Week 5 Reaction - Quality Assurance in Blended Learning

Here at Purdue, and within both the IMPACT and Purdue Extended Campus (PEC) programs, we are developing our own standards for online courses as well as all other models, including blended. This IMPACT "certification" is being developed through a collaborative effort of Teaching and Learning Initiatives, the Center for Instructional Excellence and the Purdue Libraries.

The goal of that process is to be able to evaluate new and re-designed courses for the following components:

1. Learning Outcomes
2. Learning Objectives
3. Assessment Mapping
4. Active Learning
5. Lesson Plans

The Center for Instructional Excellence is also handling student perception surveys, ideally at the beginning and end of a baseline semester (prior to re-design) then annually for each iteration of the re-design. This data, used in addition to grades, will hopefully show growth in academic achievement and classroom engagement and techniques.

Week 4 Reaction

Designing for the use of acting learning strategies is a large part of what I do at Purdue. Through the IMPACT redesign process, I have found that I prefer active learning activities in the areas of Adaptive, Productive and Experiential. This is probably because they lend themselves very well to a PBL approach to learning and my constructivist thinking.

Designing truly adaptive content is very difficult and time consuming. It usually involves the use of outside sites or simulations, but if you think a bit outside the box, even some video games can become adaptive content.

As we enter summer vacation for my kids, I am thinking about a comment I read the other day saying we should make the school year more like a summer camp. Students love to go to camps.....why? Because they are DOING, not listening, and they have freedom to pursue their passions. If we can bring some of those productive and experiential activities into any learning environment, we can make better use of the benefits of engagement. 

Now how to do it.......

Week 3 Reaction

David Huckleberry Reading Reaction 3

·         

H   How much of the final course grade do you typically allot to testing? How many tests/exams do you usually require? How can you avoid creating a “high stakes” environment that may inadvertently set students up for failure/cheating?

There are 3 exams throughout the semester, that will make-up 50% of their course grade. These are proctored exams and I have not seen many signs of cheating, and for the most part students do well on the exams.

·     
  What expectations do you have for online assessments? How do these expectations compare to those you have for face-to-face assessments? Are you harboring any biases?

I have some reservations about giving much weight to online assessments due to the ease of collaborative answers or blatant cheating. But I am more comfortable with lower stakes formative assessments throughout the semester being online.

·         What trade-offs do you see between the affordances of auto-scored online quizzes and project-based assessments? How will you strike the right balance in your blended learning course?

There is the obvious time-savings to me in online quizzing, however they are easiest when they are multiple-choice and that doesn’t address the HOTS that I want to target. Project work will do a better job of problem-solving and thinking skills, but more difficult to assess.

·         How will you implement formal and informal assessments of learning into your blended learning course? Will these all take place face-to-face, online, or in a combination?

I think a combination will work best. I am not ready to give up the exams being the primary assessment, but I want to give more weight to online activities and open-ended projects as well.

Week 2 Thoughts

"Too much scaffolding can easily feel “school-like” and procedural, taking away from players’ initiative to tinker around to discover things on their own. Too little scaffolding may leave players lost and disengaged.” 

The above quote was the one that stood out to me because in the opening sentence, I thought it was significant that something feeling “school-like” was a negative to learners. I think that is a concept lost on many veteran instructors. The fail to recognize that any task, even video gaming, can be disengaging if it starts to feel “like-school”.

In addressing the questions to ponder, I absolutely think that both student-to-student and instructor-to-student communication is important. I think it was good that it did not call it face to face communication, since it can occur in many ways. I have had success with using Discussions for some items, but it is also engaging to use some video conferencing to simulate face to face as well. Then you have the in class contact as well. So I think it is a blend (pun intended ) in Blended Learning.

Week 1 BlendKit 2014

I haven't blogged in several years, so this will be a real throwback for me. I was excited to hear that Purdue was supporting taking this course and will pay for the certification. In my role here, I work with academic course re-designs every semester as part of the Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT) program.

This will be an opportunity for me to focus some time, without having to support a faculty member, on how I would re-design a course to a blended learning model. It is a chance to perhaps develop an exemplar (hopefully) course that I can use with other faculty.

I look forward to reading the thoughts of my classmates and discussing instructional design in general. I know I have several co-workers at Purdue that may be in here as well, so if you see some jovial banter between us, know that we are a very tight team and I respect every one of them. (There I said some nice things in case they are lurking nearby.)

One with Week 2, talk more soon!!

Dave