Online Course Design EDLD 5318 - Week 2 Reflection

The irony of taking a course on online course design right now is not lost on me. In my current role, I have the responsibility of training our teachers through our transition to our district learning management system, Schoology. My district announced this transition in August, but we were given the entirety of the Fall semester to learn and familiarize ourselves with the platform. During the fall, I focused on teaching our teachers how to create assignments, organize coursework, communicate, assign grades, sync the grade book, etc, on Schoology. These topics were all necessary for teachers to learn in order for them to learn Schoology, but as I have learned the content from the first two weeks in EDLD 5318, I have realized that simply teaching teachers how to organize was not enough. 

It is not enough to simply tell teachers how to organize their courses. We gave them templates for organization, by week, by day, by unit. Every possible way. However, none of this matters, if teachers don't take the time to teach their students how to access the content and how to navigate the course. 

I have built my content for this course up until this point in a way that gives students hands-on practice and application to demonstrate mastery. I dreamed of creating a more competency-based course, but as I continued working on this, I realized that some things will be and some components will not. For example, in Module 2 of my course, students will explore the students and educator protocols for our learning framework, then they will complete an assessment style activity where they will give examples of activities for each stage. Finally, at the end of the module, they will submit a lesson plan that follows the learning framework for their classes. This is one of those modules that I felt would only make sense once it is applied, so I hope this set up is meaningful to my learners. 

All in all, I have enjoyed this class very much in the first two weeks. I can't say enough about the convenience of the timing. I truly hope to be able to apply what I learn about online course design to my role in professional development at my district.