Community building and effective online instruction EIDT 6510 Course

The following observations were gleaned from viewing a video in which instructional design industry experts discuss and highlight the benefits of creating an online learning community for facilitators of online learning experiences.

Online learning communities significantly impact student learning in that they facilitate a deeper learning experience than a more instructor-centered approach would.  The peer to peer dynamic present in an online learning community allows for exploration of concepts within a forum where students both challenge and support each other in the learning process.  The instructor does establish his/her presence and it is clear that he/she is an integral part of the community but in order to provide for a transformative experience the instructor coaches from the wings so that students can construct their own knowledge.   Student satisfaction is positively impacted because they feel that they are apart of a dynamic exchange where their input is valued and expected.

The essential elements of an online community are a facilitator who understands his/her role as a source of guidance, learners who are engaged and make professional contributions to the community and a clear focus and purpose.  It is essential to online community building that each involved party has a good sense of their responsibility to the course.  The vitality of the community depends on the level of investment and engagement of the participants.  This engagement contributes to the sustenance of online communities.  Online communities are also sustained through meaningful support from the administrators of the program where the course is utilized.

Community building has a strong correlation to effective online instruction.  A thriving online community where guided participants interact and share their observations as they learn and reflect on new concepts leads to stronger learning outcomes and increased self direction.  This increased initiative can result in participants bringing even more insights and observations to share within the community resulting in richer discussion and deeper learning.

The video resource really drove home the importance of the instructor adapting the ‘guide on the side’ versus the ‘sage on the stage’ stance.  This element–the instructor guiding and coaching rather than lecturing–is essential to the co-constructed knowledge process and is the bedrock upon which a strong and effective learning community is built.

Image from https://www.vegsoc.org/onlinecommunity

 

 

My experience with ‘scope creep’

In a past position I was charged with re-vamping an hour and a half orientation for a small non-profit to make it more engaging and have it incorporate elements like knowledge checks and small group discussions.  The executive director and I sat down to outline and discuss the key components and the deadline and I began the work shortly thereafter.  Going forward we had bi-weekly check-ins where I presented status reports and I had the understanding that a proof-of-concept  would be required of me about half-way in.  It was at the half-way point, where I furnished the ED with storyboards and content outline, when the ED shared a new vision and expectations with me.  These elements were beyond the scope that we had initially discussed and would certainly cause me to miss the deadline and budget targets.  The ED wanted to add online material to supplement the face-to-face orientation and she wanted to incorporate  a mini-training on a software system that the employees would be required to use on the job.  This added so many layers and required more resources–both finance and human.  Looking back, I would have drafted a formal MOU and would have deferred to it every time the ED wanted to pile on demands or suggest additions that could not feasibly be completed in the allotted time.

Tools to help with cost estimate & resource allocation

I found these two sites that help with cost estimation.  One was developed by The Center for Learning Technologies at Old Dominion University .  It features a spreadsheet that allows you to plug in your project information and receive cost estimates.  It is really comprehensive and has pages for each element and breaks those pages down into a division of labor among the producer, designer and tech. person.   The tool allows you to get figures related to your project based on how many hours of course content you are charged with delivering.  I would use this tool to help me get clear on the resource allocation.

The other resource is a website compiled by a seasoned Instructional Designer called nwlink.com.  It has a wealth of information (links to other resources, spreadsheet templates, toolkits) on the process of creating a budget and it offers some guidance to less experienced designers (noting the costs of overlooked expenses like stock photos etc.).  I would use this resource to help me develop the line items of my budget.  This resource is ideal for a novice ID because it gives some rough estimates (i.e. “Course is five days or less, then 3 hours of preparation for each hour of training”) and the ID can get a feel for whether their estimates are reasonable.

Resources:

Clark, D.R. (2014). Estimating Cost and time in instructional design. Retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html#tools

 

 

Modes of Communication: When reading between the lines gets blurry

This assignment called for us to observe an instance of communication through 3 different modalities; email, voicemail and face-to-face.  The following are my observations regarding each of the attempts at communication:

Email:
It seemed that I was sensing panic and impatience from Jane but I also sensed that she was making an effort not to sound too alarming and accusatory.  However she did sound mildly irritated.  Her email left me wondering; Did she copy others on this email in an effort to drum up charges against Mark’s work? Could this email be used in a smear campaign?

Voicemail:
The voicemail came across as more of a personal touch.  I sensed Jane’s concern and anxiety over the missing pieces she needed to complete her own work but in hearing her voice it wasn’t overtly confrontational or accusatory.  Still there was room for doubt.  Was she angry but just exercising restraint?  Is she gearing up to make Mark look bad? 

Face-to-face:
There was more warmth conveyed in the message. It was clear that Jane wasn’t to the point of anger or  irritability but she was extending her co-worker the professional courtesy of interfacing with them to voice her concerns over his adherence to the timeline.

This exercise confirmed my suspicion that despite your best effort to craft the pitch perfect email it can really never go over as well as an audio or visual interaction–preferably face to face.  In the professional realm, my preferred mode of communication is email because it allows me to get messages quickly to multiple people…that and I like the idea of having a paper trail documenting any exchanges.  This activity has helped me realize that I need to be more open to face-to-face exchanges and employ them wherever possible as it decreases the chance of things getting lost in translation.

 

Lessons learned from a project post-mortem.

I was a team-member for a project which my organization would under-take annually.  The planning and preparation for the “go live” date would generally start in earnest 4 months out from the event (I frequently submitted that it should be more like 6 months out but it fell on deaf ears).  The project is a fund raising event and the team includes a marketing and PR person, a volunteer manager, a fund and resource development person, SMEs who contribute as advisers/consultants and the Executive Director/project manager.  The fund raising event in question was a success in some senses–feedback we received from the public was glowing and favorable.  But it was a failure in some respects; we fell a shy of our fund raising goal and we failed to fine tune some of the processes that we intended to pay close attention to that time around.  The timeline was just too cramped and left no room for iterative development, just full steam ahead even if the process wasn’t airtight.

What contributed to the success was the team’s awareness that presenting a united and polished front to the public was paramount.  Even if there were holes in the roll-out (i.e. one sponsor’s logo wasn’t included on the t-shirt, we under-shot the amount of shirts needed and had to send some participants shirts after the fact) we worked over-time to make sure that the good experiences outweighed the bad and everyone had a good time.

One thing that contributed to the failure was that we did not devote enough time to the planning of the event.  It was the 8th year of the event and the PM felt like some processes could be skipped and were on autopilot but that kind of thinking led to re-work, rushing and oversights.   I think back on the questions from the Project Management Minimalist and one really resonated with me because it is centered around an assertion that I (and several other team-members) put forth early on in the conception phase–we need to bring in another team-member, an event planner because the PM was inundated and distracted with the wearing of that particular hat.  Question #5  of the post-mortem review asks “could we have completed this project without one or more of our vendors/contractors? If so, how?” (Greer, 2010, p. 43).   In my opinion we definitely didn’t have any fat to trim but we desperately needed to consider adding a member to the team.

The Summary & Checklist: 10 steps to project success (Greer, p. 45) lists “Estimate time, effort, and resources” as the 5th step.   A more careful and comprehensive discussion  around these items would have undoubtedly made the project more successful as it would’ve beeen made clear that we needed more time and we needed to acquire other resources (event planner) so that the PM could have the support in that area and not be the only accountable.

Reference:

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

Distance Learning Course Reflection

Even though some semblance of distance learning has been around for some time (mail and television correspondence courses), in many circles it is still perceived as a new-kid-on-the-block whose effectiveness has not been proven tried and true.  It is, however, a force to be reckoned with because of the value it holds for the stakeholders involved.  For students it offers a convenience and flexibility without which they may have been barred from study in a traditional setting.  The distance learning option has economic implications for institutions and may allow them to cut overhead costs.  That said, distance learning doesn’t currently enjoy an entirely favorable reputation but I predict that in 10 to 20 years it will be fully assimilated into society and will be de-stigmatized.  I think Instructional designers play a pivotal role in bringing about this change and should consider it a personal mission to an impetus for continuous improvement in the field of distance education.

Even if it only took a few years to integrate the technology needed to facilitate distance learning into every institution, it would likely take a few more years to get everyone on board with its implementation.  This would take more than just installing hardware and software and the like, this would require getting buy-in from key people who would be willing to sing the praises of distance education.  It would require these change agents making cases for the merits of distance education.  I think this sort of momentum is in the works now and in the near future distance education will be looked upon as equivalent to traditional education.

Instructional designers can help fuel this momentum by being very transparent about what it takes to produce effective distance education experiences.  Wherever possible, we need to get the message across that distance education is not simply traditional classroom content dumped into an online container but that it is the product of processes and analyses aimed at providing the learner with a meaningful educative experience.

I plan to be a positive force for continuous improvement by seizing every teachable moment and illustrating the difference that great distance instructional design makes.  I plan to add my voice to those who advocate for implementing distance learning options and proudly proclaim that I received my quality education from a respected and accredited institution—via an online distance program!

 

 

Pre-planning analysis of a MOOC offering

I had the pleasure of observing an open course on the history of China called ChinaX.  It is one in a host of EdX MOOCs offered by founding partners Harvard and MIT.  The course is broken up into 6 modules which are meant to correspond to a 6 week time frame.  The course is, however, asynchronous and doesn’t have any real-time elements.  The designers note that it is to be completed “anytime, self-paced” but they do restrict the learner’s autonomy just a little in choosing to lock the next module in the sequence until a set date.  The course has a lovely, light and airy interface and uses the familiar format of many CMSs with the navigation panel down the left-hand side of the screen.

Overall I’d say this was a carefully pre-planned course and that the designers provided for each of the ISSUES TO ADDRESS IN THE PLANNING PROCESS listed in the Simonson text (2012, p. 15-162).  In my navigation and participation of the course I found instances that suggest that they considered the following: Who are the learners? What is the essential content? What teaching strategies and media should be used? What is the learning environment?

The logo for the ChinaX course offered through Harvard and MIT’s edX MOOC.

 

The ChinaX course begins with an “Important Preliminary Survey” which each participant is strongly urged to complete.  This suggests that they are aware that “knowledge of general learner characteristics can inform the instructor of the nature of students” and that “this knowledge can aid the distance education instructor in overcoming the separation of instructor and students” Simonson, 2012, p. 154).  As this was the course debut they implemented the survey to gain insight so that they could better serve the students of the course.  The designers know that some learners are not there with an endgame in mind such as a certificate.  Some are there simply to audit and observe.  The pre-requisites as listed in the syllabus?—“ None, just a willingness to jump in, learn your way around and have fun”  (edX/ChinaX, 2014).  This isn’t to say that they leave the learner flying blind.  There are video tutorials on how to navigate the course for those who don’t find it instinctive.

The designers know the content extremely well. There are over one dozen Chinese history SMEs involved in supplying the content and lectures for the course.  They know the nature of the content is very vast and that they needed to put some serious thought to how best to present the content.  One of the team members (the Content Consultant and Developer) talked about how daunting it was to “conceptualize 2,000 years of Chinese history and condense it into digestible themes” (edX/ChinaX, Meet the Team video, 2014)—which they accomplished quite nicely.  This, to me, was ample evidence of their taking into account that “it is essential to examine the nature of the content as well as the sequence of information” in light of the issue of time which within the distance learning environment “is often limited and inflexible” (Simonson, 2012, p. 157).  The course is self-paced allowing the user to control the flow of information even down to the degree of speeding up (or slowing down) the cadence of lecturing professor’s.

Piskurich (Laureate Education, n.d.) notes that a well-planned course should provide ample opportunities for online learners to explore on their own. The designers for this course seemed to bear that in mind in their consideration of what strategies and media should be used as they incorporated fun optional activities that would enrich the experience (i.e. upload a video of yourself singing the Ming Dynasty song) as well as giving the learner a choice of assessment (multiple choice vs. short answer).  Teaching and Learning at a Distance notes that instructors need to “focus on selecting instructional strategies that engage all the learners in active learning [by] de-emphasizing the informative part of the instruction for more discovery of information” (Simonson, 2012, p. 159).

Lastly the learning environment was also considered.  The designers were aware that “when the classroom shifts into a distance learning setting…the environment often becomes a challenge (Simonson, 2012, p.160).  As such, they provided contingencies for the resources that they offered (transcripts of the videos should student’s need to refer to material from the video) as well as contingencies for the technology adding the following notation to their page of video tutorials:

“In locations where YouTube is restricted, edX videos may not be available for streaming. The video segments are frequently available for download, however. Click the “download here” link below each video segment to download the file for viewing (EdX, 2014).

 Resources:

EdX. (2014). Home. Retrieved from: https://www.edx.org/

Laureate Education (Producer). (n.d.). Planning and designing online courses [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education(5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.

 

 

An instance of applying technology to facilitate distance learning

Scenario:

In an effort to improve its poor safety record, a biodiesel manufacturing plant needs a series of safety training modules. These stand-alone modules must illustrate best practices on how to safely operate the many pieces of heavy machinery on the plant floor. The modules should involve step-by-step processes and the method of delivery needs to be available to all shifts at the plant. As well, the shift supervisors want to be sure the employees are engaged and can demonstrate their learning from the modules.

Recommendation:

In this case I would suggest using a CMS with a linear instruction design in which “before students are permitted to continue to the next topic within a module they must successfully complete the [accompanying] assessment” (Simonson, 2012, p. 169).   This sequential structure would facilitate linking concepts and allow students to build on the content they previously digested.  I would create modules in the CMS dedicated to each of the content areas–most likely there would be a module per each piece of heavy machinery.  Each employee would receive an invitation to self-enroll and supervisors would be given instructor access so that they can track and monitor.

This video illustrates how one company, Watson Pharmaceuticals, used the Blackboard CMS to train employees via modular video coaching.  Their goal wasn’t safety related but rather they sought to improve sales through training and they were successful in that regard.

This article details how one automotive company, Subaru, used an LMS (Moodle) to put together a modular training and “gather best practices into a knowledge database” (Gale, 2008).

 

Resources:

Gale, S.F. (2008).  Moodle goes corporate. Retrieved July 20, 2014 from http://www.workforce.com/articles/moodle-goes-corporate

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education(5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.

 

 

Distance Learning: A brief survey

Having completed a Masters using a hybrid online/face-to-face application I felt intimately acquainted with what constituted a distance education experience.  Prior to digesting the definition of distance education given by Simonson et al in Teaching and Learning at a Distance I would have also included my self-study via resources like Lynda or Skillfeed within the purview.  My definition of distance learning was essentially synonymous with the widely accepted definition of e-learning–learning conducted through an electronic medium; typically the internet.

My uninformed definition represented only one-fourth of the components necessary for a learning experience to bear the distinction  of distance learning.  As outlined in Teaching and Learning at a Distance, distance learning must be institutionally based, include a geographic separation of teacher and student, utilize interactive telecommunications, and facilitate the sharing of data, voice and video (2012).  There are many definitions out there regarding what constitutes distance learning but  this definition feels comprehensive and sufficient.

Accepting  those parameters it would hold that while I participated in e-learning (to increase my skills in certain applications or gain new skills) and assigned online modular learning to volunteers who I managed, these instances don’t necessary qualify as distance learning because while there was a separation between the “teacher” and student and video and data was shared, these experiences were not institutional based  and there was no interactivity.  And I use the term teacher loosely because the instruction was very generalized, and the teacher had little engagement beyond providing the content for users/students to digest as they saw fit.

Between 1833 and 1873 the idea of distance education was established and began to be developed and explored.   In its nascent stages those in the industry recognized the implications this medium held for educators and those who sought education.   The Distance Learning Timeline Continuum multimedia program notes that between 1873 and 1892 New York state gave a university permission to award degrees through mail correspondence.  Very early on the standard of accreditation was applied to the distance learning model so the institutionally based piece is an essential  and long-standing component–what complicates the issue is what qualifies something as an institution.

With the introduction in recent years of MOOCs and tutorial repositories such as Lynda a discussion around redefining this element might be in order.  At the crux of the argument for distance learning solutions is the flexibility and convenience that they offer.  If the spirit in which the Hermod’s institution (founded in 1898) is to be followed, distance learning should also consider those having “limited traditional education opportunities”.  What does this look like?  I’d say redoubling the efforts of those “educators and trainers [who are] advocating the accreditation of institutions that offer distance education to add credibility” (Simonson et al, 2012, p. 33).   As such, my personal definition of distance education is learning that takes place where teacher (an actively engaged instructor) and student are not in proximity of one another, that uses state-of-the-art communication tools to facilitate learning and that can originate from non-traditional institutions like MOOCs or training repositories.

 

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education(5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.