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.