Hintonblogger

Here is my report I filed with eSchool News.  I haven't seen any of the two reports I've filed with them posted yet, but I'll keep you posted.  Here are my notes from the terrific morning workshop I attended.  It provided some great ideas and motivation for rolling out online professional development in our school district.  I even had the opportunity to begin setting up my own sample online professional development class in Blackboard. It is an excellent system.  I'm looking forward to the Moodle workshop that is starting right, so I better go...

An almost full class met at William Penn High school for this morning’s workshop.  After a round of introductions, we jumped into the online learning environment (OLE) the instructors had setup at http://edc.blackboard.com.

Barbara Treacy and Liz Farmer, the workshop facilitators, began by discussing the rationale for using an online learning environment such as Blackboard, WebCT, or open-source OLEs such as Moodle.  A short discussion ensued about the benefits of some of the commercial OLE packages versus the free open-source tools that are available.

The first activity we engaged in was a brief online survey about previous involvement with online courses, both taking and teaching those courses, as well as to gauge the participant’s interest level in developing online professional development programs.  After taking the survey, we reviewed the results and found, quite predictably, a high level of interest and experience with online professional development offerings.  It was a little interesting to see that almost 30% of participants had facilitated an online course, while 20% had actually developed a course.

The question that went unasked was why people with experience developing or facilitating courses would attend a course like this.  One possible answer could be the challenges and unique skills that online learning environments require.  The newness of web-based learning environments lead one to repeatedly ask “What am I missing?” or “How can I make our online courses easier and more effective for our teachers and students who may find the requirements and interface of online learning unfamiliar?”

We next explored various sample courses as a examination of best practices for developing and deploying online learning solutions for students (K-12), teachers, and administrators.  A lengthy discussion ensued over general practices for design of courses and for effective facilitation.  One of the general conclusions the group came to was that facilitated courses with weekly deadlines were more effective than self-paced courses.  While self-paced courses seem more convenient, one participant described a recent self-paced pilot online course as a “disaster” because there were no completion guidelines for the students.  Not only was the discussion not as rich, but the facilitation was extremely difficult because the facilitator had to be omni-present in all weeks throughout the duration of the course.  Barbara Treacy and Liz Farmer affirmed that their experience had demonstrated the effectiveness of facilitated, weekly-paced courses over self-paced ones.

One of main concepts of the workshop was to do whatever was necessary to get teachers, students, whoever the participants are, talking with each other in the discussion forums because that is where much of the learning and insights will be gained.  The flexibility of the online learning environment in letting students complete weekly assignments at different times and in a personally-unique sequence are some of ways online learning helps make differentiation of instruction easier.  Workshop participants were then exposed to different discussion facilitation scenarios to which they had to respond in the online discussion forum.  The six scenarios presented included such things as slow computers, offensive posts, lack of posting, as well as how to encourage participants to post thoughtful versus superficial responses.  Participation was brisk with over 70 responses posted in the brief 10 minutes the participants were given to respond.  That equates to about three responses per participant with some terrific ideas shared.

            One of the richest conversations that occurred revolved around the value of superficial responses to discussion questions or even if the numerous similar responses to one discussion question were useful.  There were a wide variety of responses, including a value of similar responses as a way of checking for understanding, as well as different strategies for an instructor to seed or encourage more thoughtful replies to the initial postings.  Both workshop facilitators mentioned that there are on-going discussions in their own online professional development group about what level of the “I agree” responses are acceptable.

            The last half-hour of this packed, energetic workshop was devoted to the creation of individual sample online learning courses.  The facilitators provided each participant an empty course shell that we could manipulate and practice course design while they went around to answer questions.

            The workshop was high energy, information packed, and well worth the time.  Its content was focused more towards intermediate online learning experience, those who have taken an online course or perhaps facilitated a few courses.  While those who had more advanced experience may have already known much of the material, the discussion and interaction within the diverse group of participants surely made it time well spent.