Discussion on the EDUCAUSE Blended and Online Learning Group’s listserv
Question:\
I head an instructional design unit and we’ve been noticing that instructors with no experience in online teaching seem to struggle to teach in a blended environment. They get easily confused about 1) how to decide what content is best suited for in class and what goes online and 2) they also have difficulty bridging the two modalities to create a seamless and rich learning environment.
Oregon State University has a hybrid course design program that is a partnership between OSU’s Ecampus and our Center for Teaching and Learning. You can find quite a few resources here: http://ctl.oregonstate.edu/hybrid-learning
Shannon Riggs Director, Course Development and Training Oregon State University Ecampus 4943 Valley Library Corvallis, OR 97331-4504 541.737.2613
You might find my recent book The Blended Course Design Workbook: A Practical Guide to be a helpful resource. Each chapter has a literature review of the relevant research as well as activities to guide faculty through the various components of blended course design. You can read the first chapter on the fundamentals of blended teaching and learning at the publisher website. The book also has a companion website with additional resources here: http://www.bcdworkbook.com.
Katie Linder Research Director Extended Campus, Oregon State University 4943 The Valley Library Corvallis, Oregon 97331 Phone 541-737-4629 | Fax 541-737-2734 Email: kathryn.linder@oregonstate.edu Twitter: @ECResearchUnit & @RIA_podcast Check out the Research in Action podcast: ecampus.oregonstate.edu/podcast
Adobe Spark Video is an elegant, easy-to-use tool for creating animated videos that tell a story. It’s available as a browser-based cloud app or as an iOS app. You can get it as a single app or install the 3-in-1 tool to access the Spark Post and Spark Page companion apps too.
What’s great about Spark Video is that it’s quick. You can create a compelling animated video story in just minutes without any design experience, and work on your project from anywhere. As a cloud-based tool, your progress is saved and synced automatically, so you can work on it on mobile or desktop whenever creative inspiration strikes.
Animoto
Now let’s look at a tool that’s similar to Adobe Spark, but gives you more flexibility over your content. Animoto is an affordable, cloud-based tool that offers an assortment of choices and customizations to create a one-of-a-kind video to tell your brand’s story.
This tool gives you a little more control than Adobe Spark Video. You can start with a blank canvas (choosing your own colors, styles, and frames to more closely match your brand) or adapt one of the tool’s wide variety of templates.
YouTube Director
YouTube Director is a revolutionary tool to create video ads for business. Geared toward small local businesses, it’s a foolproof way to tell a compelling story in a short format.
As you follow the prompts, you’re guided to capture images, video, and voiceovers. Then you can post the video and run a video ad campaign on YouTube.
Pick the tool you will be using for creating storyboards (MS Office tools: Word, Excel, PPT).
Create a sketch of the title page with the name of the course and 3-5 page mockups containing the course sets out to accomplish, e.g.
What Ιs Gamification?
Game Thinking.
Game Elements.
Motivation & Psychology.
Gamification Design Framework.
After you have outlined the principal structure of the course, it’s time to go deeper and describe the structure of every section of the course.
Try to visualize the general layout of every page.
Enumerate all screens in the storyboard, e.g. 1/16, 2/16, 3/16, and so on.
Lay out the screens of your storyboard in order and try following the story they tell. Look at them through your learners’ eyes. Is all information delivered in a logical order? Did you leave out something important? Are your notes clear enough so that you will be able to build a complete course using your storyboard for reference a week later? Have you touched upon all important areas?
If you need to present your storyboard to your client (student) or boss (student) for review, it pays to show it to a good friend first and ask for feedback. Ask them to read your storyboard and then retell what they took away from it in their own words.
in Geenio (https://www.geen.io/) this mode is called the Pathboard, and entering it allows you to see the structure of your whole course, the sequence in which pages and tests are presented, as well as the connections between them. Some course editors not only provide you an overview of your course’s structure, but enable you to edit the course’s structure and add additional elements to it as well.
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More on storyboard importance for your hybrid/online course design:
State your objective: Each lesson should have one concise, action-oriented learning objective to ensure your lesson design process is focused.
Think as a private tutor: Learners today are inundated with media tailored to them and they expect learning to be tailored as well. So think about how the tools available, including new technologies, will help create meaningful learning moments for all your students.
Storyboard before you build: Being able to see a complete lesson, especially one that integrates various mediums, is essential to creating a successful learning experience.
Build towards high-order thinking: Technology in education can go beyond multiple-choice questions and document repositories. Don’t be afraid to integrate tools that let learners create and share.
Remember you’re learning too: Reviewing learner results from a lesson shouldn’t just be about their score, but also evaluating how effectively the lesson was developed and executed so your teaching can adapt and learn as well.
“Hybrid learning gives us the advantage of having technology available to learn in the way that we’ve grown used to,” says Ms. Pillwein, who is also a Brock University graduate. “In the abnormal psychology course, the online component is mainly tests and quizzes that you can do in your own time. I’ve found that suits my learning style more, as opposed to doing a test in class where you’d have to memorize a lot of terms and concepts.”
Ms. Pillwein also likes that the professor uploads all of her PowerPoint presentations for students to access and review. She feels that helps get the material embedded in her brain more than writing things down word for word during the lecture.
Ms. Hotham finds that the combination of two hours of classroom lecture and then one hour of online activity for the week is an effective way of teaching the material, particularly because it gives students time to take away what has been said and digest it.
After two years of teaching the course with the online component and one year before that of teaching without it, she says the student grades are higher than when she taught only in the classroom.
Ms. Hotham also finds students are more engaged in the discussion the week after doing the online activities because they have more to talk about. Sometimes she posts a video, which then becomes an online discussion.
Patrick Lyons, director of teaching and learning services at Carleton University in Ottawa, visualizes online learning taking many different forms, presenting all kinds of opportunities that could not be delivered any other way. Carleton has a long history offering distance learning, first broadcasting courses on a local cable TV channel in 1978 and then offering the world’s first video podcast of a university credit course in 2006.
Flipped/Blended/… Teaching/Learning: FridayLive! Collaborative Development Series
Presenters: Steve Gilbert, TLT Group Beth Dailey, TLT Group Dale Parker, Senior Faculty, Cambridge College Penny Kuckkahn, Nicolet College, Instructional Designer Robert Voelker-Morris, Faculty Technology Consultant, University of Oregon Winona Hatcher, Instructional Designer, Augusta University
Date: 11/11/201616
Time: 1:30 PM ET pre session. 2:00 -3:00 PM ET Main event. 3:00 – 3:30 PM ET After thoughts
Description
This is the third in our Flipped/Blended… Teaching/Learning Collaborative Development Series. Faculty considering the next steps toward flipping/blended..teaching/learning and instructional designers and design consultants will all find something of benefit from this series.
In the spring we explored what it means to flip a classroom and added to the flipped classroom toolkit. Over the summer a team of instructional designers assisted a faculty member in designing a flipped lesson. This collaborative development process is the basis of the series.
Please join us in our first meeting of the Hybrid/Online Faculty Support Group on November 16, in Miller Center, MC 205
If you consider transitioning from traditional face-to-face to hybrid and, eventually, online teaching environment, we are the right forum for you.
We intend to entertain pedagogical, as well as technological issues and scenarios for your present and future curricula.
Please do not hesitate to ask, if more information is needed.
The International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning (IJMBL) provides a forum for researchers in this field to share their knowledge and experience of combining e-learning and m-learning with other educational resources. Providing researchers, practitioners, and academicians with insight into a wide range of topics such as knowledge sharing, mobile games for learning, collaborative learning, and e-learning, this journal contains useful articles for those seeking to learn, analyze, improve, and apply technologies in mobile and blended learning. The journal spans theoretical, technical, and pedagogical issues in mobile and blended learning. These embrace comprehensive or critical reviews of the current literature, relevant technologies and applications, and important contextual issues such as privacy, security, adaptivity, and resource constraints.
Topics Covered
Comprehensive or critical reviews of the current literature
Evaluation of mobile or blended learning in practice
Future of mobile or blended learning
Knowledge Sharing
Learner interaction/collaborative learning
Mobile games for learning
Mobile or blended learning applications
Mobile or blended learning applied at different levels of education from pre-school to tertiary and beyond
Pedagogical and/or philosophical underpinnings of mobile or blended learning
Privacy and security issues
Related research in learning, including e-learning and pedagogical approaches
Resource constraints in the delivery of mobile or blended learning
Reviews of the application of mobile or blended learning in multiple contexts
Role of Wikis, blogs, podcasts, messaging, other online tools, and Web 2.0 components in learning delivery
Roles of mobile, pervasive, and immersive technologies in education
Technologies that directly or indirectly support mobile or blended learning systems (devices, networks, tools etc.)
Theoretical approaches to mobile or blended learning solutions
Use of mobile or blended learning in professional environments
Mission
The primary mission of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning (IJMBL) is to provide comprehensive coverage and understanding of the role of innovative learning theory and practice in an increasingly mobile and pervasive technological environment. As technology enables a more seamless experience of device supported learning worlds that may integrate mobile, embedded, augmented, and immersive technologies, we may expect to see increasing interest and activity in blended approaches to learning. IJMBL brings together researchers at the forefront of this field, in both technology and pedagogical practice and assists them in the development and dissemination of new approaches to both mobile and blended learning.
Among the instructors who had taught using a synchronous classroom, two thirds (66 percent) had received training specifically on how to do that. A quarter (27 percent) received a month or more of training; a third (32 percent) received less than a day. A remarkable 55 percent took their training before going into a virtual classroom.
Half of the respondents were primarily self-taught; only 24 percent received formal training; and the remaining 26 percent did their learning through informal conversations with peers who teach synchronously. The training included lots of reading, video tutorials and listening to lectures — in other words, as the report’s authors noted, “sage on the stage” activities that are “antithetical to effective virtual classroom pedagogy.” Forty-one percent of people said synchronous activities “played little or no role in their virtual classroom training”; only 30 percent found that synchronous activities did play a substantial role.
What didn’t exist in training for almost four in five respondents were any of the following:
“Shadowing” of an experienced online instructor;
Teaching or co-teaching in a classroom being monitored by a trainer or experienced online instructor; or
Reviewing recordings of their own performances in a virtual classroom.
Also helpful, the survey found:
Peer coaching from colleagues;
Reviewing recordings of the instructor’s performance; and
Consulting with an instructional designer.
my note: another glaring proof that faculty IS needed in the process.
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more on synchronous online instruction in this IMS blog
