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LTEC 5510 Week 6

Week 6 Blog

In your Blog reflect on the following items:
You have begun putting together your full course. What has gone well? What has challenged you? What feedback have you received? What feedback have you given? What have you learned from the process of developing instruction in an LMS?

Creating an online course has a bit of a learning curve.  Converting old lesson plans from my teaching days to online learning has been challenging.  My PowerPoint presentations turned screencasts are good examples of these differences. In a face to face classroom, it is good to have lots of questions while lecturing. This keeps the audience participating and interested. With video, that option is not available.  I also miss the verbal and non-verbal feedback I got from the classroom. Those cues helped me know what parts of the presentation to skip, and which parts to go in more detail.  Perhaps, using synchronous sessions could bring back that element of teaching.

Writing discussion board topics was more challenging than anticipated.   Many socioeconomically disadvantaged high school students do not necessarily have the reading and writing skills to effectively use.  That is why I created multiple discussion board questions, with varying language levels to help teachers with this step. A further step could be to have Spanish versions of these questions. That, unfortunately, is not something I can do at the moment.

One of my favorite parts of creating this online course is the quiz tools. The most advanced I got when teaching was Google forms. I like how students can see different responses for different answers depending on what they input. Further researching the topic, question banks are good ways to create different quizzes. Most useful is how Canvas is linked to a gradebook of sorts. Like all online courses, preventing students from using phones or the internet when taking quizzes is a challenge that there are few good solutions for.

As of the writing of this blog entry, my peer has not reviewed my site.  As for a self-critique, I depend too heavily on videos. As mentioned earlier in this article, I need to clean up my PowerPoint/screencasts before recording them.  My first attempts have been messy.  Adding educational games like Geniverse will add more flash to the site.
One section that I have spent almost too much time was the design of the site.  It was helpful that I was able to create a title banner or this website in my LTEC 5260, Computer Graphics for Mediated Communications. Like this course, I also had to use TAP statements to define what I wanted my graphics to look like.  The graphic is meant to draw the viewer in when first entering the site.  The color blue was used symbolically to represent how genes are the blueprint for life.  Fitting the graphic on the screen required me to edit the raw HTML. The canvas editor is not particularly powerful in this respect. Fortunately, design is not a core component of the course.

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