LMS+Reflection

=LMS Build Reflection=

Course Design
From my experience as a student of online courses, I know that the first days of a course can be overwhelming as I try to get the lay of the land. The situation is exacerbated by the isolation that can occur more easily in distance learning. To confront this, we designed the Start Here page with several essential links. First, an orientation screencast that gives the students a tour of the site. Next is a link to the Introduce Yourself forum, so that the students and instructors can begin building community from the very start. Though the syllabus is a link in the left sidebar, we decided to include it on this start page as well. Lastly, is a link to the BlackBoard Mobile Learn App and assessment. More about this below.

I especially liked the clear calendar I developed. This course had several overlapping activities, which included discussion board posts, reading and responding to classmates’ posts, and group activities with deliverables. In order to keep the learners moving thru the learning modules at a rate of one per day (to finish in the week), I setup a schedule - complete the module and post on the first day, and then read and respond to classmates on the second. On this second day, learners were already at work on the second module as well. Their group project also need to progress concurrently. Facing several different concurrent activities can be confusing for students (I know, I’ve experienced confusion in some of my courses - never quite sure I’ve always remembered every assignment and often checking the course schedule). I used the LMS calendar to layout when activities were due. I wish that I could have made the LMS calendar default to week view, but we could not find a way to do this.

I found that clarity of instructions and purposeful design is incredibly important to online course design. One of our activities included an implementation phase, “with a class of students, if possible”. The fact that this was optional (especially considering the short time frame) should have been made more explicit. It would have saved one of our learners much frustration. I saw this ambiguity in a very minor way in the course I was enrolled in. The link that in one learning module is shown as a NOT example of how to teach English is also included in the course tools, but without any mention of of it being a poor source. This became very clear once I worked on that assignment, but I am glad I did not look to it as a resource for early assignments.

Design and Aesthetics
Overall, CourseSites was fairly easy to setup and configure. I have used an LMS as an instructor to some degree in face-to-face courses, so thankfully I was already familiar with learning management systems in a general, and BlackBoard (from which CourseSites is developed) in particular. However, I did not like the way the learning modules flow from one page to another. In edit mode, these modules appear vertically on the same page, but the student views them one at a time on a single page. In addition, when building pages it was often confusing whether the page text would show up on the learning module page or only after the link was accessed. The student interaction involved more clicking and changing of pages than I would have liked. A few days into our build, our group decided we probably would organize it differently next time, but were too deep to change the current course.

Another difficulty I face was that I wasn’t able to put a course link directly into a particular page’s text. Web links were possible, but not course links. These required a separate page in the learning module. For example, the Design a Lesson activity instructed to learners to host their group project on the CourseSites wiki that was setup for them. I developed and provided an example wiki, so the learners had a model to look at. However, the link to this example wiki was a page by itself, instead of a link directly from the instructions page.

Because the BYOD course focused on mobile devices, I came across another problem when I tested mobile access. Well designed pages (such as our syllabus) that use headers and good graphic design principles are difficult to view in the mobile app. HTML-like formatting text is exposed to the user, and the only solution is to click “View page in browser”. Then the text looks correct, but now the learner has to content with the small screen size of a mobile device and additional clicking. I found and included a ‘best practices’ document in our course content.

Community & Interaction
The other course designers and I intentionally designed the ‘course’ with interactivity and community in mind. We placed a strong emphasis on the discussion board postings. Learners were expected to proceed through the modules on their own and post their initial findings, then respond to several of their classmates postings. The instructors were also regularly involved in these discussion boards, helping to move the dialog along. While ours was a small, short-lived course, we saw the beginnings of community develop as the students began to interact. We were careful to include as the top discussion board a place for problems, questions, and answers. While no one in our course used it, I went looking for such a forum in the course I participated in as a student. Finding none I emailed the instructors directly and received quick responses from both of them.

Assignments
While discussion board postings are important, I wanted the assignments to go beyond this and utilize more of the features of the CourseSites LMS. The Design a Lesson project was designed to incorporate group collaboration on the built-in wiki. In addition, a survey was used for the Collaborative Skills self and peer assessment. Unfortunately, I discovered after the fact that the CourseSites surveys are anonymous and I did not include a “my name” field. Lesson learned.

Since our course centered on the use of mobile devices, I wanted the learners to experience using a mobile device in education. We encouraged students to download BlackBoard Mobile app (for iOS or Android devices) and explore the course using it. Using CourseSites, I built a mobile accessible exam that the students had to complete. The final question asked them to take a self portrait and upload it using their mobile device.

Instructor Perspective
I have experienced group activities in several courses over the past three years, but was always on the inside, as a member of the group. I was surprised to learn that, as an instructor, I had so little idea what was going on in the groups! I could see the groups’ final products; through the CourseSites reports I could see how long the individual members have spent in various portions of the course, but students have the freedom to collaborate through whatever means they choose and the instructor does not have access to all of those means. An instructor must rely on students’ assessments of each other, through something like a Collaborative Skills Rubric. I found the reports capabilities very interesting. This is a feature of BlackBoard/CourseSites that I have not explored in depth. I will need to look at it in more detail in the future.

Conclusions
Overall, I have a much greater understanding and especially respect for quality online course design. It is not a matter of “throw some things in and see what sticks.” The course must be thoughtfully and methodically designed and then tested - all the while being mindful of how a learner will see it for the first time.