Reflection

This is my final blog post for this particular assignment in this class OMDE 603-9020 Technology. I look back at the beginning when I had to first create a blog and how nervous I was as I had never done a blog before. Once I figured out how to get in here and do my blog, I started feeling more comfortable. I really do not enjoy sharing my feelings or writing about myself, so this is a big step for me. 

As the weeks went on I appreciated the comments on here, as well as reading everyone else's blog in our class. I also referred to the question and answer area for the blog in our class. After reading those, I knew I was "not alone" in my intimidation of blogs.

Some of the students have done blogging for years and I read their blogs to give myself some pointers. Once I sit down and think about my favorite reading (s) of the week, or something in class I really gained a new perspective on, the blogging got much easier to do for me. 

Overall this has been a good experience and I can relate now to how DE teachers can review blogs to get a feel for what their students are comprehending and grasping. It is also a great way for teachers to figure out what parts of the program or course the students are drawn to naturally, and will excel at, and which particular sections they may need help with today and in the future. 

With that said, I am glad I did the blog as it gave me a different perspective on one of the web 2 tools available for both students and teachers in distance education.  I would definitely use this tool in the future. 

Terrie

July

Rubrics and other readings was the focus of the last week or so, and I really enjoyed the information we learned on the various types of rubrics. It really helped me in my assignment on my class I was creating for my paper. I had to create an online learning class outline and do a rubric, and since I have never done a rubric, the readings were invaluable material for me.

Since I have no teaching experience, I think the QM rubric would be more useful for me as a guide since it is more directed to each of the components necessary to deliver a good class and give your students constructive feedback. As I have learned feedback is really one of the most important factors in providing a better learning environment. The QM rubric is much more inclusive and is more critical and detailed for assessing the students. The QM rubric is based on the concept of alignment and is focused on assessing the students comprehension and knowledge.

I went to the Chico State website and reviewed the ROI rubric which seems to be based on the actual University's expectations for the Instructors, not the students. The ROI rubrics shown on the Chico State website had 3 levels for results achieved in each category: Baseline, effective and exemplary. For online teachers, this would be more of a self evaluation tool. It also is useful to assist Instructors redesign or create new designs for courses. Another use if for teachers that are attempting to garner public recognition. 

The rubrics readings I completed and got the most understanding from were: 

Mertler, Craig A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom. Practical Assessment,

Research & Evaluation, 7(25). Available online: http://www.pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25

Peirce, W., (2006) Designing Rubrics for Assessing Higher Order thinking http://academic.pgcc.edu/~wpeirce/MCCCTR/Designingrubricsassessingthinking.html

Rubric for Online Instruction, CSU, Chico, (2009)

Quality Matters https://www.qualitymatters.org/rubric

June continued -Design, Wikis, and more philosophy

Blog #4, June 30, 2014

June is almost over and in this last week or so we have explored more on learning theory and course design and development.

Chapter 5 in our book had me reading about instructional design systems models such as ADDIE (Analysis, Development, Implement and Evaluate) and ISD (Instructional Systems Design). So many acronyms in DE!  Planning is emphasized in ISD and I see why it is a monumental job for teachers to plan all their teaching strategies. I found the different stages in instructional design easy to follow (for a change!) and understand that all of the components of the students required performance are part of this stage. I drifted back to Gagne and Bloom and their objectives. The importance of the right development team came to mind and I think the course team model is much more effective than the author-editor model, especially in distance education. I realize the costs involved, and the time to prepare can be very expensive and lengthy. The information on creating lessons gave me good insight into how the work breaks down into segments. This will help me on my next paper, as well as the piece on multimedia tools. Designing student participation is more involved than I anticipated, but I was happy for the information and tips this week from this chapter. Training teachers in using instructional design models remains extremely important.

We also got into our team assignment or Wiki exercise. Everyone in my group is great and so far it is a good experience. We have a lot done already, so I am feeling pretty good about my first wiki exercise. Another tool we are learning, so helpful.

We participated in discussions on learning theory, instructional design and online teaching philosophies, based on the articles by Sangra and Kanuka I talked about how I personally agree that designers and faculty need to fully comprehend the impact of using the various modes of delivery when class designs are utilizing the most up to date technologies. We need to be able to adapt strategies to facilitating, learning, or being a facilitator. I have my views on e-technology philosophy. I like the combination of uses determinism and social determinism. Using technology as a “tool” to learn, not using technology to control learning. That is something that stuck with me from Kanuka’s chapter where she talked about an analogy by Jonassen. The analogy is a carpenter uses his tools to build, the tools do not control the carpenter.

  

Kanuka, H. (2008). "Understanding eLearning Technologies in Practice through Philosophies-in-Practice" from The Theory and Practice of Online Learning (online book). pp. 91-118

June continued-Open Content

June continued -Open Content

I was mesmerized reading in class recently about the views and principles on open content. The readings in class leads me to believe more strongly regarding a more defined structure and overall comprehensive framework in many areas of distance education. Sharing knowledge learned and showing competencies should be 2 of the results of us students accessing the open content information. For teachers, framework around strategies, evaluations and how these help students should be part of open content information, as we (students, faculty) can only learn more from others.

 I was thinking about struggles with open content as far as just being able to download material and use it for your classroom “as is”. I don’t agree with that and when I read Mr. Bates good, bad, and ugly article he expanded on that a bit. I agree with him that using open content materials as a basis or a resource for developing our own course work as teachers is a good idea and I think it can be very useful, but a structure or framework needs to be defined to ensure best practices. We need to really know the perspective of the original writer and the intent of the material.  One of the other articles had me thinking of how just downloading open content and using it to develop a course could be detrimental to schools and students. What if the content was not verified as accurate? What if it was dated? We would not be helping students or faculty at all, but possibly taking a step backwards. Lots to think about  regarding open content.

Link to one of the articles I found interesting:

http://www.tonybates.ca/2011/02/06/oers-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/.

June continued-Social Media

I have some thoughts to share on our focus on social media in the class over the last 2 weeks. There were many good readings and discussion posts on Social Media in the classroom that I found extremely insightful and very thought provoking.

The powerful tools of social media are amazing and the opportunities seem to be endless. For one of our discussions. I am very interested in social media and believe it can be very useful for us in distance education so I found this week of our study more interesting than the last week. I found all of the statistics on the website personalizemedia.com fascinating. Gary’s social media count had some staggering statistics on everything from how many pictures are posted on facebook daily (50 million) to you tube daily video counts (3 billion).

One of our discussions came from reviewing inspiring ways for us to use social media in the classroom. I am not currently a teacher, but plan to work in training at work after my studies, and found some of the ideas very useful. I have done some training at work and am also in the mentoring program, so this week was so helpful to me for my job. Everybody in class listed several tips that they found useful, and I must say I have one favorite of the ones that I listed. Following mentors is my #1 pick, which suggests that we follow professors, mentors, or other important people in our field of study to find out about their research and professional activities. Since starting at UMUC I did join twitter and follow some of the DE scholars and Professors and their tweets lead me to articles that have helped me in class or given me food for thought. I read Terry Anderson’s article on how useful some of the social media tools are in the classroom, and I agree that sharing ideas and tips is a benefit of all the social media tools for both students and teachers. One of the points everyone discussed in our boards was having a secure environment to share knowledge. With the web changing so fast, I agree this is a concern.

 The writing coach in this class proved to be such a blessing for me in this module. Since I have been out of school for years, I struggle with writing papers. I am so very grateful that we have a writing coach and she really gave me some excellent critique on my paper that gave me the opportunity to improve it before submitting the final assignment. I handed in my draft which I based on lack of quality control in asynchronous technology in distance education. The gist of what I wanted to convey was that the advances in asynchronous technology have exploded over the past decade in DE, and quality control is needed to ensure that DE can keep up with the changes while delivering a quality product. The writing coach pointed out how I needed to reorganize my thoughts in the paper more succinctly and made some excellent points of what I needed to fix and improve upon. It really helped me reorganize and refocus on the final product of the paper. 

The readings I found in researching the paper gave me more insight into the design of discussion boards, and future progress. One suggestion in one of the articles was about all universities having a more structured design of discussion boards in order to be able to save them digitally, catalog them, and have them available for future access in classes and research for students and faculty.

 http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/05/100-inspiring-ways-to-use-social-media-in-the-classroom/

http://www.personalizemedia.com/garys-social-media-count/

Anderson, T. (2009) Social networking in Education. A draft paper to stride handbook for the Indira Gandhi National Open University.  http://terrya.edublogs.org/2009/04/28/social-networking-chapter/

Creating a blog for OMDE 603 9020

Hello everyone,

This is my first attempt at a blog for a class I am in at UMUC. The class is OMDE 603 9020 Technology in Distance Education and E-Learning. As a new student at UMUC there are so many different things to keep track of but I am sure I will get up to speed. This month of May has been a bit overwhelming and I hope June I level out and feel more comfortable with the courses and the amount of work.

Our fist group of readings were a good overview for me of the history of technology in distance education over the three generations. Learning the terminology and values and how they are applied was very helpful. 

The readings on historical context regarding quality control had me thinking of distance education just as I do any other business. There are many ways to control the design of your project in business or your class for DE that can lead to success.When I read Chapter 5 for the last module it gave me a clearer understanding or perhaps more in depth one of the key to successful distance education classes being the design and development being done by a team of specialist.

My favorite part of these first few readings was Moore and how he discussed how the economies of scale and the division of labor specialization has non consistent practice in our field. There was an article within one of the readings (also by Moore) where he gave an analogy of the specializations of labor in distance education to the airline industry. 

We spent some time discussing the term the authors use in DE literature and validating their reasoning for it. the authors use distance education mainly and one of the main reasons for that is they identify that the students and teachers are in different locations or "at a distance" and communication for education by technology is necessary. I agree with the term "Distance Education".