Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning

Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning was an interesting article published by the US Department of Education. The most effective forms of distance education that I found applicable to my course assignment are: 1) blended learning is more effective than purely online or f2f learning and 2) reflection greatly enhances learning.

About ten years ago I decided to take a free online course offered by Barnes & Noble on XML. I couldn’t get past the first class because I couldn’t get the XML editor to run on my computer. I emailed the instructor and he responded but I never was able to get it to work and I never completed the course. Now, I have taken several blended courses with Dr. Sponder and I like that if I run into an issue such as that I have Dr. Sponder as well as classmates with whom I’ve met face to face who are available to help me.

In light of my experiences I completely concur that blended learning is more effective than purely online learning. By having the social knowledge of someone it encourages you to continue and gives you a real sense that you have someone to help you.  Despite the evidence in this paper I still grapple with the fact that blended learning is more effective than f2f learning. When I consider the “reflection” discussed throughout this paper I agree that blended learning allows more time for this. However, if done correctly, reflection can be incorporated well into a f2f course. I recently completed a f2f course with Dr. Foshay that required numerous readings and much reflection and discussion. I would argue that this was done very effectively and that both the reflection and the discussions would not have been as effective for me if they were done online.

The one thing I was truly surprised at was that video did not appear to influence the amount that students learn in an online class. I don’t believe that video can teach everything. However, I feel that in an online class there are somethings that ONLY video can teach.  While an instruction manual may have effective text and images a video will make a procedure much more clear to a learner. I feel that this conclusion in the article is based on a poor study that didn’t look at the effect of online video by content type.

While I did learn a great deal by reading this article I found that like the video conclusion, I questioned much of what they concluded. It seems that there really is not enough research in this area to draw conclusions and that much more work needs to be done.

Response to Faculty Perspectives on Moodle

My first experience with Moodle was in rebuilding an online course for an educational association. It was my first experience with LMSs and the the consulting firm that hired me explained what LMSs were all about and even gave me a copy of Gardner’s magic quadrant review of existing LMSs.  They also explained how to use Moodle and post my course. My first reactions were horrible. I felt the interface was totally clumsy and not well organized. To post my course I needed to go through a course document of about 100 fields and needed only to complete about 3. Furthermore, the course had quizzes and bookmarking that didn’t seem to show up in the interface. As far as I was concerned free didn’t necessarily mean worthwhile. I had written off Moodle for good.

It wasn’t until I came to CCSU and Dr. Sponder used it for all of his courses that Moodle made a lot more sense to me. The more traditional week by week organization used at CCSU made sense of this beast for me. I really liked the weekly organization but I still felt the interface seemed a little immature.

Then, last semester I took a course with Dr. Foshay using Blackboard and I was even less impressed. With all of the money a commercial system has, the interface was not any better. It was still boring and even worse the content was not organized by week. Dr. Foshay told me that he stripped the course down to the bare bones and that it could do so much more but I am still skeptical.

Reading this week’s assignment only confirmed my suspicions about Blackboard. Having said that, CCSU’s Instructional Technology Department will be offering courses on Blackboard that I hope to take in the next few months just so I can truly speak from experience.

The reading articulated many things about Moodle which I have been experiencing. I do think Moodle is excellent in the weekly organization but I can relate that students need a little more show and tell on how to use its features. The ability to work any time and any where is a great feature of online learning. Allowing shy students to speak up via discussions is another positive point. While I like the ability to give users extra information “just in case” the article made me realize how this can be overwhelming for students. In the "old days" a teacher wouldn’t photocopy an overabundance of articles “just in case”. This is something for me to keep in mind.

One author, Brian, noted how students can’t share work with each other. This is definitely a draw back. At CCSU, Dr. Sponder gets around this by having students post work to their websites. But that does detach the work from the grades, if gradebook is being used.

One feature I would like to see implemented in both Blackboard and Moodle is the ability to comment on readings. If a reading is posted students should be able to post comments like they do on Crocodoc.com. Comments should either kept private – like a student keeping his/her own notes or public – a student commenting as part of an assignment or for the purposes of a discussion.

I guess nothing is ever perfect and the features of an LMS definitely make learning easier. However, I’ve seen many other applications that are slicker and more user friendly and I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask Blackboard and Moodle to step up their game.

Vision of Technology in My Work

Every once in a while I take some time to reflect upon the recent past and I am always amazed at how much I have learned. For example, when I graduated from college I realized how much knowledge about computer science I had gathered in my four years. Or when I left my first job out of college and had a resume filled with relevant activities. Even when my oldest son turned two I looked back on the past two years and realized how much I had learned about raising children and being a mother. The last two years I’ve also grown so much as a result of completing my masters in educational technology. 

Each time I start out on a journey like these I think I know so much and then after a couple of years I look back and realize that I hardly knew much at all. Like when I read every parenting book Barnes & Noble offered during my pregnancy but none of them prepared me for my son being sick and needing emergency surgery twice in his first two months of life. Or when I knew every type of looping algorithm for programming but needed to find the perfect one for my first application I was paid to build. I suspect the next couple of years for me will be the same.

For the next year or two I will be teaching full time the undergraduate educational technology courses at CCSU. I’ve spent much of the last year preparing for this by auditing the courses, researching and completing my masters. As I said before I’ve learned so much. However, I imagine that over the next year or two I will grow so much more as a person, as a teacher and as a lover of technology.

I’ve prepared myself to teach the topics of the courses: iMovie, Microsoft Word, Google Spreadsheets, Smartnotebook, blogging, WebQuests, concept-mapping, Wikis, social networking, and podcasts. I’m now preparing for how I will teach some new additions to the courses including Personal Learning Networks and iPads. While I’d like to consider my knowledge of all of these areas above average I’m not sure if I will ever be able to say in this world of rapidly advancing technology if I am an expert. Because, after all, once you become an expert in something technological, it is passé and there is a new technology to learn. That is OK, because life would be boring otherwise. At least for me.

Despite that, in the next year I plan to strive to be an expert in all of the topics I am teaching. Most particularly, I plan to become an “expert” in PLNs and iPads. While I do subscribe to many email distributions and Facebook pages on educational technology, I hope to really ramp up my network of resources in the next year. I hope to seek out the best practices of the technologies I know and to get familiar with the ones that are new. I hope to develop a list of people with which to connect. In addition, while I don’t have an iPad I hope to learn more about them for personal use, productivity as a teacher and for instruction. Furthermore, I spent some time this spring getting to know the gradebook module of moodle and I hope to continue my knowledge of that and expand it to include the new features of Moodle 2.2.

It’s been a very busy two years for me completing my masters and raising my family. I hope once my coursework is done and my group project is complete I can spend some time reading the pile of books that sits on my night stand that I’ve collected over the last couple of years. Most of them are about educational technology and there is one or two on personal growth. Maybe, I’ll even find time to read a novel or two…on my new iPad.