Kickstart Week is an offering of the course design institute and in this case, it helps instructors think about the goals of the course and, in particular, the challenges of delivering online courses. It was highly effective and provided great food for thought!
Highlights from Kickstart Week...
The Kickstart Week was well organized and helped me reconsider some key elements of my course. The presenters offered a selection of tools, approaches, insight and best practices. After the last day, I am excited to get started on planning, sculpting and creating content for my course. There were many highlights for each day, so I chose those that I found most applicable or intriguing and that I plan to use. On the first day, I had to consider how online courses could offer students more contact with their peers than large lecture classes and I considered it one of my primary challenges in transporting the course online from the classroom. I want to ensure that my students don't feel alone and anonymous but were invited to become part of a community – in order to meet one of my expressed goals – which was to have them develop their own voice in order to be effective in standing up to racism and prejudice. I was introduced to ways in which I could show my personality and through modeling and activities designed to give a face to the voice (video responses) that would make them feel part of a class that was inhabited by real people. Another part of the first day was backward building the course from the objectives, which helped me think about the activities I wanted them to be completed. We worked further with these on the following day in getting it down into the structure and finally to thinking about the type and meaning of the activities we would design to meet course goals/objectives. On the second day, I found the accessibility information in constructing pages for screen readers I hadn't considered before very useful. There were many practical tips on creating PDF with OCR and linking to external sites that were already proofed. In all, there were many tips to improve accessibility that I will take with me and implement. I found that most of what I was learning I could apply to the other courses I teach as well. On the third day, I found the page-linking decision-based activities very interesting and was thinking of ways to implement them, there was a bit of planning involved in each, so they were time-consuming, but they offered a way to vary an activity. I thought it interesting to open up assignment methods to different modes of students delivering content in order for them to show me what they know and so the decision based – which could also be in leading them to different types of activities were one way of doing that. I plan on implementing this not only in this class, but in other classes I teach. On the final day, I found that the focus on planning forced me to consider what is needed to get the course running and then work on polishing it from there. I also began to see just how much time would be involved and so had to scale back some of the aspirations and hope to add these in later iterations of the course. On this final day, I also enjoyed working with Adobe Rush and thought the controls were simple and powerful and could offer a good way to create professional-looking videos quickly. I was able to combine the Adobe Rush with MS Movie maker to allow for the ‘Ken Burns’ style of camera movement over photos/slides, which could supply a good b roll for my introductions and lectures. In summary, I thought that although the days were long, I came away with a lot of information and tips. I find myself excited to start developing content and playing with the technology and methods of assignment coming out of the class. I think, however, the best takeaway for me was in the focus at the beginning on building a course from its goals and objectives and then the activities and choice of texts fell into place. I’m very pleased with what the Kickstart Week has done in so little time to offer me an expansive view of where I am going with my course.
Hands-on training, practical solutions, and planning...
When considering the changes I will implement in my course, it all begins with the first day focus on backwards building and thinking about what I have always saved for some of the final lessons of the course in connecting it to the contemporary day. I hadn’t considered it before, as I was working through things chronologically, but I should begin with the contemporary and in every lecture, spend some time on connecting the material to students’ lives today. I have always tried to do this with the activities, but I think now (after also having seen a lot of the collaborative tools for students) it will be something I integrate more actively into the course daily. The learning goals were to give students insight into how the language we use shapes our perceptions of the world around us and the second was to have them develop a personal ethics that respects individuality and tolerance of others’ individuality. Going from here, I started to see how I could integrate activities in the online course on a weekly basis that would also bolster the community of the students. This included offering more varied ways in which they could deliver or complete their assignments, and I would also model this by offering several different modes for them to access the lecture materials – video, podcast, transcript and lecture blog. I also want to ensure that all of my materials are compliant with accessibility and copyright, so I know there are some things that I will need to revamp. I have been preparing to move this course (on the Holocaust in lit and film) to an online version for a couple of years, so I’ve gotten a head start on the content, but I am excited to put it into new formats and to consider new forms of assignments. I appreciate fully and plan to use the templates provided to help remind myself of all that is needed for students to complete an assignment – which includes more thorough instructions like the reason I am asking them to do what they are doing. I liked the top 10 tips in designing an online course offered by the Student Government and plan to use those and other checklists offered. I will be sure to make use of Zoom to meet with students, have them conduct group work and to record lectures with on the fly green screen. I also plan to use the decision based linking pages assignments to offer more variety and outcomes based on the material. For example, I sometimes have quite a few texts that I would like students to be able to know, and by having a choose your own style, I can keep the workload manageable for them, direct each towards a topic of their interest, and then have them collect and share their thoughts and reflections with each other in a follow-up discussion. I’m looking forward to designing a couple of these activities spread out over the weeks where they can have divergent texts to supplement our standard texts. Another change will be in how I have students feel part of the community and that is already in part by making sure accessibility is in place, but also in that they share who they are and put a face to a name and ideas early in the course. The ease at which students can now use video and how we can access and store them opens up new avenues, and I plan to begin with these introductions, modelling it myself, but also getting to know the students better this way (probably subdivided into study groups that they stick with throughout the first half of the course, and then randomized for the second half). I think this will replace the response papers, or perhaps offer another mode of expression, for those who chose. In all, this is really just a small portion of the changes that I will undertake and am considering more, but really after the planning discussion, I can see that I need to first get the most important aspects in place before I move to new ones.
What's next...?
I think the next steps will include devising the timeline for the production of content, putting it onto Carmen, and getting a feasible first run course out. I want to invite my colleagues to ‘guest’ lecture some of the topics we cover in the course (they sometimes teach the course, or have a specialty), the more voices I can include, the more I can demonstrate and model the importance of differing voices and perspectives. Some of my colleagues have asked to sit in on my teaching and I’ve also will be co-teaching a course and think that they could be great resources and hopefully also take away some of the things that I’ve been able to learn. I would hope that the first run of the online version is a success and it can continue in the future, or even provide the impetus to move some other courses into an online format. I also teach a popular fairy tales course and would love to be able to design an online version of that (in fact, I was often thinking about that course while designing the Holocaust course). I think if the model is good enough, it can attract some of my colleagues to give it a shot. Next year in the fall, I plan to work on a Master of Education in learning technology and would look to promote and facilitate the leveraging of technology and the implementation of online courses for my colleagues. I’m already sort of an unofficial go-to person for tech related issues on my floor, and more officially in assisting the CLLC with their distance learning rooms and research projects. In summary, I think my department is perhaps a little shy about implementing new formats because of their workload and perhaps bias against the mode of communication. I think that if I provide a successful working model, then it may inspire others to branch out and give it a try. I plan on putting my heart into this work and to hopefully make a course that students find transformational and could be a good model for others.
Comments