Reorganizing my course.
Alex’s breeze presentation tied directly with “A Follow Up in the Investigation of Teaching Presence” the article she developed with P. Shea. I noticed that there were many recurrent themes, which I thought lent itself to being redundant, which Alex says is a good thing in the Online learning environment. I would agree. Not only did she present this info as a breeze slide show, which appeals to the visual learning style, she also tied it to auditory. Re-reading a lot of what she said in the Breeze presentation in the article reiterated important themes. I think the part of the breeze presentation that impacted me the most was the idea that teaching presence is knowledge centered, learner centered and assessment centered. I am really trying to re-organize my learning activities by renaming them and making them more kid friendly. I am also trying to focus on how I am going to assess student learning in each of the modules. I am toying with the thought to switching the placement of 2 of my modules, the first and the second, to make them flow a little better and allow students to get into content that will serve as a review for them for the most part while they are learning the new course management system.
I took a look at the courses for observation again and looked at a virtual field trip of an art gallery that really looked neat. I was thinking that a virtual field trip would tie in perfectly with my composers and time periods module. It would be really neat to allow students to get a glimpse of Vienna or NYC without actually traveling there.
The most difficult part for me this week is trying to keep the online and offline activities separated making sure that the activities I choose are going to be the best fit for the learning environment. This hybrid learning business is much harder than I was thinking. Sometimes I start to think about the possibilities of what I could do and I overwhelm myself thinking about how to make it work in the online environment and how much writing it will be. I need to tell myself to take a step back and look at the big picture to get a better sense of what is important with regard to big ideas, and back off a little on the details.
What is working is using a new organizer for managing my learning activities in MS word. In the manual Alex said that drafting out the learning activities would be a paper and pencil activity, but I think this is working ok for me. I made a table that outlines each module and lists both on and offline activities and allows me to look at them next to one another. I am hoping that this is going to be an easier way for me to reorganize everything and find the logical patterns of how to present knowledge that is learner centered, develop community spirit and then assess the knowledge. Like I said before, the assessment part is the difficult thing for me, but I am working on it. The manual gives some neat ideas for activities and assessments which I am going to consider using in each module. I just still really have to think about what I am doing a little more and play with some things. (4)
