Month: May 2020

Categories
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.

Categories
201 course Critical Inquiry Exploration Learning Activities post 3

Increasing Student Engagement

While reading an article reporting on different strategies for increasing student engagement in online courses, I had the notion to create a survey of live topics in my critical thinking course. In this activity, students would be presented with an array of topics and issues in the topic area. By their response they would identify:

  1. How settled their own view on the issue is;
  2. How aware they are of other views that could be taken; and
  3. The level of acceptance they have for other views.

Such a survey might then provide a list of suitable issues that could be explored in virtual debates, where students could present reasonable arguments for others to consider and assess for strengths and weaknesses.

Categories
201 course Critical Inquiry Exploration Learning Activities

Social Matters Forum otl201

I have long encouraged my students to use Moodle as a social engagement area. To that end, I have a social matters forum in each course site. I require students to write a short introduction (2-3 sentences they don’t mind others knowing) and I give a long list of possible topics, so that students need not include information they are uncomfortable sharing.

The section of otl201 devoted to instructor strategies mentioned this as a strategy to increase social presence in the course.

The introduction (and a response to someone else’s intro) are the only posts I require, but I often alert students to social events that are happening on campus and around town, so they can see the forum’s purpose as an outside-class activity. Often students take up the practice of notifying others. However, more often, they choose to use a group created in Facebook for that purpose. This gives them more flexibility of who they choose to include (most often excluding the instructor–ouch!–but also including those within their comfortable social circles. It will be interesting to see how such practices might adapt/evolve in the context of continuous-intake courses where many participants may be the only ones at their particular point in the course being taken.

Categories
201 course Critical Inquiry post 2 Resolution

Remodeling effective CoI interaction

the talking heads model of communication transfer
Popular conception of communication

According to a popular model of communication, information transfer is accomplished by means of a message that reflects ideation on the part of a speaker/writer and interpretation on the part of at least one hearer/reader.

I reject the common model of communication and instead conceive human behaviour more in the way understood by the linguists Kenneth and Evelyn Pike. In interaction with phenomenological ideas articulated by Edmund Husserl and developed by Paul Ricoeur, I understand fundamental entities in human groups to be about community (the people and relevant objects perceived to be included), communication (any behaviour that is socially relevant, including talking and writing), and communion (aka belonging, or us, the experience of members of the community as they are together). These relevant aspects of any group emerge from key processes: hospitality (where the community provides a place and support for newcomers and members), charity (where the actions of all participants are taken in the best possible communicative light), and compassion (where the experience of an “other” is taken to be one’s own).

The model that results from these basic events and participants is quite messy and better explains the frequency of miscommunication and negotiation of understanding that are common in everyday social life.

Now, as I reflect upon the video I included in the first post for this course and upon the readings for this lesson (otl201, lesson 1), I am encouraged that I achieved a balance of professional informality that I believe students would find helpful. In order to increase my social presence in this video, I would aim for similar informality, but I would include overt references to the course being taught (in this case, I am preparing to help students in CMNS 3211, so I would overtly refer to the course in the video). I would also select an object that is directly relevant to the course. Finally, my closing would directly invite students to respond and create a video discussion around an item of interest in the course. In CMNS 3211, the central item being considered is social media and the formation of digital communities, so the consideration of how we create community together in the online course is both practically and theoretically relevant. Our interactions have relevance as we develop community, but also as practical demonstrations of the success of our efforts and their measurability.

Categories
201 course Critical Inquiry post 1 Triggering Event

A bit about me

Okay. So I’m going to introduce myself. My name is Randy Radney –that wasn’t an echo that you heard– Randy was not the name my mother gave me, but it’s the one that people usually call me, except in the British context where people tend to refer to me simply as Radney. I sign my email messages as “radney” So if you want to call me, radney, that’s fine. If I’m a teacher in a class and you’re a student, and you prefer to call me “Coach,” that’s fine as well. My title is officially “Doctor,” as in Dr. Radney, but I don’t really like you to use that. If you’d rather avoid it, that’s fine with me. “Coach” is a fine way of addressing me. There are probably also unprintable ways of addressing me that I’d prefer that you avoided as well. I need to let you know something that’s very important to me. There’s a lot of things that are much more important than this, but this is close-to-hand, so I’m just going to show you on camera this little fellow here is called a Yeti. And I was introduced to a Yeti a number of years ago when I asked somebody what I might be able to do, what I might be able to use in a classroom that would allow sound to be picked up from every direction equivalently, and the helpful person at Staples directed me to look at a Yeti Blue. This is the particular model that I’m looking at, and I have used it for a number of years in class when I have class discussions that need to be recorded so that some people can listen to them later, I like using that. So it’s a bit important to me. It’s been useful to me and I like it. There’s a lot more to get to know about me. And you’ll be able to, probably by reading documents that I write, things that are available, and by participating in a class either with me as a fellow student or with me as an instructor in various courses that I teach here at Thompson Rivers University. Thank you very much. Bye bye for now.

Categories
101 course Critical Inquiry Reflections Resolution Triggering Event

Reflecting on the 101 course for instructors

self-isolation
Collaborative Reflection

As a course designer who is training to be a course facilitator for TRU-OL, this first course, concerned as it has been with design elements has been stimulating and frustrating.

I find it exciting to consider how courses can be designed to focus on the needs of learners, so that students don’t waste time in activities that are unproductive in terms of the goals and assessments that pertain to the course at hand.

However, the course I am about to teach for TRUOL has already been designed. Learning objectives may or may not be aligned with the activities and assessments that I will need to encourage students to complete. And I have no control over this. The optimist in me believes that the course that has been designed has attended to this value, but the realist in me knows that some designers have constructed courses along very different lines from the constructivist-collectivist model of learning. To anticipate establishing a community of inquiry (COI) in a course and to find that students are expected to complete the course individually and with little interaction and/or collaboration would be disappointing at the least.

Categories
101 course Critical Inquiry Integration post 4 showcase

Feedback Gaps otl101, post 4

 

Mills Memorial Library at McMaster
Mills Memorial Library at McMaster

The consideration of Hattie’s discussion on feedback raises my awareness of some important gaps in the feedback I have been offering students. I teach across a wide range of disciplines in both applied and theoretical areas, so my feedback is necessarily diverse.

For example, in a course where I am preparing students to succeed in the office environment at the end of the year, my feedback is focused upon what will make them valued employees in the very near future. By contrast, when I am teaching writing courses that ultimately are aimed at on-the-job writing, but for students whose career paths require longer terms of training before working at a job, I need to couch my comments in a context that involves a much longer training path before the students are writing for an employer. Finally, when I am teaching critical thinking or ethics, my concerns pertaining to the writing of students is more the clarity (and charity!) of their thought, rather than the specific form of their written communication.

All of this tends toward a careful consideration of the goals inherent in the course being taught (as well as students’ compliance and interest in those goals). One of Hattie’s notions that caught my attention is that students may and should be involved in the process of goal-setting. I have tended to think of goal-setting as something done as a part of the process of getting a course approved at the university, and so, not open to negotiation on the part of the instance of a course being taught. Having generally understood the important of creating a class-collective (learning community or community-of-inquiry–COI) and welcoming processes of knowledge construction socially in the context of class sessions, I did not see how dis-empowering the notion of predefined goals were to an authentic learning community dynamic.

As a result, I can see that I need to have more careful discussion with students concerning the process of goal-setting as a prerequisite to engaging and providing feedback on students’ work during the course.

This is merely the first step to increase the quality of feedback I provide. I must also include the questions and the types of feedback Hattie considers in providing a more beneficial feedback process to students.

 

Categories
101 course Critical Inquiry post 3 Resolution showcase

otl101, post 3

In today’s post, I wish to explore the alignment of course objectives with course activities and assessments, so as to promote more thorough skill development in the critical thinking introduction that I teach each year. The course objectives are stated as follows in the course outline:

More specifically, by the end of the course, students will:

  • come to understand the structures of clear thought and argument;
  • increase their discernment of reasonable argumentation;
  • be able to identify several common errors in reasoning;
  • acquire tools to clarify their own thought and communication, including, but not limited to, the use of basic deductive reasoning; and
  • appreciate the relevance of careful thinking and expression for leaders in society.

At the beginning of the course, students need to build skills at identifying patterns of sound and unsound reasoning. Characteristically, they begin with simple situations and progress through the course into increasing complexity and sophistication. The textbook used in the course,

David R. Morrow & Anthony Weston. 2015. A Workbook for Arguments: A Complete Course in Critical Thinking (Second Edition),

provides careful consideration of first, simpler, and then more complex arguments as students gain expertise and confidence. The book is structured upon consideration of 45 rules that can be applied when people assess the relative strength and clarity of argumentation.

The first of these rules invites students to identify premises and conclusions of arguments. At the very beginning of the course, students search for overt words such as “therefore” or “so” to signal a conclusion, or “if,” “since,” or “because” to mark a premise. They also may be tempted to believe that premises must precede conclusions. As a result, they apply lower-level cognitive skills that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Gradually, they are presented with arguments that use no signal words or order conclusions and premises in surprising ways to increase their ability to see relations between unmarked and disordered statements and correctly identify premises and conclusions, as well as statements that provide (relevant and irrelevant) background information concerning the situation.

Since the exercises in the book are presented as a set of puzzles, students are generally engaged and motivated to use more than lower-level reasoning skills even in the early days.

Additionally, students are challenged to compare arguments that are neither universally strong/good or completely weak/bad, but scalar, having relative strength or weakness and being quite or only somewhat persuasive of their conclusions. Not only are the standards scalar (as opposed to polar), but each rule application tends to provide a new dimension of evaluation, such that the consideration of an argument’s value or strength is a multi-dimensional field, rather than a simple line connecting strong at one end and weak at the other.

Class activities consider a range of exercises from the book (which provides solutions for about half of the items, and course evaluations are largely done on students’ work on exercises in the book for which solutions are not provided. As the course proceeds, various exercises that have been evaluated for credit in the course are also critiqued in group sessions, to give students further practice at improving their skills.

Extended arguments from current events and opinions expressed concerning the events are also included in the course to give students practice in subject areas they are interested in.

In all these ways, there is an application of the course learning objectives to both the class activities and assessments to bring the course into alignment. One key way I believe this can be further reinforced during the course would be periodic review of the course outline’s learning objectives, so that students are reminded how and why they are gaining skills in the areas they are.

 

Categories
101 course Critical Inquiry showcase Triggering Event

On Cognitive Presence, post 2

In the article read for this section of the course, I have been encouraged to consider the notion of critical thinking as a social process, whether synchronous or asynchronous. The article attempted to construct a heuristic to diagnose the presence or absence of processes in a community based upon the use of key terms or phrases that are indicators of ongoing community processes reflected in the text transcripts of interactions. Although I believe the attempt at coding discussions for the processes indicated was misguided and the progress made in assessing and categorizing phases present in the course was too uncertain, I consider the conceptual framework of the learning process to be a useful one. I like both the challenge to imagine critical thinking as less an individual project and more a community one and the handing over of judgement to a collective, rather than a hierarchical and imposed power move. I also enjoyed considering the construction of meaning as a by-product of cognitive presence. While it might be possible to view the construction of meaning as an individual’s response to a situation, it is more subtle to notice how ‘meanings’ are negotiated in a community, with individual reactions being suppressed and again supported by reactions from others in the social context. For example, consider a joke told in a community of speakers. Hypothetically suppose that one person in the audience is offended by the joke, while another is significantly amused. It might be possible to take the joke as having two meanings in that context. However, notice that it is also possible for the ‘meanings’ to be negotiated in further interaction, resulting in the mitigation of both offense and amusement, as the two audience members reflect upon each other’s reaction. Also note that the two reactions may not resolve each other, but may provoke greater offense/amusement on the part of each person. That is, we need not necessarily assume that all social interaction will necessarily resolve into similarity, but make further distance interlocutors. I am not here saying that the individual reactions are irrelevant, but I do claim that the further interactions are relevant to the overall process of the construction of meaning in a social context.

Categories
101 course Critical Inquiry Resolution showcase

Hello, otl101 post 1

This is Day One of online training to facilitate in the TRU Open Learning world. This is a good chance for me to see how the online environment intimidates those whose roles are less empowered among the learning community. For example, learners who must excel to succeed at whatever project they hope to complete may face uncertainty both as to whether we are doing the process correctly and what cost will attend if we fail. Also, learners who are less familiar with expectations of learning in the 21st century, the bulk of whose training has been face-to-face and has used older technology, may face lack of clarity and a fog of possibilities without any clear direction or a map to guide us. Finally, those of us used to being in “the driver’s seat” regarding course operation may be be unable to relinquish control over our learning, particularly when we cannot see those who are “actually” driving. All in all, the feelings are puzzling, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable. We forge ahead . . . ?