Jeffery Dallas

As a professional educator, revising my courses and closing the loop are essential to improving the quality of my future courses.  This lesson shared some additional sources of data to use when evaluating my courses.  In the past, I think I've probably relied too heavily on course surveys.  While course surveys are critically important, I plan to also focus more on making sure the learning objectives match with the syllabus and industry expectations.  I'd also like to try the focus group approach if students would be willing to have a deeper conversation and reflect on all parts of the course.

In this lesson, I learned about the importance of formative assessment, which is a way of gathering what students have learned through a non-graded activity.  An example of formative assessment is a non-graded quiz or practice problems that are not collected for a grade.  This idea really stands out to me, especially for an online course.  I want to find ways to incorporate more formative assessments in my online courses.  Since I don't teach synchronous courses, it will be difficult to work in reflection questions as a way of formative assessment.  Thus, I'd like to create some short non-graded quizzes… >>>

A point made in this lesson that really resonated with me is that students need to learn with technology rather than from it.  I think many instructors view new technologies or simulations as teaching tools.  While they can be teaching tools, the technology should help guide the student towards learning particular skills.  This will help with scaffolding the student's learning.

After studying this lesson, I think my course organization can use some improvement.  I really like the idea of creating a database of course materials.  I currently use various folders to store information and learning objects I've used in past courses.  However, I think I can improve my own efficiency by putting all of these items in a central location.  It will also help me avoid losing content or "forgetting" about something I used in one section of a course but not another.

This lesson opened my eyes to the frustrations that student can feel related to technical issues.  I plan to be more cognizant of technical concerns and share information so students can avoid them.

There were a lot of interesting points made in this lesson.  What particularly resonated with me is responding to groups of students in asynchronous discussion boards at a time.  I've made a habit of responding to individual posts, but am going to focus on enriching the conversation by tying multiple student posts into one reply post from me.

I learned more about the importance of student introductions/biographies.  In my experience, I've struggled to get students to respond in this area.  I'm thinking of making it more interactive and fun by asking each student to ask five random questions of a fellow student and then that student will be expected to respond.  I'm thinking of questions with short answers (What is your favorite TV show?,  Coke or Pepsi?, etc.).  Hopefully this will be a nice ice breaker as students won't see it as intellectually daunting or burdensome.

In an online environment, the instructor is not only the content expert but is also expected to be a first level technical issue troubleshooter.  I like that the module emphasizes the need for instructors to run through the course and activities.  I think this will be a great way to categorize technical issues and gives the instructor a chance to announce potential issues before students even have to deal with the frustration.