Instructional Design in Online Learning
Week 1: 17 June 2017 Instructional Design and Learning Theories
This week has afforded us the unique opportunity to be on the opposite side of the instructional coin; we will begin the process of selecting a Learning Management System of our choosing and design a course as if we are an online instructor. This promises to be an exciting adventure, and one that will provide us with new digital tools to add to our resumes. I am beyond excited to hit the ground running!
Before I jump in and begin discussing my instructional choices and the reasons behind them, I feel it is important to discuss my beliefs about learning theories when it comes to online instruction. The four learning theories most commonly associated with digital learning are: Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, and Connectivism (Sanders, 2017). These theories are further explained in the video below:
I would love to be able to say, "This one theory is my learning theory of choice, and I'm sticking to it!" But after reviewing the attributes of each, they seem to be interrelated and necessary for successful learning to take place. For example, Behaviorism can best be described as training others to behave in a certain way. In our situation, everyone in this program is innovative, and it is our goal to "train" others to embrace technology, including those students who are enrolled in our courses. We have to teach them to navigate electronic devices if they are to be successful in a digital learning environment. Once we have showed them the ropes a few times, this is where Cognitivism moves in.
Cognitivism involves thinking and gaining knowledge. Once the knowledge is stored, at some point it is referenced again when the information is needed. Information like how to operate a device which was initially learned through Behaviorism. See how they connect? The background knowledge gained from the two theories above is then utilized as a person moves into the next theory: Constructivism.
Constructivism is the process of using your prior knowledge to develop new ideas or connect the dots when given a large amount of information to sift through. Without Behaviorism and Cognitivism, a person would not have a schema to build on when trying to make sense of the world. But even when an individual tries to figure things out, an answer is not always easy to come by independently, and this is where Connectivism comes into play.
Connectivism involves networking with other individuals to solve problems or come up with new ideas. In our current 21st-Century environment, this networking often takes place in the cyber world using various devices. Once a group is collaborating and sharing in a connected format, each individual relies on their own Behaviorism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism to contribute to the group. This is why I feel that the four learning are interconnected, and one cannot function without the other, so I plan to keep them all in mind when designing my own online learning course.
Now that I have articulated my own beliefs about learning theories, it is time to get down to business. I have just scratched the surface of the design of my online course by selecting an LMS and adding a few required elements. Please follow the hyperlink above to watch my course evolve and grow over the next four weeks!
References
L. (2010, June 17). Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism & Learning and Instructional Theory. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YOqgXjynd0
Sanders, B. (2017, July 17). Welcome to EDLD 5318. Retrieved from https://lamar.adobeconnect.com/p51l210uuq0q/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal
Week 2: 30 July 2017 Assessment and Activities
This week brought us to a topic that is fresh in my mind after taking EDLD 5315-Assessing Digital Learning Instruction: Assessment. It never ceases to amaze me how my Lamar professors have staged these classes in such as way that one lesson builds on another, and the resources you need to be successful in your current class can be found if you reflect on the artifacts you have completed in previous courses.
While working through my current task, designing an online learning course, I have relied heavily on two documents that I completed last spring. Those assessments being my UbD Template and Fink's 3-Column Table. Designing an online course could prove to be daunting, but thanks to those artifacts, everything I need has been available at the click of a mouse. Since the outline and design I documented in those two assignments have everything laid out for me, I have been able to transfer my ideas over and connect them to the necessary resources to teach my course. I had to spend a little time tweaking the assessments, but for the most part, I had an adequate structure to help shape my outline.
At this point, after creating three modules, I feel like I have a solid foundation in place, and it will be a unit I will be able to use in my classroom in the fall. I have three more modules to complete, and then I will work on making the site a little prettier by adding a few more pictures to dress it up. Here is an outline of what I have created so far.
It is my hope that my online course will help my students acquire the 21st-Century skills they are in need of along with enhancing their ability to analyze literature, write for an audience and purpose, and develop an appreciation for reading.
References
Fink, L. D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Forsythe, G. (2012, November 14). Planning your online course v2 [Design collage]. Retrieved July 30, 2017, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/8186356402/
Wiggins, G., & Mctighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design, Expanded 2Nd Edition. Danvers, MA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Week 3: 6 August 2017 Your Course Design Tool
This week brought a little bit of closure to the creation of my blogging unit in Schoology since I now have most of the basic information keyed in for each lesson. While designing each lesson in my site, I have made it a point to keep all elements of the lesson sequential and in alignment with my lesson agendas to allow students to use the forward arrows to scroll to the next item they will need to complete. Hopefully, this will help to avoid any confusion about where to find the activities required for each learning objective.
As far as chunking goes, I have separated the unit into six different folders by week to make sure the students are aware of the items that will be due each week. Since the assignments will be drafted in the students’ ePortfolios, I have not included any items for submission in Schoology. All assessment will take place within each ePortfolio except for the places where students have to fill out a paper document. I believe there are only two of these instances since I want the course to be as paperless as possible.
Each lesson has connecting videos, articles, and links with examples for the expectations I have for the unit. For example, when we are setting up our ePortfolios in Lesson 2, I have included a link to Auburn University’s example ePortfolios to give students a variety of ideas for setting up their sites. The same lesson also has an introductory video at the beginning to provide students a rationale for creating an electronic portfolio. While integrating resources, I arranged the elements in the same way that I would design a face-face lesson since the unit will be facilitated in my English 3 classes.
Active learning will be found throughout the unit in the form of who class discussions, reading and commenting on other students’ blog posts, small group book talks, and through the creation of an ePortfolio and blog posts within it. Since this is a high school classroom, I want to make sure my students still have plenty of social interaction. The social aspect of an educational environment is what makes many of them enjoy coming to school each day.
My “Blogging to Improve Literacy” unit will contain formative assessments in each lesson such as commenting on other students’ blog post, rating outside blog sites online or creating a book trailer. The summative assessment will be a series of 12 blog posts that connect to an independent study novel of their choosing. Each blog prompt will provoke literary analysis by having the students return to the text to analyze characters, setting, conflict, climax, plot, etc. The questions being addressed are higher order and require much more than just a regurgitation of the text. For example, Blog Post #4 requires the following: Characterize a major character from your book using the elements of S.T.E.A.L. (Speech, Thoughts, Effect on Others, Action, Looks). How do these attributes enhance the plot of your novel? Comment on two other blog posts.
Between reading, creating an ePortfolio, blogging, and analyzing the literature, I believe my students will be challenged at the highest level along with gaining many important 21st-Century skills to help them as they move into adulthood.
Week 4: 13 August 2017 Course Implementation
S-students
E-ease of use
C-cost
T-teaching functions, including pedagogical affordances of media
I-interaction
O-organizational issues
N-networking
S-security and privacy
While working through the Week 4 module, the reading material I found most interesting was Bates’ introduction of the SECTIONS model (2015). I noticed the acronym was very comprehensive in nature, and its individual parts were reflective of the planning process I often go through when implementing new technology in my classroom.
For example, outside of the current unit I am building, I am also designing a blended learning routine for the English Language Learners I serve on my campus. There are so many areas of SECTIONS that have weighed on the decisions I have made when adopting new software and procedures for the 2017-18 school year. It was surprising to learn that I actually went through this process earlier in the week before jumping into the reading for our course, and I didn’t realize beforehand that there was formal research connected to the steps I went through.
First and foremost, I had to consider the students I was serving. During the previous school year, I worked with many newcomers to the U.S. who did not know any English. The approach I took with this group was similar to the pedagogical approach one might take when working with early learners at an elementary school. We did lots of work with pictures, conversation practice, vocabulary building, and speaking/pronunciation drills. This year, my group will be more advanced overall, and I have identified a need to make the instruction more rigorous and centered around reading since the students have the basic language down and need to build fluency for the standardized testing they will undergo at the end of the year.
In a perfect world, I would have thousands of dollars to purchase an all-inclusive reading program that will assess and target the needs of each the students I am serving, but in my situation, money is not an option. I needed to find something that was free or low cost. This is a tall order to fill in a society who is looking to get a piece of the market by selling the software they are writing. After waking up at four in the morning in a panic since I still did not have a solution, I ran across a couple of options that I think will work nicely to help my students achieve the fluency they are in need of.
The basis of my classroom pedagogy for this group will be The Daily Five (Boushey & Moser, 2015). This program has been used for years to build reading fluency in early childhood students, but I believe the elements of this methodology can be applied to any age of students who are striving to master a new language. The core foundations of The Daily Five are read to self, work on writing, read to someone, listen to reading, and word work.
Since I will be facilitating these routines mostly on my own, I needed software for the kids to work on while I am reading with small homogenous groups. After much searching and experimentation, I have decided to go with a free reading platform, Read Theory. org (Read Theory LLC, 2017) and a word work site, Spelling Classroom. Com (Spelling Classroom, 2017). I believe that combining the two software sites with small group attention from a teacher will help to rapidly elevate their reading progress. At this point in the decision making process, I had covered the S-I portions of the SECTIONS model, and I was ready to finish up.
Thanks to the forethought, planning, and purchasing that has taken place in my District, I didn’t have to put much thought into the O-S areas of SECTIONS. We are fortunate to have a robust network along with a class set up Chrome Books at our disposal. In addition, the District filter and firewall help to protect the privacy and security of our students.
In the future, I know I will be leaning on the SECTIONS models for years to come as our Educational Technology practices evolve both on my Campus and in my District. It has me thinking that our class textbook, Teaching in a Digital Age (Bates, 2015) may be a potential District-wide book study to get everyone on the same page.
References
Bates, A.W. (Tony). Teaching in a Digital Age. 5 Apr. 2015, opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/.
Boushey, Gail, and Joan Moser. Daily 5: Fostering Literacy Independence in the Primary Years. Moorabbin, Victoria, Hawker Brownlow Education, 2015.
Read Theory LLC. Online Reading Activities | ReadTheory. 2017, readtheory.org/.
Spelling Classroom . Spelling Classroom. 2017, spellingclassroom.com/.
Week 5: 20 August 2017 Reflection and Analysis of Online Learning
Whether an instructor is planning for online or face-to-face learning, instructional design theories can be a difficult topic to tackle. From building background knowledge, to guided practice, to independent practice, each student needs the integration of a variety of different elements to successfully work through an assigned lesson. The differences in learning needs can be attributed to Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Lane, n.d.) in which he asserts that all humans need varying content-delivery modalities since everyone is wired differently. Finding a way to incorporate multiple experiences into one class period or course module is not an easy feat to achieve, but technology has afforded us the luxury of having endless digital and print resources at our fingertips. The digital resources being a huge asset to those who do not perform well when exposed to print-only instruction. But how does an educator best compile these resources to meet the needs of his or her students? The answer can often be found by tailoring lessons using a predetermined design theory after considering the necessities of the audience involved in the process.
In my situation, I began by considering what I wanted my students to achieve the most, and my conclusion was the highest need among our campus population is the enhancement of reading fluency by fostering a love of literacy in my classroom. In recent years, our STAAR scores have been lacking in the reading comprehension categories, and my team is finding that this can be attributed to our students’ lack of reading for enjoyment outside of the school day, a problem that stems from the rise in electronic device use, and a population who is fast-moving with little downtime for reading. I wanted to find a way to utilize my learners’ technology use to help them build reading stamina. This led to the development of my “Blogging to Improve Literacy Unit”; a unit that would be powered by behaviorist, constructivist, and cognitivist learning theories.
It is my belief that behaviorist learning still has a place in today’s classrooms since we as educators are training our students to adopt certain behaviors that are necessary to become successful as adults. In my situation, the desired outcomes for my unit were building technology fluency, inspiring my students to read for enjoyment, and helping them learn to document their learning electronically. Since behaviorism often has an “emphasis on reward and punishment,” (Bates, 2015) I felt the reward will be realized when the students find enjoyment in a reading selection of their choosing, and as a result, will be able to collaborate with their peers in connection with their new-found passion. A passion that will also be fueled by progressing effortlessly through a learning hierarchy.
The learning hierarchy I am referring to connects to cognitivism and is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bates, 2015). Bloom’s Taxonomy takes learners through a varying degree of increasingly rigorous tasks in connection with a learning objective. As teachers, we always strive to keep our instruction within the highest levels of Bloom’s, but for some students, there is a need to start simply and work into it. For this reason, I chose to create initial blog prompts that are recollective in nature and lend themselves to basic recall such as describing the characters or the plot overview. Once the first few entries are complete, and the students have read further into their books, the complexity of the writing tasks increase to incorporate analyzation, application, or evaluation to the reading. Finally, toward the end of the unit, the students work up to creation as they craft a book trailer video to sell their reading selection to a classmate, a task that also requires constructivism.
The one thing that is unique about my unit is the way cognitivism and constructivism will work hand-in-hand throughout every step of the process since the students are constructing or making sense of their own learning as they craft blog entries that are increasingly difficult to compile. This was not easy to achieve since I had to carefully consider the depth of my questioning along the way to meet the criteria of Bloom’s taxonomy. Upon looking back at the prompts connected to my lessons, I believe I achieved what I set out to accomplish, and it was surprisingly easy to chunk the content thanks to a little help from my previous graduate work.
The work I am referring to is the UbD template I created in EDLD 5313, Creating Significant Learning Environments. The UbD template became instrumental in helping me to plan my individual lessons since the unit was already outlined by learning goals, separated into learning activities, and finally connected to appropriate assessments. I followed the document fairly closely and made small adjustments along the way as needed. In the future as I am planning other units or online courses, I will always start with the UbD template since it allows for ease in aligning digital instruction. A need that will not be going away anytime soon since technology is continually evolving.
Along with the growth of technology comes a need for students to be continually immersed in new applications and tools. Future jobs will utilize technology that doesn’t even exist yet, but once students have achieved technology fluency through constant classroom exposure, they will easily adapt to the changes and new tools that come their way. Creating a learning environment that fosters a classroom climate of inquiry and self-discovery will also help my students to routinely seek out answers to questions they are unsure of. Life is no longer scripted or working alongside a “how-to” guide; we have to teach our kids to think outside the box and be fearless when faced with a new challenge.
References
Bates, T. (2015). Teaching in a digital age. Burnaby, BC: SFU Document Solutions, Simon Fraser University.
Lane, C. (n.d.). Multiple intelligences. Retrieved August 20, 2017, from http://www.tecweb.org/styles/gardner.html