I have learned the following:
- In order for a online course to be of quality it must have structural integrity, that consist of modules, lessons and topics related to skilss that are to be to the student(s)
Using the addition of multi-sensory activites is going to help the students stay engaged and actively learn. I think the briggest takeway from this concept is to get creative with the student activity and content.
I instruct HVAC/R students at Suffolk County Community College and I developed an online course using Blackboard in a hybrid modality last spring for their internship capstone course. I quickly learned that the course was too difficult for them to navigate. I thought my learning modules with detailed levels of table of contents and subdivisions were great. It was not - its needs to be very easy for them to follow and engage.
I offer this suggestion
Check what your student sees in the LMS platform that your school uses. As an exanple, LMS (Learning Management System) that I use is Blackboard (Bb) and what I see the course content (instructor view) was very different from the student view.
add content to keep students engaged like stll pictures and videos
use asynchronous chat for student to submit research they have found for classmates to review.
I would follow the recommended structure to help student to easily find the modules and lesson as required. I would provide some navaigational simplicity to help the learner navigate through the course by including links, calender, overview, notes, assignments and location. Active learners would have opportunties to reinfore their learning. Intellectual interaction opportunties would provide the learner to contribute thier knowledge to help with high levels of retention.
Like all good lessons, require much time to prepare and carefully understand what key ideas the instructor wants the student to learn and understand and more importantly the instructor must be sure that the student has all the background information in order to use the new ideas that will be presented to successful comprehend the content as the course progresses in the course, The challenge for myself is to learn these platform and navigate between them online.
Courses have modules, modules have topics; topics have lessons.
I, further, learned the importance of incorporating multi-media into learning experiences. Also, students will retain more by clicking for interaction, rather than simply clicking and viewing. I will add additional activities to stimulate student retention of content.
I learned about the structure of how online course. I plan on using this framework in the future to build online content for my courses in the event of virtual learning days.
The organization of the course is a huge asset. The content should be broken down into modules that are well structured and sequenced so that the students can learn it in small segments at a time.
The explanation of how the organization and ease of navigation help the student make so much sense and is really eye-opening.
Online courses must be well structured and allow participants to interact with one another.
Quality online courses should intergrate btween the following four areas: Structural Integrity, Navigational Simplicity, Active Learner- Centered Learning, and Intellectual Interaction.
The course covers various learning activities that are supported in an e-learning environment and describes the typical components of an online course.
I learned that having quality media combined with quality interaction equates to better engagement and retention of information.
I learned the objectives for the course, and that online courses need to be navigable, interactive, and engaging. I could not access any of the Flash player content.
I learned that navigational simplicity refers to the ability of an e-learning to move through the course accessing notes, links, and other features of the class.
This is a helpful way to think about how I will tackle online learning in the fall. I like the idea of thinking in terms of modules, lessons, and topics. This will then allow me to break down the ways in which my students will interact with the material and may help them with navigation. My school system is using TEAMS and my courses for CTE are PLTW biomedical which has it own online platform. If just find it difficult to translate one learning platform to another when the PLTW platform does not make it easy to copy documents and activities. I also teach one course of 9th graders and they have great difficulties navigating through two different learning platforms. I am hoping this course will give me some ideas. I also should say that neither of the learning platforms that I use connect to my school grade book so I must take all grades and input them into another online program.
