Week 15: Final Reflections

Final blog reflection due by Tuesday
Reviewing your previous blog posts, what, if anything, has changed in your attitude toward online schools and online schooling over the past 15 weeks?

A lot has certainly changed over the past weeks. I will highlight two main changes below.

First, I used to believe that it is important to study the effectiveness of online schooling; whether they are better than traditional schools or lacking. This course has showed me that that this study might not be straightforward after all. In fact, it might be more beneficial to study what works in online schooling and apply that to traditional environment. In my interview with Dr Brian Woodfield from Brigham Young University, I took the chance to ask this question again and his reply was, “ That’s a good question? But against what?”. There are no simple benchmark targets and variables might be too many to make the comparison effective. It has taught me that instead of just focusing on the comparisons, we should perhaps think about the processes that work better for each media.

Also, I used to think that online schooling is a lonely and boring process, without the face-to-face interaction found in traditional classrooms. To a certain extent, I still think it is true but I realized that the younger generation nowadays might be as comfortable in an online environment as in a traditional one. In fact, with the explosion of social media, interaction has taken an entire different form and many face-to-face environment are tapping on its appeal to engage young learners. With the overwhelming number of online tools to enhance the social presence of students nowadays, some might argue that online learning is actually more collaborative and exciting than traditional classrooms.

Week 13: Difficult aspect of researching for final project

What was the most difficult aspect of researching this topic?

The most difficult part was finding out the design considerations of online science labs. Most of the literature was confined to studies on implementation and effectiveness of program; and not much was be found on design consideration. As a Physics teacher, I was curious to find out how designers of online science labs view virtual learning and the outcomes that was focused on during planning.

I had the privilege to interview Dr Brian Woodfield, Professor at Brigham Young University (with help from Dr Lowes). From our conversation, we talked about bringing principles that make video games successful into virtual science labs. The interview certainly opened my eyes to the world of online wet labs, gave us insights that would be difficult to gather on our own.

Week 11: Research on Virtual Schools and Virtual Schooling

What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important in learning about virtual schools? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learned this week?

This week, as I read through the reports, I am struck by the repeated cautions made by authors on the causality between variables and outcomes tested. For example, in IESD, Comprehensive Technical Report 2009 Evaluation of social skills of fulltime online public school students, self-assessments of the socialization skills of online students are not found to be lower than f2f students. The author further his claims that this does not mean online schools made them sociable; in this study, there was no pretesting done so students might have a active social life right from the start. The articles this week made me realized that it is easy to jump into causality, and we should practise caution when looking at these results.

Week 10: Online vs face-to-face

What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important in learning about virtual schools? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learned this week?

This week’s activity has set me thinking about the measurement of effectiveness of virtual schools. I used to think that measurement is straightforward and now realized that comparisons are sometimes irrelevant since there are too many variables in the first place. It has taught me that we should perhaps play more attention to what makes a system successful in the first place, rather than focus on the minor differences.

Week 9: Unit Creation

Blog: Now that you have seen what other people did in creating their units, is there anything that you might do differently if you were to redesign your own unit?

I particularly like the online survey that Adrienne and Tiffany included at the end of their course unit. It made me wonder on the importance of listening to the needs of our target, the students. I am taking a course at TC right now, called mobile phone learning. Speakers are invited to give a presentation on their niche areas every week, and we are invited to fill up a survey on the effectiveness of the session and ways that can be improved after the session. Knowing the needs of our students is important and doing so at a regular basis, instead of at the end of the course, lets the instructional designer alter the course material if necessary. In fact, this might be even more important since it is an online course where facial cues are not available. I would definitely consider including one when designing a course next time.

Week 7: Designing a unit

What are you most concerned about as you embark on creating a curriculum unit?

As a teacher and a instructional designer, I feel that it is important to identify the learning outcomes before the tools itself. As this is an online class, we might feel pressurized to whip up all the fancy web2.0 tools and use them at random in our curriculum design. As a user myself, I know that learners might not be comfortable if they have to dabble in too many online tools or deal with too many logins for one unit. It is important to identify an appropriate tool or two that facilitates and improve the learning experience of learners and utilize the potential to these tools. I believe that it is crucial to delve deep rather than dabble briefly in many things.

Week 6: Student-Student Interaction

Did you change anything in the Google spreadsheet? If so, what? Has your view of the schools you chose to research changed from the first week you looked at them? If so, how?

I have been researching for a number of schools since the first week, and K12 International Academy is one of them. In K12 International Academy, it is self-paced for K-8 and class-paced for high school. That said, little is said about the type of student-student interaction on the website. It would be interesting to observe the social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence (Garrison, 2007) in these 2 differently paced settings, for different age groups.

My views on online schools have certainly changed, in Robyler (2009), the combined perspectives of experienced virtual teachers shed light on the factors of successful online schooling. Firstly, students can be prepared to succeed, and general ability may not be as critical in determining success as some studies would seem to indicate. Secondly, the environment can be arranged to promote success; pre-course counselling and orientation can be arranged to get students ready for online schooling and to prevent misconceptions about online requirements. These are factors that can be easily overlooked, but play a critical role in facilitating student-student interaction, and successful online schooling experience.