of understanding helped me be a little more specific. Reviewing explicit examples of different levels of engagement and how certain terms can reflect different aims enables me to be a little bit more reflective when reading students communication. And seeing the seven principles gives me a solid structure to work from when approaching design and restructuring.
- In what ways did the platform (WordPress) influence your interaction with the content and other people and what you learned?
- I appreciated how easy it was to embed different forms of content into a single post and have it all work. Videos, audio, images, and image editing seemed relatively easy. I didn’t dive overly deep into wordpresses options but I could definitely see some uses for it with some courses.
In addition to reflecting on your work, please include 2-3 ideas that you would like to implement in your own practice and how you might go about doing so.
- I currently am part of a field school group that annually travels to another country to support local heath care professionals. I am considering seeing if wordpress would be an effective medium for students to submit work on. Because of its flexibility in allowing images, videos, etc., I could see it being an effective way for students to complete assignments in flexible ways.
- My fellow OLFM and myself have desires to re-design the OL course we are involved in. The course can be described as information heavy, as it covers a lot of detail. The current course has little to no learning activities outside of end of module quizzes to help students build confidence in the material. I would like to change that to help make this self-paced course a little more engaging.
Cael