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301 course Critical Inquiry Learning Activities Reflections Resolution showcase

Building on OTL courses

As I complete my initial pass through the OTL 101, 201, and 301 courses, I record the following summary observations and plans. These represent only a first pass through the material and closely correspond to specific questions posed at the end of the last course.

most important lessons from the course

The concentration of the curriculum upon design in course delivery demonstrates for me that there is a crucial connection between the design and my role as a course facilitator. Commitments in the course readings toward blended delivery were obvious–and serve as a reminder that continuous-intake delivery of courses is not an optimal learning environment for most subject areas–but the lessons learned have applicability across a wide range of delivery modes.

Another principle learned in the course set is that my role is chiefly to encourage concentration on the work and understanding of the curriculum, but within a context of safe and frequent communication. There is no substitute for the presence of a facilitator when students are working towards completion of their course as individuals. Of course, this principle has been more poignantly demonstrated in its lack herein–OTL 101, 201, and 301 completely lack a facilitator presence at a time when faculty being trained could use it.

Change of thinking from completing the course

In the past, I have had a practice of staying out of students’ way when teaching in a course. Some students seem to resent too much “hovering” on the part of instructors (perhaps in the same way that service personnel can be intrusive when interrupting meals in restaurants to ask if clientele are finding “Everything okay?”).

One thing I will try to make more obvious in future is my own presence in the course, but not in a way that is obtrusive to students who are taking online courses because they are “good independent learners” and who want to demonstrate that they do not need “help to get through the course.” In short, I want to be there for those who need me without being in the way for those who don’t.

In the LMS I am most familiar with, it would be nice if forum discussions could show post authors how many times their posts had been viewed by others. At present, the only way to show authors their post has been read is by replying, but it is sometimes too intrusive for instructors to reply to every post: It would be good for me to be able to see that others have read my messages without necessarily having to have them reply. Visibility of post-views, of tacit response to messages, would be a helpful way to show presence without intruding into (mostly peer) discussions.

platform (WordPress) influence on interaction with the content, other people, and learning

I like the WordPress environment, given its openness and (relative) simplicity. I think it would be a very good option for synchronous course support (and it is not deficient at all for asynchronous support–although tracking when blog posts have been viewed by others would probably be a good enhancement). However, I think it would be very good for WordPress to have some tools for social markup of readings by users such that others could choose to see or ignore such commenting (sort of a mashup of WordPress and Diigo, if that were possible).

However, it would be a mistake to believe that WordPress can deliver personal presence into asynchronous courses where facilitators are absent. The platform is fine for its intended purpose, but it doesn’t provide a sufficient guarantee of success in and of itself.

most effective learning strategies

I think that the most profitable aspect of this course was encouraging me to write (blog) regularly and often. I have long felt as though more writing in university contexts would be better evidence of learning and exploration, but this series of courses has nurtured my own desire to write. Since I teach primarily in humanities, I cannot speak for the benefits of writing in STEM disciplines directly, but I have come to believe quite strongly in the value of writing across the humanities.

This video is the first of a four-part discussion of how writing takes centre-stage in the development of journalism skills that go far beyond writing itself.

two or three ideas to implement

Although I am completing the three courses in this training program as a requisite to continued work with TRU-OL, I believe the value of skills learned will lead to changed practice across all my teaching. Since our default delivery of university education is planned to be remote for the current (fall 2020) semester as a response to the Covid-19 crisis, thinking of  learning as a remote process with asynchronicity as a default feature, my role in courses throughout all my teaching will have elements that are central when teaching an online course for TRU-OL. With this in mind, the courses have helped me to think of the current year’s instruction in the following (very different) ways.

  1. First of all, I need to revisit the syllabi/outlines for all my courses to make sure that course objectives align with assignments and assessments completely.
  2. In addition, I need to “pare down” assignments that needlessly overlap or provide redundant evidence of competency–leading to potential for overwork in students.
  3. Finally, I need to provide more formative work to help student gain skills and confidence in their abilities and understanding of the more complex summative assignments.
Plans for future learning

I would like to review Teaching In Blended Learning Environments and E-Learning in the 21st Century as stand-alone sources to reflect upon their place and value outside the OTL courses. The use and value of a source is different when it is being studied in the context of a course that needs to be completed versus a reading that needs to be applied to practice in the days ahead. I hope to blog more about these sources in the coming days and particularly with a view to the valuable ideas marginalized or hidden by the current course curriculum. (This does not mean that I disparage OTL courses in any way, it is only that McLuhan’s observation (medium = message) is endlessly productive for modifying our thinking and views of our reading and reflection. Learning is a never-ending process. We need to be both careful and humble in using the expression “I have learned . . .” and “I know . . .”

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301 course Critical Inquiry Resolution

Self-coding Exercise

In this course, I have been reading articles and books presenting best practices used in online teaching. While the materials have been primarily focused upon online or blended synchronous teaching, I am preparing to teach a continuous-intake course that will minimize possibilities for a real-time, community of inquiry (CoI). This is ironic, given the overt CoI biases of the authors of both the texts and the courses (OTL 1o1, 201, and 301). Now that I have a considerable body of reflective writing done on this blog, I have undertaken to code posts according to four processes of inquiry: triggering event, exploration, integration, and resolution. After coding the blog posts, I have some observations to make concerning my learning process.

Did you engage in each of the phases of the critical inquiry process?

Yes, I did engage in each of the learning phases in the three courses. However, the integration phase was missing from OTL 201. As I reflect upon this fact, I recall that it was about that time I began to miss interaction with an instructor in the course. I believe that a responsible person monitoring my progress in the course would have intervened, not to “rescue” me, but to stimulate my inquiry in the direction of integration. The course materials were about student engagement, and I was needing some interaction in order to provide a stimulus for integration of the information with my current practice in the course. Now that I think about it, I believe I should have engaged my PLN (personal learning network), colleagues who know and have worked with me in online and blended education and who have a great deal to say about student engagement.

Were you able to resolve any problems or dilemmas?

I think that my insights written above will help me to turn to my PLN more quickly in future, so that I can establish a social presence for what otherwise would be a dry and individual desert of learning.

What might you do differently in a future course?

In consideration that students in an online course–whether synchronous and face-to-face (blended, for example), synchronous online, or remote and asynchronous–are going to lose contact with others and have a tendency to “drop out.” I would like to plan for more proactive stimulation to engage students more positively at the outset and during the course, rather than as a corrective or remedial process.

How might you engage with your students to ensure that they are working through the entire inquiry process?

I believe that students need to understand a great deal more about the learning process. At present, it is mysterious and intimidating, it doesn’t feel natural, particularly for students who already feel marginalized by aspects of higher education. Although a major part of this discussion might be categorized as “decolonization” of learning, I believe it goes far beyond the divide between settler and indigenous ways of thinking; it is connected to the very privileged view of learning held by many entitled people in higher-learning institutions.

Do you think that working through this course in an open platform like WordPress helps to encourage reflective learning?

I think that learning in the open could, in fact, shut reflective learning down. It is hard to write in the open and be vulnerable to the sorts of notions and plans that might allow colleagues and students to review what I have written and to hold me accountable for views expressed here that they might not see manifest in my classes or online teaching. To have opinions is one thing, but to hold oneself accountable to those expressed opinions is rather like sticking to a diet: easy to think, hard to live.

I recently was able to make some progress in the matter of my diet by realising that I had to redefine my relationship to food radically. I think perhaps that a similar redefinition needs to take place regarding my relationship to learning. My own experience redefining my relationship to food has been incredibly painful (I have a great debt to the Muslim concept of Ramadan just past in this regard), and I suspect that any real progress in making me a better facilitator of learning will be even more painful. I can’t say I look forward to it–yet another occasion for humility!

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301 course Critical Inquiry post 4 Triggering Event

CoI in the Asynchronous World

When students involved in a course come together, it can seem easy to create a dynamic community of inquiry around the subject matter of the course. There are many opportunities (around 40 hours of them, in most courses) where students can be encouraged to make real social contact with others in the course. In an online course, such social presence has analogues in terms of forums and chats, as well as synchronous sessions where students can interact (at least in text) with each other and “build community.”

Now, in a course that is continuous-intake and students are rarely, if ever, at the same point in their learning, the one’s first reaction to the notion of community is a bit of a horse-laugh. Imagine a library where patrons must be absolutely silent, where they are reading entirely individually, and you have a picture of the asynchronous course dynamic.

Of course, in a library, it is always possible for patrons to interact, just as it is possible for any two students to interact with each other in a course, even when they are not at the same place in the curriculum. But the point of the illustration is not just to consider whether they would interact, but to further examine what benefit would come from their interaction.

  • They could interact in the library/course:
    • Excuse me, do you know how the fiction books are shelved?
    • Do you know how many books can be checked out?
    • And so on.
  • But what would motivate the more experienced patrons/students to help newbies? Why would they take time?

In this blog post, I hope to consider some of these questions. However, in view of my own limited experience in teaching continuous intake courses (that is, none!), I will need to probe the minds of some others.

Adding to the difficulty of my geographic isolation (Interior BC, Canada) and the relative isolation of the season (summer 2020), I also have the complications of CoVid-19, wherein we are somewhat cloistered and unable to roam freely from interview to interview.

As a result, I have emailed a couple of colleagues at TRU, as well as close associates in some online organizations I have worked for over the years. In a few days, I hope to update this blog post with their insights. The particular questions I am interested in are as follows:

  1. How do you promote social engagement among participants who are not at the same point with each other in the course you are teaching?
  2. How do you provide summaries and integrate understanding in a way that does not privilege later students over previous ones?
  3. What is the hardest thing to achieve in building a community of inquiry?
  4. What are the most difficult situations you have dealt with in online teaching?

If possible, I hope to keep the previous part of this post as close to the form it presently has, and just add the results of my informal interviews below, following the outline above (or adding/modifying as seems most relevant to the responses I get). Stay tuned . . .

My first respondent said,

Hi Randy, I am on hold with [company], so have some time to respond. The students in my self paced course are solitary travellers with no community. I don’t even try and I don’t think it is necessary to have a community for the topic which is [name of course]. Every student creates their own unique [work] so it is  a self contained activity. I think this encourages independent thought and self reliance. The student can enter a dialogue with me though via email and I find that works really well. The students seem happy with that. I answer them promptly and in depth. I don’t think community is essential in all courses and honestly, many of my OL students were also  attending face to face classes at TRU when we had them, so weren’t lacking community. They just wanted to take a few more credits on their own time.

To the question about difficulty with student success, the respondent said,

I haven’t had difficult online situations other than academic integrity questions. (ugh!)

So to check academic integrity, I always check the author of the document under Word’s document properties. Occasionally the author of the document was a different name than the student’s name. If this is the case, I will ask the student why that is. Sometimes they are using a roommate’s computer. Or their computer has a nickname which shows up as the document author. I’ve had students voluntarily send me a photo of their laptop with the sign in name page, with their TRU ID card held alongside it. I didn’t ask them to do this but it is a good solution if you are suspicious about authorship.

But I think the difficult part in getting the student to succeed is to ensure they actually read the lessons and do the activities the lessons provide. I often have to remind them to do this, and can tell by the quality of the assignment if they are actually reading the lessons. They often don’t read the comments I provide in Track Changes. I make sure to convert their Word assignment into a pdf file which shows my track changes comments better than Word does. I think many students just do the assignments without doing the course material, which is really discouraging for the course developer (me).

Another “interviewee” writes:

[I am h]appy to share whatever knowledge I have, but I have never taught an online course with a continuous intake. I think building a community of inquiry with students all at different points of completion will be very challenging. You might get some inspiration from my research website at: http://elearnopen.info/ and/or my Technology Toolbox for Educators website – https://sites.google.com/site/technologytoolboxforeducators/home.

 

Promoting social engagement even when all students are working through the course with the same start/end dates is a challenge…but if they are all at different points the engagement can only be asynchronous, not in real-time. I suggest you try to use tools that will enable students to see or hear previous students ideas/contributions and have them comment or respond to points raised by others. [Check out] collaborative tools such as; Flipgrid (videos), Q & A style forums, Google Docs, audio podcasts etc. If you have students “create an end product” that can be stored online, then you can use these as resources for future students. [For example], they could create videos, audio podcasts, digital storybooks etc. about the topics they are studying (will depend [on] your course objectives & content). TT4Ed “Creating” page has a few ideas for technologies https://sites.google.com/site/technologytoolboxforeducators/pedagogies/creating-articulating)
[In terms of specifically] Moodle [tools] has a Q & A type forum – you can pose a question(s) for students and they can ONLY see others responses AFTER they have posted their response. You can add your own summaries, or get your students to summarise their understanding of previous students’ posts. [Using Moodle’s conditional access,] You can put information online somewhere and only give students access to it when they reach a specific point in the course – e.g. Google doc & give them the URL when they complete a specific activity.

 

The hardest thing to achieve in building a community of inquiry [is] student interaction in various forms – with each other, the teacher & the content… [I have curated] lots of links to information and resources for inquiry-based learning – https://sites.google.com/site/technologytoolboxforeducators/about-learning/real-world-learning/inquiry-based-learning & information for communicating & collaborating online – https://sites.google.com/site/technologytoolboxforeducators/pedagogies/collaborating
The most difficult situation I have dealt with in online teaching [is the] lack of student participation…you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink…. however, you can try 🙂

Obviously, both respondents provided helpful feedback to the questions presented. They have very different views regarding education and learning. However, both of them challenge the idea that collaborative effort is easy in a continuous-intake course.

It seems to me that a crucial factor in the notion that past students would want to revisit their work and interact with later students is mentioned in the epigram to the reading for lesson three of this course: curiosity. When assignments push students’ curiosity and help them answer questions they believe are important ones, they will want to see how the answers change over time. Thus, assignments that provoke students’ curiosity are more likely to encourage post-completion interaction.

Another crucial factor goes by the buzzword, authentic. When assignments are authentic, they provide tools and resources that remain valuable to people outside the particular learning environment where they are developed. Because authentic assignments require learners to produce professional practice, and not merely student practice of professional tasks, the product of such assignments have certain essential features that lead to a longer “shelf-life.”

  1. Since they deal with “real-world” problems, authentic assignments can lead even “newbies” to insights not already known by more experienced professionals. In effect, their naivete may afford students creativity that professionals lack.
  2. Since such assignments reflect the overall purpose that can draw people into professional practice, more experienced people can be encouraged to lend a hand to students where “textbook” assignments would lack challenge or application in the real world.
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301 course Critical Inquiry Integration

Aligning Outcomes and Activities

technician aligns wheel
Performance depends upon alignment.

My objective in this post is to consider learning outcomes for a course and design activities such that they promote and encourage students’ attainment of the outcomes.

An introductory course in critical thinking has several learning outcomes that are desirable. For example, successful students should:

  1. come to understand the structures of clear thought and argument;
  2. increase their discernment of reasonable argumentation; and
  3. be able to identify several common errors in reasoning.

Near the beginning of the course, there is an exercise requiring students to look over several cases–short, published arguments that show, to one degree or another, a clear conclusion and supporting premises. The task for students is to discern the conclusion and identify it, along with relevant premises.

While the exercises are good and help student sharpen their skills and develop confidence, I would like to extend the exercise by having students propose their own cases, either from print-based or online sources. These student-examples would also be short and as simple as possible, but they would encourage students to be both cognitively present in a less controlled environment practicing the same skills and receiving feedback on their efforts in a timely way.

Later on in the course, students are exposed to common reasoning errors, red-herrings, smoke-screens, slippery-slope, ad hominem, and so forth. They are given examples of the types of faulty reasoning and practice categorizing faulty arguments according to types provided. Again, this is a good exercise to build skills and confidence, but I would like to extend it into the realm where students are looking for their own example cases in their everyday life, reading, and discourse.

My reasoning behind these extended exercises is that I have found students lack propensity to take their university learning and apply it directly in their own lives. Since one major goal behind the course in critical thinking is to prepare students to engage more readily in careful examination of everyday reasoning across disciplines, I believe they need to have more practice in less-structured and less-selected situations.

As a final step in these extended exercises, I would have students journal their examples, their analysis, and some reflection on what they find compelling about their selections or how they might improve them to make them more reasonable. If they were to blog their journals, they could also interact with each other to enhance discourse within the learning context.

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301 course Critical Inquiry Exploration Reflections

Training in the absence of active presence by a teacher

Classroom without instructor
Teaching Presence?

It is ironic that we are reading about how active presence of a teacher is a key element to CoI (community of inquiry), since this otl301 course and its precursors, otl101 and otl201 have notably lacked any real-time presence by monitors. There has been no feedback from instructors or designers of the training and little peer interaction, little in the way of what might be called community, in fact. We have been asked to consider several questions:

How has your view of the effective practice changed now that you have read more about teaching presence?

I think I have become more aware of how students feel when they enroll in a course and then feel left-to-dry by the curriculum and assignments sans human presence in the course. Reading about teaching presence has helped me to identify this lack in the current training agenda for online instructors at TRU-OL.

In what ways did the effective practice that you identified show the characteristics of teaching presence?

In my previous post, I reported a course where students collaborated to cover three times the amount of material on the subject of philosophy of language that they would have been able to cover by individual effort. I reported on the dynamics of class meetings and how students were entrusted with tasks whether others were dependent upon them to understand readings and to negotiate an understanding of various views of language and the basic questions considered by philosophers of language while they were formulating their own views in this regard.

My own knowledge of the field provided a certain amount of guidance and moderation when it was obvious that authors held divergent opinions and views. I could pull out quotes that I had collected, along with commentary I had provided in my own study. I could also guide students toward relevant sections of larger works that an initial reading might not be able to see as directly relevant to philosophy of language.

During the study groups sessions and the authorial review sessions, I floated between groups who were free to call on me to ‘referee’ disputes and provide suggestions for more focused study.

During the presentations, I moderated to make sure ideas were presented and questioned in a respectful manner, even when students of other authors had considered stances that were vastly different from the ones being presented.

How could the idea of teaching presence have made the experience even more effective than it was?

If I were to teach that course now, I would consider meetings with groups between class sessions to monitor individual study more closely, particularly with the more junior scholars. What I was effectively doing was teaching undergraduates (and graduates) in the style more like that of a graduate (or even post-graduate) seminar. Scholars with less experience can do this sort of study in groups, but they need more careful coaching and mentoring, given the distractions of undergraduate life.

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301 course Critical Inquiry Integration Learning Activities post 1 Reflections showcase

Peer Study and Learning

The paradox of education
Adapted from a concept of Paul Feyerabend

Although I currently teach mostly “lower-division” university courses, I have directed programs in university education, advising undergraduates pursuing a major or minor and directing a graduate program. I have also been involved in the design and implementation of multiple graduate programs generally in the humanities and specifically in theoretical linguistics. In this context during the early 2000s, I taught a capstone course that primarily served a linguistics program. In the course, taught every spring, I taught primarily graduating 4th-year linguistics majors with a few philosophy majors. About a third of the class was graduate students in applied linguistics. During the course introduction in the first week’s (three-hour) class, I presented how to quickly discern an author’s main point and key supporting ideas in an academic article. This was a “hands-on” session that gave students practice at key skills in study they would use during the remainder of the course. Selecting and quoting or paraphrasing these key ideas was modelled, along with proper citation expectations.

Also during this introductory class, students would form into study groups of four or five students per group. They would be presented with a list of some 40 authors that would be read during the course. Each student was expected to read work written by an author each week during the course with 1/3 of the authors from the list read by each student during the course. During the first week of the course, students in each study group would pick an author from their choice of three for each week of the course. For example, at the second weekly class, students would have read Frege, Whorf, or Quine concerning their view of what language is. At the third class meeting, students would have read Austin, Searle, or Grice concerning the nature of human communication. By the fourth week, authors were Kuhn, Pepper, and Devlin and the topic was the nature of scientific progress. Obviously, in groups of four or five there would be multiple readers of the same author, but their would also be a significant part of each study group that would not have read the author, so readers of Frege or Grice would have to explain to the others in their study group what key ideas each author had provided to answer the week’s main question.

Course topics were aligned with authors, such that each of four authors had written significant text on the subject matter to be discussed at that week’s class. Groups were told they needed to insure all authors for each week had been studied by at least one member of their group. Each week, I would have students meet initially in their groups to review the work of each of the authors for that week (first hour). Then, I would have the readers of each author meet together in a sort of mega-group to discuss the author they had all read (second hour). Groups during this hour were generally between ten and fifteen students per group. Their task as they met together was to decide key material and create a presentation for the whole class to help us all understand the contribution of that author to our overall considerations of the nature of language and communication. Since we were meeting within the same room, discussions created a happy bedlam during that second hour. The third hour was devoted to presentations from each “team” who had read the same author during the week. Each team had 10 minutes to present to the whole class, so choices had to be made quickly during the second hour of what to include and what to leave alone.

During the course, students would consolidate ideas about the nature of understanding, language, science, meaning, communication, translation, identity, and so on, picking and choosing concepts and principles that would allow them to build a research essay reflecting their own emerging understanding of the nature of these topics and their inter-relationship.

Why was this an effective practice?

One reason this practice was so effective was that each student had their group depending upon them. If work was neglected between class meetings, the group was let down. Also, each student had something to bring that no one else could provide. They were allowed to bring their unique contribution to their study group and see how it aligned (or contrasted) with the work of other authors.

Then, too, the groups where everyone had read the same authors provided a means for each student to check their understanding with peers who had also read the same author. Different understandings could be compared and readings reviewed for accuracy and coverage.

Finally, the group presentation to the whole class increased all our knowledge concerning the authors and the topic for the week. I came away from each class meeting aware of some new perspective on each author that I had not noticed before.

What are some of the key ingredients?

I believe a key element of this approach to learning was the trust placed in students to do the assigned work each week. It was obviously a key component of the class composition that these were more experienced students who were highly motivated and capable of processing difficult readings well.

Without exception, students did not trust themselves (or each other) to do reliable and competent work, but over the weeks they came to respect each other’s capabilities and talents for both study and presentation.

what changes would improve the experience?

I have used this approach in more basic areas of study (for example, in a beginning linguistics course on grammatical analysis), but I would like to extend the method across more academic disciplines. I would also like to apply it in classes where students are less experienced and less motivated to find simpler work for students to collaborate on. If I could find a way to make this approach productive earlier in students’ academic careers, I believe it would lead to much more independent study skills, as well as demonstrating the benefits to be gained by the formation of study groups early on in a student’s program.

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201 course Critical Inquiry Exploration

Revis(it)ed Learning Activities

I have a post category of learning activities on this blog. My updated version of the learning activities posts I have made so far can be accessed by following this link. Hopefully, this filtered view of posts on this blog will display the five posts that I have made showing learning activities during this course.

My aim in attending to learning activities has been to choose activities I do not have as much experience with as some others discussed in the readings for otl201, while also focusing upon activities that directly contribute to the learning objectives of a course. In this present case, I am concentrating upon activities that will increase student engagement in online courses, since that is a learning objective of otl201.

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201 course Critical Inquiry Learning Activities Reflections Resolution

OTL201 Encouraging Student Engagement, post 5

This course has provided the stimulus to think through how my own behaviour can help students engage the course material better. In the past, I have thought of such things as media as helps for students unable (or unwilling) to take the time to read the textbook carefully, but I am now closer to an understanding of the inclusion of media as a way to personalize the course curriculum and to model approach-ability and engagement myself.

Along with this new understanding, I have come to see the production of media as less formal (as well as less lengthy!) contact with students. In the coming year, I hope to produce a short video each week of my regular semester courses. I will aim to connect the video content to curriculum content, along the lines of reinforcing how the week’s material pursues one or more of the learning objectives of the course. My goal will be to help students see these connections more clearly, as well as to present my own engagement and interest in the lessons.

In addition to the strategy above, I also want to learn how to ask forum questions in Moodle that promote greater interaction among students. As I teach critical thinking, I often find students very willing to complete the book exercises, but without true engagement with issues and controversies that they are involved with and presented in everyday life and social contexts. Since a critical component of my critical thinking course is the application of careful thinking skills to everyday situations, I want to post forum items that students find easy to respond to and easy to engage others with.

For the past two decades, I have found forum discussions in philosophy courses superior to in-class discussions, since the forum mode allows students time to think carefully while in-class discussions encourage students to think more quickly than carefully. I have abundant evidence that the quality of online asynchronous discussion is much deeper and more detailed than similar synchronous discussions in face-to-face situations. My goal in this regard will be to achieve a situation at least six times during a semester when forum discussions stimulate some measure of interest on the part of students. This would be roughly one such discussion for every two weeks of the course.

I hope to revisit these two goals for my own engagement in the critical thinking course (as well as analogues for any other courses I am contracted to teach in) at the end of the 2020-2021 academic year to reflect on and revise, as well as to extend further.

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201 course Critical Inquiry Learning Activities post 4 Resolution Triggering Event

Critical Thinking Introduction, post 4

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201 course Critical Inquiry Exploration Learning Activities post 3 Resolution

The Aim of Student Interaction

Reading further in the same resource referenced in another post, I noticed the report that the actual nature of the activity seems to be less important than the “meaningful communication” between learners and instructors (M. Dixson, p. 8). Combining this insight with earlier discussions about empowering students to have input into the methods and standards by which they are assessed in the course, I would like to consider an activity early in an online course where students select learning objectives and consider activities, reporting on their understanding of how the activities will accomplish the objectives, as well as how they see themselves being able to provide evidence of minimal, adequate, superior, and excellent achievement in any assignment that will be assessed. The work of earlier students will remain on record for later students to build upon (and earlier students will also be able to review the work of later students, if they are still engaged in the course).

This should also provide a certain amount of self-assessment and reflection upon the work done in the course, rather than a dynamic where the student does the work and the teacher is the sole judge. There may even be the opportunity for group reflection upon individual work done over time.