Month: March 2024

The course I have created this semester is Mental Health Studies 20. It is created on Moodle and is delivered asynchronously. I have taught Mental Health Studies 20 in the past, in a blended learning environment, face-to-face with technology-enhanced learning. Mental Health Studies is a course with sensitive content and is best delivered in an environment that encourages discussion, allows for reflection and has the teacher’s support. My challenge during this process was creating an online class incorporating all three elements.

The course creation process involved creating a course profile using the ADDIE Model. The ADDIE Model provides a framework and a five-step course creation process. I enjoyed using the model as I began to build my course. The framework provided guidance and made me reflect on my course’s “why’s”. I will definitely be using ADDIE as my guidance in all of my future course creations.

As I started creating my course, I focused on incorporating activities encouraging student engagement and interaction. As a way to foster interaction and collaboration, I am going to try using Discord so students can ask questions, post resources and share content. At the start of each unit, I included a Journal entry activity in which students will be asked to respond to prompts that are related to the topic. Students will be required to respond to other students.

For me, the most challenging part of the course creation process was having classmates review my work.  As I noted in an earlier post, I tend to be highly self-critical, which makes it difficult for me to share my work (and vulnerabilities) with my classmates. However, the feedback and comments I received were incredibly helpful and most appreciated.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating a new course. In the past when I have created content, I never used the ADDIE Model to guide me through the process, nor did I think about key components such as  accessibility or AI. These considerations have enriched my approach and broadened my perspective on instructional design. Moving forward, I am eager to continue integrating these principles into my future projects to create more inclusive and impactful learning experiences.

Here is the link to my Final Course Prototype.

Maintaining academic integrity in online learning is challenging. In asynchronous classes, students complete their work when it fits into their schedule. The teacher isn’t watching over them as they complete assignments and assessments. When students submit work, a teacher must determine if it is authentic and if it shows their understanding of the content and outcomes to be achieved. This is a challenging part. How do we, as teachers, determine this?

Before students can proceed with my online courses, they must read through a lesson and pass a “quiz” to demonstrate their understanding of the importance of Academic Integrity. The lesson contains information about:

• What is academic integrity?
• The importance of academic integrity
• The values associated with academic integrity.

The lesson and pre-quiz aim to educate students about the importance of submitting their own work. Although each student is required to complete the lesson and quiz, this does not mean that we don’t come across work that is copied, plagiarized, or generated through AI.

After watching Dr. Kouros’ lecture, I realized how little I knew about AI. The possibilities with AI seem endless. So, how do we, as educators, deal with AI’s ever-changing capacities? How do we educate our students about the biases, misinformation, and inaccuracies that exist when using AI?

Throughout my career, I have encountered situations in which a student’s academic integrity has been questioned. Whether they were writing the answers on their hands, copying from other students, using work that was not cited, or copying and pasting from the internet, students must always be reminded of the importance of completing their own work and showing what they have learned.

When it comes to AI, I have so much to learn!  As an educator, I must acknowledge the new technologies that exist and teach my students (and myself!) how to use them appropriately. This requires me to have an open mind, and to realize that you never truly, stop learning.

Last week’s class on equity and accessibility made me reflect on my understanding of the terms and my current teaching practices. Equity includes treating some people differently and considering people’s particular needs and situations. At the same time, accessibility makes information, activities, and/or environments sensible, meaningful, and usable for as many people as possible (SeeWriteHear, 2020)

• Accessibility is about equity
• Accessibility is about cultural practice
• Accessibility is about people
• Accessibility is about compliance
• Accessibility is about usability
• Accessibility is about context (SeeWriteHear, 2022).

(Source: https://opentextbooks.uregina.ca/diversityandinclusionforoer/front-matter/definitions/)

As I reflect on the concepts of equity and accessibility, I need to ask myself the following questions:

Equity:

• Am I providing equal opportunities for all students to succeed in my classes?
• Do I recognize and address my students’ diverse needs and backgrounds?
• How can I ensure that each student has access to the resources and support they need to thrive academically?
• Am I aware of potential biases in my teaching methods, assessments, and student interactions?

Accessibility:

• Is the course content accessible to students with disabilities or diverse learning needs?
• Have I provided alternative formats (e.g., transcripts, captions, audio descriptions) for multimedia content?
• Have I considered the usability of online platforms and tools for students with various technological skills or limitations?

I acknowledge that there are many areas for improvement in my classes. The following article provides 20 ways teachers can make enhance accessiblity in their classes. Ranging from using clear and consistent layouts to keeping paragraphs short, this article is a good resource to help teachers implement simple adjustments to their classes, as a way to foster greater accessibility in their teaching.

To be completely honest, sharing my work with my classmates overwhelms me. Despite my years of teaching, and having taught many different classes and doing SO many lesson plans, the fear of someone looking at my work and saying it isn’t good enough scares me. I know the importance of feedback. Feedback is essential for my growth and development. Feedback provides me with new information from a different lens which helps me to improve my work. That said, I am very grateful for the feedback and comments my classmates provided me. Their feedback made me look at how I can make my course better.

“It’s incredibly exciting to have your work seen by others, to have others respond to it.”

I’ll begin by discussing the feedback I’ve received and outlining how I can make improvements. Afterward, I’ll share some positive comments from my classmates regarding aspects they appreciated in my course.

Feedback #1: Reaching out to each student individually at the beginning of a course. Yes, I completely agree that this would be incredibly time-consuming. An expectation that we have as online teachers, is to send a welcome email to all students that are enrolled in our courses. This email is just an introductory email to welcome them to the course and provide a bit of information about the course and how they can contact me. I ask students to respond to my email- usually but asking them a few random questions- so that I can confirm that they have received the email and that this is the correct email address they would like me to use during the semester.

Feedback #2: I indicated that interactions among students can be challenging due to learners completing assignments on different timelines. A suggestion could be for me to encourage students to collaborate through Discord and that is a great idea. Moving forward with my classes, I am going to try a platform like Discord, so that students have a place where they can ask questions and connect.

Feedback #3: In one of my interative videos, I need to add a pause so students have the opportunity to read and answer the questions. I will definitely make that improvement.

Feedback #4: There are some technical issues that I need to fix. My audio wasn’t working in my H5P Presentation, and for my Blog Post some information was cut off. Both will be easy to fix.

I am grateful for the positive feedback I received from my classmates. I appreciated learning that they found my course “professional” and “ready to go”.  I am glad that they found my course easy to navigate and that my course “accommodates learning styles through choice of assignments, lessons and assessments.” I took all of the feedback and comments I received and created a wordcloud.