EDLD 5318 - Week 4 Update

Two courses in my district that could be redesigned into online courses are The 4Cs in the Virtual Classroom, and Schoology = Success: Setting Up Schoology to Set Your Students Up for Success.

The 4Cs in the Virtual Classroom course is one that many teachers seek out, but it is hard to reach everyone that wants the training with our current set up of offering the course once a month throughout the school year. I think this course would lend itself perfectly to the online environment, especially since we utilize Schoology district-wide now and the instructor(s) can utilize the same tools and strategies that our teachers have access to in their virtual classrooms. 

Schoology = Success: Setting Up Schoology to Set Your Students Up for Success is another course that I have offered virtually through Google Meet, but I think would and could be much more effective if it were an online course. Through this course, I could model for teachers how things can be designed in Schoology with the SECTIONS model in mind. This is a huge area of need for the teachers I support and I plan to begin my work on this online course as soon as possible. 

For week 3, we had to complete the OSCQR Score Card for course design review below. 

After completing my OSCQR Scorecard, I have identified some minor areas that I need to revise in order to make my course more easily accessible and easy to navigate. I will have to start by going back in to include a prerequisite checklist of some sort that lets students know what skills they must be able to apply to this course to be successful. An example would be, clicking links, watching videos with Schoology, creating a document and uploading it to Schoology, and recording videos for module reflections. 

Additionally, I need to include a course information page in my START HERE folder that explains 1) that the course is fully online and self-paced, and 2) that deconstructs the course in a navigable way along with recommendations for how students should interact with the course (ie. Schoology through Chrome Browser). 

Discussion

The SECTIONS model is helpful to me in planning my course because it gives me a framework for deciding what to use and how to engage my students best. I appreciate this framework, especially because I have been in a situation before where I chose something to assign or present to students online based on convenience only to later figure out that there were other considerations that should have been made. 9/10 the students voiced their opinions, concerns, or issues and that is how I came to these conclusions. The SECTIONS model gives me a sort of checklist to ensure the content I am promoting and assigning my class meets the standards for quality. I can absolutely use this model as I discern what to and to not include in my online course 

The resource I use for my course will be varied and included various modes of media including video, articles, project-based applications, assessments, and playlists of a combination of all of these, too. These resources will all be housed in their module folders and organized sequentially. Something I have made a point to do in my course is sure I provide links to the assignments and resources in my to-do list at the beginning of a module, this way students can access what they need easily without always have to click around and search for what is being referenced in the list. All assignments will be submitted on Schoology. 

I have decided not to include collaborative projects for this particular online course, for the mere fact that I want it to serve as a self-paced course for new teachers and other self-starters that is fully online. That is where my course falls on the continuum of online learning referenced in chapter 9. My course will contain entirely online content and learners will need technology to be able to complete it successfully. I do hope to expand this course into a Blended Learning 102 course that will contain some more collaborative components, though. 

In terms of the expansion of OERS, I do think that the need for teachers to focus on teaching digital skills will drastically increase. I met a new friend at TCEA last week that wore a shirt that said "Teach Like Google Exists" and she had to explain it to me, but her point was that teachers have to quit teaching like our students can't google content they need or want to know and start focusing on enabling them to research, critically think, apply, and problem solve. Once teachers can get away from feeling like they have to have all of the answers, and start enabling their students to apply all of these problems solving, applicable, digital skills, students will take better ownership of their own learning and ultimately be more autonomous.