Month: February 2020

Being a distance education teacher, I was curious about the chapter on Effective Practices in the book “Creating Online Learning Experiences” (Crosslin, 2018). Unfortunately, most of the suggested practices felt redundant, unhelpful, or were peddling poor pedagogy. Here are some examples:

• “Spending time and resources to create a high quality learning experience”
  • I’m honestly unsure why this statement had to be said. It gives the impression that people thought hastily created lessons would still work in online learning and there’s no need for “time and effort” in course designs. This should be given for any type of work be it online or in-person and in both teaching or other unrelated fields. It reminds me of the paper by Sparks (2018) which looked at effects of heat on students’ academic performance, with a shocking revelation that students don’t do well in a hot classroom.
• “Creating lessons that focus more on active engagement and less on passive content consumption“, and “If possible, especially in MOOCs, shorter course durations with simple, straight forward organization” .
  • More advice that feels redundant as teachers are aware that student attention span is fairly short (Bunce et al., 2010). Educators who’ve undergone teacher training are taught the same advice: reduce passive learning or “chalk talk”, chunk long activities into segments, include more engaging content and tasks, or schedule breaks. It should be no surprise that these general recommendations for traditional in-person teaching also applies to learners online. It might even be easier to implement in distance education as there are a plethora of short videos (less than 5 minutes) which neatly and concisely summarizes course concepts.
  • As for “shorter course duration”, I can only assume they’re referring to the length of each “activity” and not the duration of the entire course; as the latter would mean making an online course assess less content than its traditional counterpart. The goal of online learning shouldn’t be making it “easier” in terms of workload or depth of knowledge, rather in accessibility and flexibility.
  • In terms of simple and straightforward design, this should also be second nature as educators should set and state the learning goals and outcomes for each class or module, and not design a philosophical maze where students discover the meaning to the course.

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• “Less focus and time on videos to watch and/or text to read per week”
  • This gem is concerning for several reasons:
    • First, if this statement was geared towards post-secondary (which is most likely is), it makes no sense to reduce the amount of reading between in-person and online courses. As mentioned, online courses should not be a watered down version of traditional lectures. The issue is post-secondary educators typically assign readings and reiterate or clarify them during the in-person lectures. This model is questionable as there is often a lack of engagement as it is purely teacher-centered pedagogy. Online courses should not be conducted under the same format in the sense of forcing them to watch recorded lectures alongside readings. The absence of those lectures shouldn’t lead to more readings either, but rather more assessment (formative or short summative) to allow students to check their understanding. If this advice was designed for high school online courses, this makes even less sense as those courses are not structured in week-by-week format; students progress at their own pace be as long as they complete all requirements by the end of the semester or school year. One individual may choose to read all the “week’s worth” in a single day, or perhaps are constrained by other priorities and spread the same readings over multiple weeks.
    • Secondly, how do you expect to get coherent or reflective assignments from students who are lacking the foundational knowledge of what they’re writing about? Less reading does not mean better results, in fact, it would most likely produce worse results (unless it’s a creative or free-write piece); much like going into an interview unprepared.
    • Third (and lastly, because too much text is bad), is interpreting this statement as letting online courses be more Inquiry- (or Problem-) based learning. This was brought up during our discussions as a way to “assign” less reading and let students pursue their own. Multiple studies (Alfieri et al., 2011; Mayer, 2004; Sweller et al., 2007; Kirschener et al., 2006) have argued that this minimal guidance method does not work in most cases. Ddirect guidance (such as worked examples) is preferred and more efficient when dealing with novel concepts.
• “Completing the entire course design before the start date”
  • Wow. Being prepared in advance will be helpful?
• “Utilizing networked learning and interactive activities”
  • To be fair, I think network learning (synchronous meetings) would be useful for online education… at the post-secondary level. K-12 online learning are not conducted in lock-step fashion like in higher Ed. Asking students to commit to an online meeting when they’re not prepared or ahead of the content would be counterproductive. Students may also opt out of those meetings if they deem it unhelpful (Veletsianos et al., 2016)
  • During our meeting, someone also suggested that these synchronous meetings could be recorded for others to view. This would be a good idea if it didn’t go against early “advice” of less focus on videos to watch. Also, what content would be covered in those synchronous meetings that wouldn’t be covered from assigned reading/videos?
  • While synchronous meetings might help students build relations and community with other students or the teacher, the online social networks could also become a source of distraction for students (Paul et al., 2012).
• “Listening to and responding promptly to participant concerns”
  • …was this an article about programming students or teaching them?

While I understand the need to provide any recommendations for teaching in this scary new world of online learning, I cannot help be read these suggestions with my glass being:

References:

Alfieri, L., Brooks, P. J., Aldrich, N. J., & Tenenbaum, H. R. (2011). Does discovery-based instruction enhance learning? Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021017

Bunce, D. M., Flens, E. A., & Neiles, K. Y. (2010). How Long Can Students Pay Attention in Class? A Study of Student Attention Decline Using Clickers. Journal of Chemical Education, 87(12), 1438–1443. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed100409p

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1

Mayer, R. E. (2004). Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure
discovery learning? The case for guided methods of instruction. American Psychologist, 59, 14–19. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.14

Paul, J. A., Baker, H. M., & Cochran, J. D. (2012). Effect of online social networking on student academic performance. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(6), 2117–2127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.06.016

Sparks, S. (2018). School Facilities: “Heat and Learning.” Education Week, 37(35), 5–1.

Sweller, J., Kirschner, P. A., & Clark, R. E. (2007). Why minimally guided
teaching techniques do not work: A reply to commentaries. Educational
Psychologist, 42, 115–121.

Veletsianos, G., Reich, J., & Pasquini, L. A. (2016). The Life Between Big Data Log Events: Learners’ Strategies to Overcome Challenges in MOOCs. AERA Open, 2(3), 233285841665700. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858416657002

For the emergent sessions, I joined the one on Blended & Distance Learning to hear about what the rest of the class thought or wondered about the topic. Some of the highlights & questions that interested me were and wanted to answer from my perspective as a DL teacher.

• Students not exhibiting same behavior online compared to in-class:
  • In my experience there are several reasons for this behavior. First of all is that if the discussion was to be assessed, such as a debate or feedback, students would treat it as a “formal assignment” and restrict themselves from letting their personality show through. They’ve understood the difference between academic and informal writing, so are exercising it here given that it’s being moderated by the teacher. The second reason could be that they’re simply too shy or overly conscious of how they will be judged if they put themselves out there. In-class, they may have some safety in the belief that not everyone is paying attention to their conversation, whereas it’s the opposite in a forum discussion where everyone can view it repeatedly. Lastly, students have their own preferred methods of back-channel discussions that teachers are simply unaware of. It’s their “private space” where they feel comfortable discussing with each other, where they could be a bit goofy or mean-spirited with one another.
• Applying synchronous meetings in high school online courses:
  • Great idea, except for the fact that we cannot “require” students attend meetings given the nature of the online course. There’s also the issue of when the meetings would take place. Students generally choose online courses because regular school hours do not work for them, or they are cross-enrolled to take multiple courses. Afternoon and evenings are also suspect as 1) teachers have their own lives, 2) students have their own lives, and 3) they may not have access / permission to attend synchronous meetings (ie. FOIPPA, or just personal shyness). In addition, not all students would progress through the course at the same pace. Some would work well ahead, some on pace, and some who will never touch the course until the last week. Unlike our own M.Ed sessions, these students would not have the same understanding required to have a meaningful discussion together.
• The idea that online courses should require students take a course on communication – a sort of “netiquette” course.
  • This would be a boon to students and society overall as most students (and adults) seem to be unaware of how to separate private / public image, or acceptable / unacceptable comments. At our school, we do offer these type of “soft skills” lessons during our Flex blocks to Blended students, but we have not tried it with fully online students. The idea of making it “mandatory” and assigning a credit to it would perhaps cross some red tape in terms of school transcripts and curricular outcomes.