Quality Assurance

With any course, it is important to monitor quality. Whether you are in the classroom or online, you need to make sure that your lessons are effective. Because you don't have the in person feedback and the option to read body language, quality assurance for an online course becomes eve more crucial. There are many different ways to test the quality of the content, the site, and how the students are receiving the instruction.

You can follow a formal design, such as the Kirkpatrick Partners' four steps, or go with something like a survey. The Kirkpatrick model focuses on the initial reaction the learners have to the material first. If they have a negative take on the course, they are not as likely to learn well. After the initial reaction, the students' knowledge gained can be tested. They can then see if the information they have is something that they can use to make a change in their life. After the course is completed, it is beneficial to go back and see if the students have actually implemented a behavioral change that lasted. While there is a lot more effort in doing something like this, it is very effective and can be a great way to monitor the quality of any course.

Implementation of Content and Media

Implementing content and media can be a little bit tricky. Since this consists of everything the student is going to learn in the course, you need to make sure that it is very clear and that things flow together. There have been a couple of assignments through this graduate program I am going through, that were not very clear. It was difficult to understand exactly what I was supposed to do. In situations like this, it is very important to be able to contact other classmates and even the instructor to get clarification. Going forward, they would be able to use this feedback to make the content and/or media for that week better. Sometime with an online course, you have to test it out on a group of people before you can refine everything to run more smoothly.

Web 2.0 is important in online courses. Courses can become boring very easily if the course only consists of words and pictures. Students need to feel like they can interact with the content. If they can interact, they are more likely to learn or remember the information.

Online Assessments

I believe that for an online class, formative assessment is very important. Because the teacher is more of a coach and doesn't have the ability to be right there in person to give feedback, it is important to do a formative assessment to see if the students are on track. Formative assessment is a type of assessment that is done along the way throughout the learning. Rather than just a summative assessment at the end of the course to see what information the students have retained, the formative assessment can gather this information while the students are learning and makes it easier for the instructor to make adjustments to the curriculum as needed.

Formative assessments also steer the students in the right direction. If the students get off-track one way or another, a formative assessment can recognize this so a correction can be made. Having the ability to guide students through virtual courses is very important because there is already an additional amount of responsibility placed on them to stay with the course. By providing the formative assessments and results to the students, they will recognize that they are being monitored and that they have support to complete the course successfully.

Designing Effective Instruction

When creating any course, there are certain guidelines most of us follow to make the course effective. An online course is no different, and will actually require perhaps more thought than a traditional course. One reason for this is the media and technology that will be used throughout the course can change the effectiveness completely.

First, you will need to look at the course objectives. You need to know who your audience will be so you can cater the learning material to them. As you realize if you course is just for instruction, or if it something the learners will need to be able to pass on to others, you can decide how to best set up the outline of the course.

Media and technology are things that I feel are incredibly important with learning. They can make the course a lot more effective and make the content much easier to learn by the audience. Providing interactive media in an online course is always something helpful for the learners as well as the Instructional Designer to see what knowledge has actually been gained.

As the course is created, be sure to look back at everything and make sure that your course goals are attainable. The learners need to be able to successfully map through the entire course and use the information in their lives. If they can better relate to the material through whatever methods are provided in the course, it will be a lot more memorable for them.

Instructional Design Methods

With so many different instructional design methods out there (over 100), it is difficult to say which one I use the most. I think that I use many of them in different situations and I use some of them to a certain degree all the time.

It is no surprise to me that many people use at least some portion of the ADDIE Model. I am no exception to this. I have found with many of my lesson plans that I use this process to improve. For example, I had my students making commercials with the classroom set of iPads. One thing that I noticed was that about 1/4 of the students cropped their videos so that the actor's head was cut off and you could see more of their body than was necessary. From this evaluation, I know that I need to add in a section on the Rule of Thirds so the students can appropriately video any object of person. Because I am constantly improving lesson plans, I like to evaluate how they turn out. After the evaluation, I will go through the process of analysis, design, develop, implement and then evaluate again. This makes things run more smoothly each time. I feel that I am a more effective teacher when I am able to improve my own lesson plans.

I have found in my own learning, that I am able to grasp concepts when I can apply what I am learning to real life. I also learn much more quickly when I can physically interact and use my hands. Merrill's First Principles of Instruction Model focuses on task-centered learning. Because I learn well this way, I try to incorporate task-centered learning into my lesson plans as much as possible. By allowing the students to learn a task, recall previous knowledge, interact with something, use real-life application and then actually integrate what they have learned into their lives, I know that they will remember what they are learning a lot better.

Week 2

My name is Steve Bodell. I have a wife and four children and work at Willowcreek Middle School. There, I work in the CTE Technology and Engineering Department full time. This is my second year of teaching and I really like it a lot. I have been going to colleges/universities for almost ten years and am excited to be on the end stretch. After several career changes, I believe I have found the one. I am able to use a lot of technology in my classes and was able to get a set of iPads for my students to use. I have the ability to enhance the learning environment and utilize e-learning much easier than before.

I want to get to the point where my classes are doing a lot more online learning. I will have a lot of online resources for the students to use and hope to eventually like to have a completely paperless classroom. Although this can be somewhat hard, especially for design, as students are able to draw out their design ideas easier on paper than on the computer.

My grade book that I use at my school doesn't have a lot of features on it. I am excited about this class project so we can learn more about Learning Management Systems. Depending on how this project goes, I might want to invest in having my own LMS for my classroom (aside from my school grade book).