Category Archives: reflection

if you do all the work, who does the learning?!!!

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At every moment in the design and management of this course i ask myself to think about whether the choice i am about to make is me doing the work, or if there is a way for me to get students to do the work so that they can do the learning : ) this is a constant struggle for me as i LOVE to talk and LOVE to talk about what i am passionate about, namely effective online instruction.

So i say … teach them to fish instead of giving them the fish…make them do the work… don’t do it for them, take every opportunity to challenge your students to do most of the work in your course… because if they are doing the work, they are doing the learning, figure out ways to make them teach each other, that is how people learn… if you view everything and every interaction in the course as an opportunity to express that concept and if you are able to scrutinize yourself, your design, your actions and interactions, etc., you will be a better educator.

It is harder because you want to help them, make sure they get it, make sure they know what you know…. but!!!! that is a trap… remember if you do the work, who does the learning?!!! It is harder also because they can’t all fish right away… But you have to resist the temptation…just remember that if you give them the answers/information, they are not learning anything really . . . learning takes time, it is a process, that like fishing requires patience and practice, and it is not something you cause to happen… it is something the student chooses to do…

It is also something that you, as the course designer/instructor can facilitate.

How?? Have them reflect, apply, report, explain, defend, refute, question, self-assess, summarize, synthesize, and analyze their engagement with course content and as a member of the class community.

Design learning activities that make students make their thinking visible to you.

i teach like a girl!

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I started out today working on a web space for my daughters school parent council… went looking for free online web forms to incorporate for various purposes… found wufoo (which looks fantastic!) Read about the founders (love their voice/felt connected), wanted to know them more/better, clicked on their blog. Immediately clicked on the post “on asking users for their feelings” – thought about marti cleaveland and her work on emotional presence and also about getsatisfaction.com and how they ask you how you feel ….. and there i “met” kathy sierra. And now i want to really meet her.

Along the way, FYI, i also found this gem Seven rules for establishing a corporate presence on Twitter and viddler (“…So, to sum things up: you should use Viddler. The end.” This made me think of homer simpson (which makes me think of my husband – which makes me warm and fuzzy), laugh, and love the person behind that voice… same as the wufoo guys.) also incredibly cooltool that i can’t wait to play with.

So i “met” Kathy Sierra through her blog creating passionate users googled her to learn more… to see if i could find a list of presentations on her (thinking about SLN SOLsummit) found Kathy Sierra on “building a Global Microbrand” on slideshare and by similar serendipity “met” Garr Reynolds, read about his presentation zen, and was treated to his preso on brain rules. Found them both on twitter and followed them immediately. This has been my learning journey today … it has been a very satisfying string of learning experiences and encounters today and documenting it has been an interesting exercise…

This is a long way to get to what i finally wanted to get to, which is Kathy Sierra’s blog post i code like a girl that resonated with me, and got me thinking. My six year-old daughter has said several times over the last couple of days, “and mami…he screamed like a little girl. [then lots of giggles]” I asked her “where did you hear that expression?” “why do you think that is funny?” “what does that mean?” She no doubt heard it from Hunter, or Adam, or Dylan, or Arlo,


who in turn got it from their daddies, or perhaps their coaches, or more probably from some TV show… or movie… that i let her watch… she is such a sponge. It hit me like a brick in the face. My precious little daughter parroting something so superficially funny, and seemingly innocuous, yet such a simple insidiously powerful negative statement. I am a short round Colombian woman. I am an administrator of a large (the 2nd largest) university wide program in a large (the largest) bureaucratic university system in a sea dominated by old(er) white male suits. i am an educator, instructional designer and technologist, and artist and a mom in a world dominated by application developers/domain administrators/CIOs/, who are generally neither educators nor right-brained, and who are generally usually male. I not only code like a girl. I supervise like a girl, i administrate like a girl, i conduct meetings like a girl. I also

  • “write like a girl”
  • “express myself like a girl”
  • “design like a girl”
  • and… i “teach like a girl!”

All of my today has a theme… the emotional voice found in the wufoo pages, being asked about my feelings, thinking about creating passionate users, thinking about community (building it, sustaining it, nurturing it) at work with faculty and instructional designers, at school with the parent council web space, and of course in my summer ETAP687 course. So it is official… i teach like a girl and am proud of it : )

here is what my students say: http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1106177

flag One of the most thorough and nurturing instructors I have had in my academic career. Helped to shape us into better leaders and teachers
flag Difficult course but learned the most of any other course I have taken in years. Too much work for the 3 credits, though.
flag Really helpful and great personality 🙂 Would have enjoyed taking the class F2F more so than online, but did enjoy and appreciate the class.
flag Great course, I hope to take another class with Professor Pickett again
flag Great course, and a terrific teacher. Lots of work, but worth it!
flag Alex is awesome!!! She is very down to earth and expresses a mothering presence in the course. I would def. take another class with her.

This was by far the hardest, most time consuming course I have taken for my Masters. When I signed up for it, I was extremely excited because I wanted to know about teaching online. In comparison to many other elective grad classes, I found the work load to be quite a bit. Developing an online course takes a large amount of time (as you know!) – Maybe in the future cutting down on the number of discussion posts (maybe 4?) or blog posts (1 per module) might help students find more time to work on their courses, which to me was the most important/exciting/gratifying aspect of the class.

You have been the most influential teacher I have had online yet. You have also taught me how to improve my teaching and teacher presence through the modeling you do in this course. Thanks for investing so much time in me and my fellow student’s learning! 🙂

This was the most challenging course in my Master Degree career at UAlbany. I loved every minute of it. I think that pushing students to perform at higher levels helps them to break the plateu of what they think they are capable of. Usually they are capable of more than you think. It also helped my learning to use diigo and rate my posts. At first I thought it was painstaking and hard, especially when I spent an hour on constructing a post only to recieve a 2, but as I learned that it was more about teaching others, I began to perform better and was more motivated to teach something new and provide a cool resouce in diigo

My feelings about this course are great! I would recommend anyone interested in online course development to take the course with Alex. She makes everyone in the course feel welcome and comfortable, which is the key to being successful and having students who are motivated to working with her.

Relationships and feelings are one of the underlying keys to success in a course. If you have a teacher you like, don’t you want to work harder to please them? I know I do…and I know that I don’t really feel like working for someone who berates my feelings and is insensitive.

Overall, this has been the most challenging course that I have encountered in my educational career and that is saying something since my background includes some biological and chemical science courses that most people dread the mere thought of taking. However, I feel I have learned more in this course that I can apply to my own life and profession than those afore mentioned courses. The principles presented and utilized in my online course design made me revaluate my FTF courses and how I will teach them in the future, too.

Another major impression is the degree to which Alexandra is adept at infusing “teaching presence” in to the online learning experience. She, along with Peter Shea et al. (2005) designed a study that looked the effects of teaching presence, using as research subjects 2,036 students participating in the SUNY Learning Network (SLN). Pickett, Shea, and colleagues, examined the “connection between students’ sense of learning community as measured by Rovai’s Classroom Community Scale and teaching presence as measured by indicators that reflect components in the Community of Inquiry Model as described by Garrison, Anderson, and their colleagues” (p 70). The researchers reported a correlation between teacher presence and a well-developed sense of community, which is key in the constructivist paradigm. Especially important is the instructor’s participation in “directed facilitation”, which may play a significant role in the creation of community, and may “include whether the students feel the instructor is drawing in participants, creating an accepting climate for learning, keeping students on track, and diagnosing misperceptions” (p.71). I think it is fair to say, based on her very high level of robust participation, that Alexandra is adept at producing directed facilitation.

In this course, I think you are demonstrating teaching presence mostly through the discussions within each module. Not to be little feedback provided to us through our written assignments, much of the teaching presence that I sense from you is in the discussion areas; likewise, from student teaching presence. I made a related comment to how much students are contributing to my learning in this course within my blog. I think that the class community is sort of being created in the blogs but also has pieces of it spread out in the discussions. Reading through each discussion post, whether it applies to me directly or not, creates a sense that other students are experiencing similar things as I am within the course. The icebreaker activity in this course was unique. The use of a conversational tone provides a personal sense to all posts. In this module, the use of Diigo to work individually and within the entire group to share references and to comment on the shared references is another way that a sense of community is being created.

I still remember how I felt that first time I accessed this course through blackboard and clicked on the link that said click here first. A video from Youtube came up and there was Alex saying hello and introducing herself and the course in video format. This was only the second time I had a professor in my online learning career that made a video appearance to welcome me and my classmates to the class. One striking aspect of her video was that it wasn’t edited or scripted. It was just her talking to us all in one take… how much more “real” that it get? This first glimpse into the course immediately got me thinking that my instructor was going to be knowledgeable and techno-savvy and would be able to help me learn a great deal. I also had a chance to hear her voice in real time and see what she looked like. I have taken online classes before in which the instructor NEVER gave us a description of herself, and many don’t provide pictures. I like to see who I am working with and know a little bit about them, don’t you?

I think another way Alex has created a welcoming online environment is in how she utilizes the 7 principles for effective online teaching. She maintains very frequent contact, encourages cooperation among each of us, provides us with learning activities that get us actively involved in our own learning, she gives prompt feedback, emphasizes time on task, maintains VERY high expectations (which pushes us to reach beyond our normal threshold for learning), and presents a lot of the information in a variety of ways which appeal to various learning styles.

You have brought a fresh perspective to my learning and it has shaped me into a better student, and hopefully a better teacher as well. In facilitating discourse, you have done an excellent job taking our comments and observations to another level. I’ve enjoyed how you have been able to encourage us to add to our points by asking us additional questions. You have also provided us with opportunities to rate ourselves and each other, further enabling us to push ourselves to new levels. One of the things in teaching presence that I have found most effective has been your ability to “Draw in participants, prompting discussion/interaction.” (Pickett 2008) I enjoy looking at the emails I get each day to see if there are points I may want to followup on later. By having Moodle auto-send us updates, it keeps the course in our mind and enables us to stay connected even when not connected. In terms of developing class community, you have been most effective at “Create activities where students must rely on each other.” (Pickett 2008). I have received so much feedback and new perspective from my peers through the use of diigo, student responses, and by observing others coursework.

I think from day one, Alex made it a goal to establish teaching presence and class community within this course. Starting with teaching presence, there are three main components that are each addressed: facilitating discourse, direct instruction, and instructional design and organization (Pickett 2008). Starting with the course information documents which showed us basically the guidelines for the course, the module break down complete with time frames, and the rubrics which would be used to evaluate us, we were able to experience teaching presence. Continuing, Alex set up specific questions for our discussions and presented content through readings and presentations – this is all apart of teaching presence. It is important though to realize that students play a large role in teaching presence as well and this is clearly evident in our course. Through our discussions, in which we are encouraged to respond and challenge our classmates’ thinking, through our blog posts, through our interaction with Alex whether it be about our personal courses, our ideas presented in discussions, or the content of our blogs, we are absolutely illustrating teaching presence.

When it comes to class community, also from day one, this was started and continues to grow with each module. We started with the Getting to Know You Activities, which included creating the Voice Thread welcome, the course profile, putting our pictures and even for some of us, our voices online. All of this helped establish who exactly this class is and for me, helps make it more comfortable to interact within the class. We continue to build community by responding to classmates blogs and sharing our own experiences, but I think one of the most important ways is through our discussions. In each module, we must interact with our classmates – whether it is sharing our reflections, our experiences, new knowledge, or just giving positive feedback, we are constantly interacting and building trust in each other. This is what class community is really about.

I am hard, hot and nurturing! Hell yes i teach like a girl.

more best intentions

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i really did have every intention of blogging through the delivery of the course…but … well… it didn’t happen as often as i would have liked. The course is almost over now and i don’t know what i will do with my time once it is over : )
Wow! This has been one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences i have had in my professional life. I LOVED every minute of the exhausting experience. Someone asked me to day in the course what i would do next time to alleviate the workload…(Amanda). I honestly don’t know… I LOVE participating in the discussions. I LOVE giving feedback, and based on the responses to my questionnaire so far, the students valued it as well…
What i wish is that some of the course administration was easier in Moodle… like grading discussion and tallying scores and adding them automatically to the gradebook… I spent sooooooo much time on manually tracking these admin aspects of the course. If i had had more students, i don’t think i could have physically done it.
I love polldaddy and am using it to collect feedback from the students on aspects of the course. LOVED this course and loved my students. : )

my reflecting pool

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I was surprised that there were k-12 educators in the course. I just assumed it would be all college level instructors that would be developing courses for adults. It was very very cool to see things from their perspective and to see the courses they developed for various k-12 age levels.

I was surprised at how polite everyone was in the course… maybe that was not it, maybe it was more that there was a formality to the interactions that i did not anticipate.

I think the concern about grades/failing/etc. also surprised me.

I was VERY surprised a student’s trying to interact in the course using a cell phone. I did not anticipate or expect that at all. Really interesting implication. Not sure what to do about that yet : )

I was surprised that most students seemed to prefer communicating with me privately via coursemail with stuff that needn’t have been private… i need to manage that better by directing students to the appropriate areas of the course. I wonder why… perhaps it was just easier than scrolling down to find the question areas or the talk with me area…?

I was surprised that no one really used the Bulletin Board or any of the class community areas really. No one found the hidden picture : ) i wonder if that is cuz the area is way at the end of the topics physically.

I was very very very happy with the blogging activity. I loved reading the student posts!

I loved using jing in the course.

I learned a lot using diigo for the shared references in the course. I need to shore that up some now in the course. I want all links that are used anywhere in the course or the blogs or anywhere to be posted and tagged in diigo. Also, i need to set up some standard tagging conventions and have some instruction on how to tag effectively for students, especially thinking about the resource moving forward with the student beyond the end of the term. The diigo link roll embedded right into a moodle block rocks!!!

Twitter and voicethreads worked great.

I found grading very tedious for technical reasons. I had to do everything manually. Tally up all the discussion grades… etc.

Using moodle for course management was extremely challenging. There are limited course management tools, or i just don’t know how to use moodle, so following and keeping up with things during the course delivery was very difficult. I also need to look at the design of my activities, the amount of work required and my own levels of participation in the course.

Not having a HD for tech support was also very challenging. Not having a MID to review my course and to give me feedback on optimizing the features and functionality of Moodle was also frustrating… or i missed having that a lot.

In spite of all the work, i loved every minute of developing and delivering this course. It has been awesome. And i had wonderful awesome students that I can’t thank enough for sharing this first online teaching experiences with me. : )

i HATE the file/folder metaphor

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Whose idea was this? this is further evidence of the tech tail wagging the pedagogy dog…and the app developer logically categorizing information and storing it in tidy little categories and folders … EXCEPT that it is buried …click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click  to find anything… I hate it. This metaphor does not make sense for online course content presentation. how can you find anything? stuff gets too buried… you have to drill in too far to get at information and then can’t get anywhere else easily/quickly/intuitively without having to click back out or click on breadcrumbs that may also not be intuitive… it is verrrrrrrrrrry frustrating. This is one more thing i HATE about commercial LMSs. Moodle doesn’t have this, but it is still too linear and too locked down… however the beauty of it is that it  allows you to EASILY pull in feeds from anywhere. I just added a diigo linkroll feed to my etap687 coursemap that is soooooooooo cool.In my dreams i see a learning environment that displays a coursemap, for example, as a wordcloud that is dynamicaly affected by user (student /facutly ) interaction… i think i have mentioned this elsewehre in this blog… i am still conceptualizing .

http://www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/alexpickett.html  – created based on my tweets using tweetclouds.com.

 – both created based on my delicious bookmarks using wordle. Would be cool if these wordclouds were a clickable way to interact with my bookmarks… would be cooler if in addition to reflecting the frequency of the tags with font size, that it also took into account the frequency of the enduser’s clicks on links to create a dynamic representation of both creator and user’s interaction with the  links…
BTW (i’ve said this before) but whose brilliant idea was it to put the “‘shut down” button under a “start” button?

the cms is a dinosaur …and you know what happened to them…

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I am using moodle to teach ETAP687 because UAlbany was unable to provide instructor-level BLS course shells for the students in this course to create their own online courses, which is a main project for the course. I created the course in Moodle so that students could see from the student perspective what moodle can look like and how it functions. It didn’t make any sense to have students create courses in Moodle and have etap687 in BLS.

I also wanted students to be able to take what they create here in this course and be able to keep it and possibly teach it sometime in the future. With Moodle, an open source platform, it seemed like a better choice than locking things into one of the commercial course management systems…

That brings me to some of my other choices in the design of this course… as i have mentioned elsewhere in this blog i have incorporated various web2.0 tools into the course such as voicethread, diigo, edublogs, twitter, jing, meebome, audacity, youtube, breeze …. etc.

So….why did i “choose” to do that you may wonder?

Moodle provides a blog utility for students, it also has a news forum by default for each course and blocks that tie into the news forum to post announcements, etc. There is a calendar and ways to create links to shared resources or references within the course… last time i actually used the “glossary” feature to create a way to collect and present a list of categorized/sortable shared references for the course that the students used to build a shared annotated bibliography of resources – they had to provide a link, as description and an evaluation of the resource. I also used the “journal” feature for the “reflections” metacognitive activities of the course…

I chose to incorporate public freely available tools external to the CMS on purpose for several reasons.

  1. i am interested in exploring, testing, and evaluating the instructional potential and use of web2.0 cooltools to enhance online instruction, interaction, and engagement.
  2. I am looking for ways to enhance the fully online primarily text-based asynchronous teaching and learning environment with a little bling for the above stated reasons.
  3. Have i mentioned lately that i hate commercial CMSs? I naturally resist and feel uncomfortably confined by the locked down nature of the CMS… i mean really, is a “blog” that is locked into a CMS really a blog? No!!!!!!!! you can’t just call it a chicken when it is a duck!!!! Part of what makes it a blog is the fact that it is public – anyone can see it and interact with it. It also represents you publicly, belongs to you/you own it/it is yours to have and use, and to keep it beyond the end of the course and term – that is an authentic online learning activity! That is why i also thought it essential that the shared resources for the course be external to the CMS using diigo… i want my students to have access to the resources after the course ends!

There is something about the nature of interaction in a public forum. There is something about ownership….being able to for example, customize a blog visually to yourself by picking a theme and deciding what widgets to display and how you choose to present yourself to the world. There is also something about the responsibility you have regarding the public ownership of your thoughts and interactions, as well as the investment in time and energy to build or contribute to something that is yours and that reflects you. If you know it is just for a course, then you are doing it for me. If it is yours, then you can build it for you… a much more authentic exercise. I think that even the character of your “voice” is different, more authentically you, in a “real” blog, for example, than in one that is locked into a CMS. Plus – again you get to keep it or have access to it beyond the end of the course and term!

  1. i also enjoy playing with technology.
  2. i really like a challenge. : )

i personally love exploring the instructional potential of technology, but i do not advocate the use of technology for anything other than a compelling instructional reason. I would never advocate the use of any technology unless it assisted in meeting an instructional objective better, safer, easier, faster, or cheaper… You don’t need a backhoe to plant a tomato seed .

In my work at SUNY i never “train” the use of tools – even the almighty CMS. I discuss best practices in online pedagogy and plug the effective use of the tools in when and where it serves the pedagogical objective.

So, here is the question… is the cost of “stitching” all these tools together worth the hassle to the students (and to the instructor), the multiple authentications required to access resources housed at various external sites, the lack of technical support, the risks of johnny appleseeding course work and content around the web, the learning curve to be able to use them effectively/productively in an online teaching and learning environment?

For me, the answer is yes. Online social networking, social computing, folksonomy/social/collaborative tagging, data mashups, ubiquitous broadband, wireless, hand held and mobile computing, mobile broadband, and the cultural shift from passive consumers of content to engaged user-generators of content, has brought about a grassroots revolution resulting in a global democratization of access to tools, information, experts, content, professional development, and education as evinced by the open courseware and open source software initiatives that have changed how education is delivered, conducted… and defined. It is my obligation as a responsible netizen and educator in this moment to participate, to evaluate, to document, and to expose and engage my students to and in this process.

The commercial CMS is extinct… they just don’t know it yet.

when is a discussion not a “discussion”? When it is a written assignment…

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Its really funny now that students have experience with other course management systems that all use a common similar basic function-based taxonomy to label categories of types of online course activity – like “discussion” for example – that it has resulted in expectations and consequent confusion when you use the functionality for something other than what is commonly thought of as online “discussion.” And I don’t mean funny – ha ha.

It is yet another irritating example of the software tail wagging the pedagogy dog. I hate that. Or is this due to student experiences with untrained faculty use of CMS features and functionality in an web-enhanced environment? I don’t know. I am having a moment.

“Technically” I have “written assignments” in this course implemented using the discussion tool, because that is the only way i could have students be able to see each other’s work in Moodle easily. Also it was the easiest way I found to be able to attach the file that i used to model my expectations for some of the assignment. And that provides the students with the option to attach their written assignment, so they can share an comment on each other’s work. It is very interesting to me that because i used the “discussion” feature to implement a written assignment a student reported being thrown “off”… i think in terms of functionality. This is very interesting. One of the reasons i HATE course management systems is that they are designed by app developers (not educators) who want everything to fit into tidy little buckets… that they can code easily, discretely…things that can be labeled… like discussion, written assignment, quiz, etc. But in so doing the tech tail then wags the pedagogy/instruction/instructor dog… in the reality of a fully online teaching and learning environment interaction is integrated, NOT in these separate buckets. The almighty CMS imposes an interface and interaction logic that it has no business doing. I don’t walk out of my classroom to go to a discussion room, then to another place to write an essay, then to yet another place to submit an assignment, and then to yet another place to get my grades…etc. It all happens in the classroom… From the app developers perspective there is a lovely logic to a function-based app design. The problem is when that technical logic spills out of the code and into my ability to be effective in the online teaching environment resulting in a confusion that everything created with the “discussion” utility is a “discussion” when the reality it is a tool coded with certain functionality that can be used in a variety of ways that may or may not be considered “discussion.” I HATE that label too btw… better would be “interaction.”

It suppose it also could be that i just don’t know how to use moodle, or that i hate labels, or that i hate app developers, or that i hate CMSs. yes… I think it is the last one.

In my dreams i see a PLE that displays a coursemap, for example, as a moving wordcloud and that is dynamically affected by user (student /faculty ) interaction… still conceptualizing.

best intentions

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So i had every intention of blogging through the delivery of this course…but so far i have had no time. The course is in its third week and i am still trying to figure out how to use the grading features and trying to keep up with it all. I am trying to be a good example and to practice what i preach. There are somethings that i know already i would do differently next time and some things that i will change. i have been meaning to reflect on the experience a bit so far. 

From about 15 original registrants there are now 8 students in the course.

Wow! Building and teaching this course has been one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences i have had in my professional life. So far I have LOVED every minute of the exhausting experience.
  • I am using a manual that i wrote as the course textbook – a CMS neutral resource in which i have updated my thoughts and approaches to online course development.
  • I designed a course in Moodle.
  • I blogged.
  • I interviewed online faculty and posted the interviews with their online courses creating podcasts for faculty development purposes – an online course for observation with author /instructional designer commentary.
  • I created 3 Breeze presentations – audio annotated powerpoint presentations.
  • I designed and have implemented several course learning activities using web2.0 applications that are external to the CMS, including edublogs, voicethread, diigo, meebome, youtube, twitter…
This has been a very satisfying experience. I innovated, i stretched, i did new things, i have met and interacted with new people, i am listening/observing … it is a total blast.
I still trying to figure out how to use the gradebook. I am not crazy about how much work this is for me. Next time i will change the intro discussion in module 1 and the discussion design of module 2. With the voicethread some of the self intro in the first module discussion is redundant… i thought that would be ok, but i need to really reframe that discussion to be more than a casual into… interestingly enough that same discussion with new online SLN faculty is a completely different experience. There is a different character to the teacher/student relationship that i had not anticipated that is not there with faculty that i train. It is probably the fact that i am not grading faculty : )
The second discussion in module 2 may be too many questions… i need to evaluate that some. Look at which questions are generating engagement and which are not.
Also, i am concerned that the class community area is not getting as much traffic as i would like/as expected. Perhaps because it is visually/physically way down several scrolls on the screen. Students are contacting me with questions via email rather than in the ask a question area or in the talk with me area. I need to think about how to address that and manage it better next time. I am looking forward to feedback from the students on all of this.

my first weeks!

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I have been so consumed with facilitating the course that i have had little time to really blog… the first 2 weeks are almost over. It is going great. There are now 9 students or so signed up to the course. A few have dropped. I was sad to see them go. They were all adding wonderful dimension to the course. It is amazing. They are from all over the NY. It is such a cool feeling to be connecting with all these amazing people. I have not kept up my log, but i have been putting in huge amounts of time. I was up all night last night…
Some issues are frustrating… students haven’t been able to get their moodle course shells set up until late this week… and I am having trouble with course management in moodle… it is hard to keep the discussions straight. there is no way to sort the discussion , to mark items read or unread, to track where you are, to collapse /expand threads… to see which i have evaluated, to see which ones come in new…it is really easy to loose a post in there… also, i am just not comfortable with how the thing functions. there seem to be no course management tools… i just today looked to see what is going on in the gradebook and can’t figure it out … There was stuff posted in the BB and suggestions area that i didn’t know about, though i am “subscribed” to the forum. it is just not clear when new stuff is posted or where. and tracking is a probelm. Good things i have a high tolerance for this tech stuff going south : )

I will be opening up module 2 next week … very exciting…

i am loving this. it is soooooo much fun.

: )

jitters

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so my course has started… 14 enrolled, so far there are 9 that have shown up. One has dropped

i am concerned about several things.
I am not confident that i know exactly how certain things in the course are going to work – the gradebook, the discusion ratings. I just discovered how to make a custom rating scheme today and set it up, but i have no idea how it will work.

I finally got my rubrics finalized. It has been a challenge designing assessments for this Pass/Fail course. I don’t like it.

I have not gone in and tested yet with a student identity. (i confess – this is not good – so do as i suggest, not as i do).

No problems with using voicethreads and setting up the blogs. Except no one has done a video post… might be becuase they don’t have the hardware. I LOVE that they have interacted with each other. I had hoped they would. What i had not anticipated was that they would script and read their comments. And provide them in both audio and text formats.

I am not happy with how the written assignments had to be designed. I want to be able to attach files, reply to posts/have a discussion, add subject lines, and i can only do that with the discussion forums sort of… The problem is that i want to collect them all and then once all have been collected, then turn them back over to the students for review and comments…

I had to recreate the BB. The news forum is not working. The students can’t see the add new topic button and can’t see any of the reply links on the discussion topics. weird… So i hid it and recreated it and now they can see it. It is a bummer though becuase the news forum has an announcements block tied to it that is a nice feature. Unfortunately, that too is buggy and the see previous announcments link does not show anything beyond the current post.