Taking this class has been a humbling experience for me! As an Instructional Designer by trade I was confident coming into this course, but hopeful I would be able to apply what I learn into practice. Thankfully my hopes were realized as through interaction with all my peers and from Katia’s lessons, I’ve been introduced to new tools I haven’t heard of before, have a new understanding of terms that I thought I knew, and experienced new ways to utilize existing tools I knew about! Additionally, I have increased my understanding of important principles of online learning such as accessibility and community building.

A lot of what I learned throughout this course was through the collaboration and sharing we participated in during breakout rooms and in class larger discussions. Thank you to everyone who I’ve interacted with throughout this course as you’ve all truly contributed to what I have learned!

For my summary of learning I have recorded 5 short videos that highlight my key takeaways from this class , and provide examples of how I have applied my learning, or how it can be applied/why it is important!

I’ve decided to present this using H5P through Lumi (Lumi being another tool I was unfamiliar with but introduced to through this class!)

To interact with my presentation, first click on the arrow Icon, that looks like this “” , and then for each short video you can click on the plus icons which are labeled, and look like this ““.

Here is the link to Lumi to access it!

learning-summary-y8-nof | Lumi

*Note, Images used in this presentation are generated by AI

As Josh and I work in course design for a living, we thought that this course would simply be another normal task! We wanted to be wrong in that thought, and thankfully, we were as this was no normal development! When deciding the topic our course was going to be on we talked about picking our own topic not related to our jobs or alternatively, developing a course related to our jobs! When evaluating our options, and with the thought that we wanted this experience to be different from our regular day to day, we *almost* settled on making up our own topic. Suddenly, a German language course was approved for development and we were told it was going to have a blended delivery. Despite being involved in many online course developments, neither of us have been involved in developing a blended course before. This was the perfect opportunity for us to apply what we learn in the class, and after gaining permission from Michael, the instructor, our decision was made and we began working on our course profile!

For a video walkthrough of our course you can follow this link  

Course creation process:

Choosing the LMS was easy, we settled on Moodle simply because it is what the U of R uses, so it was decided for us! We then started meeting with Michael to talk the game plan. After our introductory meetings, we quickly had to decide our pedagogical approach. Many considerations were made and we landed on taking a flipped classroom approach to this course. This approach meant we had to be very intentional in how we deliver the learning material to students so that they come to the synchronous sessions prepared with basic understanding and any questions they may have! We knew of just the tool for this: H5P!

Building interactivity:

Over the years we have become pretty familiar with the basics of H5P and knew we wanted to utilize them in this course. Language learning really only works with practice, practice, and more practice, and so that’s what we tried to create. Every H5P is provided as optional practice to the students. The main types we used are Dialog Cards and Dictation. Every unit introduces an abundance of new words and phrases that run the risk of being easily forgotten. By providing students a space to endlessly listen to, translate, and spell out the words in German they are much more likely to not fall behind. Another H5P we used quite commonly was Drag the words. In our last class about accessibility we learned from Katia how inaccessible drag and drop activities can be, and this had us re-thinking what we do. Thankfully, the smart folks over at H5P have thought of this drawback and have enabled these activities to work with point-and-click. This means participants click on the draggable object, then click where they want to put it, without needing to hold the mouse button down! After we discovered this, we let out a big sigh of relief. 

The textbook being used for this course has plenty of exercises meant to serve the same purpose as the H5Ps we’ve created. In Michael’s videos he goes through all of the exercises for each unit, but we wanted to allow students to practice them outside of the videos as well. So for almost every exercise we’ve created an H5P equivalent directly in the course. Immediately after watching the video students can scroll down and try the exercises for themselves. Not only will this serve as beneficial practice, but it also allows them to get immediate feedback on their answers so they can see where they need to improve. Other exercises that don’t work well as H5Ps, or that require a partner, will be saved for the weekly Zoom meeting, or alternatively students can use our newly added “Connections forum” to reach out to their classmates for potential partner study.

Summative assessment:

Now, we haven’t discussed graded materials yet with Michael, so for the prototype we had to come up with these things on our own. With so much time needed to be spent practicing we didn’t want to overwhelm the students so we’ve tried to keep the assignments and quizzes brief. The assignments all focus on one key takeaway from each unit and are meant to take no longer than an hour. They feature a mix of both written assignments, and video assignments. While some students may not be keen on recording themselves it is meant for their benefit. One of the aspects of learning a language is being able to speak it. Overcoming their fear of this type of assignment early will help them gain the confidence they’ll need when these types of questions come up during a midterm or final exam.

The quizzes feature a maximum of three questions, most of which are based on the H5P interactives found throughout the unit. Minor changes have been made where possible so that the interactives maintain their purpose as practice tools instead of merely becoming answer keys for the quizzes. Most of the quizzes also feature one question that requires video recording. Just like the video assignments this is meant to prepare them for higher stakes spoken elements in both midterms and the final exam.

Feedback: when everything changed

Admittedly, this heading is misleading. We are grateful for the opportunity to have had our colleagues explore our prototype and provide valuable feedback. This was much appreciated as we rarely get the opportunity to receive feedback from participants before a course is delivered! We received many great suggestions, some we could act on, and some we could not. One of the bigger improvements we made was improving the “community” aspect in our class by creating a location for students to exchange contact information and form study groups! Additionally, we also made improvements to applicable H5Ps by adding more feedback built into the tools when the students answer right or wrong. We plan to add more feedback once we get input from Michael. For a bigger picture on all the changes we made based on feedback, check out our blog post!

TL;DR

Below is a quick summary of the key components in our course.

1. Format: Blended, Asynchronous online material, with synchronous sessions using a flipped classroom approach
2. LMS: Moodle
3. Interactivity/Formative assessment: H5P
4. Summative assessment: Quizzes and assignments
5. Feedback we implemented and extra changes we made:
   1. Added a connections forum to allow students to form study groups, friendships, and anything else they desire with their peers! (Somehow despite writing entire blogs about engagement and community (Rhett, Josh), we missed including this initially)
   2. Increased feedback on H5Ps when possible
   3. Modified external linking to open within the same tab when appropriate
   4. Enabled completion tracking on activities

So what’s next?

As we close out this class, we still have a lot of work ahead for 6 additional modules to be ready by the upcoming fall semester. We are very grateful for all that we learned and the wonderful feedback that we have received along the way in this process! We are going to continue developing with all of this in mind, still focusing on our goal that this will be the best course development that we have been involved in! 

If you haven’t heard by now this is not our first attempt at building an online course. Josh and I have been involved in many online course developments at the U of R over the last five years. But one thing we rarely ever get the chance to do is get student feedback prior to a course’s first delivery. That’s why we were so excited that we’d finally get that chance. Early in the development process we set the goal that we wanted to make this the best course either of us have been a part of. So first just a quick thank you to Ayodele, Osas, Dwayne, & Matthew. Your feedback has been very helpful and will certainly give us a much better chance to reach our goal. We’d like to take some time to respond to a few comments and suggestions in particular. Some suggestions we plan on incorporating into the upcoming prototype modules, some that will have to wait for the course to be fully developed, and unfortunately others that will have to be omitted altogether. We’ll also cover some changes we plan to make following the discussions we had in our most recent class about accessibility.

We received a lot of good feedback regarding our course prototype. One thing that seemed to come up multiple times is that our colleagues think there should be more peer-peer interaction. Since this course is blended with one synchronous session per week, we do not want to overload students with too many tasks and add more mandatory components of this class. However, these comments did make us realize we had the opportunity to increase collaboration among students. As a result, we have added a “connections forum” that students can use to  exchange information with each other and create their own study groups or practice sessions! This will be an optional component of the class for anyone wanting to get some extra practice with their peers! This is a welcome change as there are many benefits to study groups when learning a language. According to Milena Quaresma, a speech language therapist, students who study language together experience multiple benefits such as receiving feedback from each other, practicing listening to the language with different accents, and gaining confidence in their speaking to name a few!

Another suggestion that came up multiple times was incorporating more feedback on the H5P interactives we’ve created. Feedback is a beneficial addition that can take an interactive from good to great and far too often it goes unused. Unfortunately there are several H5P types we’ve used that do not have an option to provide feedback, but there is occasionally a workaround. For example, each of our modules is filled with Dialog Card H5Ps for students to review the newest words or phrases they’ve learned. When students flip over a card they can select whether they were right or wrong in their response. Each wrong answer will go back into the pile for them to try again. Now even though this H5P type doesn’t include feedback we can actually go into the text overrides and change the standard response they’re shown once they’ve answered all of the Dialog cards correctly. We’ll have to wait and hear back from Michael, the instructor, on what he feels the best response would be, but even incorporating German language by like “Richtig!” and “Falsch!” (Right! And Wrong!) will be a positive change. Thankfully many other H5P types we’ve used such as Dictation or Multiple Choice have actual feedback settings, so in most cases we’ll be able to make a small change that is sure to have a big impact.

One challenge we faced was that in the actual course development we are mainly focused on the Module books including both the videos and H5Ps that come with them. Many missing elements need to be discussed with Michael before they’re created, but for the sake of the prototype we had to do a bit of improvisation. First, the quiz questions were ones we created on our own. One reviewer caught an error in one question and while that won’t be a big deal for this prototype it still stresses the importance of sticking to our course profile and ensuring each activity is reviewed with a close eye, otherwise when the actual course comes around a tiny error could slip by semester after semester. Second, the early stages of the course have yet to be fully developed, so certain aspects don’t currently exist. A couple reviews mentioned additions such as a brief reference to assessment strategy in order to provide clarity to students, or outlining clear participation requirements for the synchronous sessions. Rest assured that while these changes may not make an appearance in the prototype, we agree wholeheartedly with ensuring the students understand what’s expected of them and will undoubtedly be implementing these recommendations before the first offering of the course.

Next we will discuss some of the feedback that we unfortunately are unable to incorporate into our course design. One of our reviews was very diligent in their testing and noted that dark mode does not work well on our course. This is a very good point, and admittedly something we wish we could fix. Unfortunately the integration of dark mode is done on the developer side of things (back end) and we are not able to make changes to get it to work properly. However, this flaw in moodle’s dark mode has been noted and passed onto the information technology development team in hopes that they will make a repair in the future! Another comment was that the online etext was not working for our tester. We personally made a mistake here, since the text being used for the course is a paid resource we could not provide access to it for our reviews. We should have mentioned this ahead of time so they did not spend any time trying to access this course.

Relating to UDL, we have tried to include components to support many learners already, but there are new things we will be including based on our most recent class! First, we have put a significant effort in ensuring that the caption files for the videos are correct. This meant correcting all of the English and German manually (Kaltura does a pretty good job of automatically captioning English, but the German became gibberish in the files). This will allow students to read live captions while playing the video, or download the file to read on their own. Additionally, for all textbook exercises we have created H5Ps for students who prefer tactile learning, and for those who prefer pen on paper can still complete the exercises and get the answers from the lecture video! When designing H5Ps we always consider accessibility guidelines published about H5Ps. We try to avoid inaccessible H5Ps the best we can, however, whenever we do use one that is deemed inaccessible in some way, we will always provide an alternative presentation of the material to ensure everyone can view it in a way that works for them. Lastly, we designed a “getting started” section that is intended to allow students to interact with the learning environment in a friendly way! This section shows students the format of the class, where to find resources, how to interact with various H5Ps and even lets them participate in a zero-stakes quiz in order to gain familiarity with the tool. We are hopeful that this effort results in students becoming very comfortable with the course and how to interact and navigate with it, before it actually begins! 

One thing we will be changing to make the course more accessible will be changing the links to open within the same tab instead of a new tab. We were operating under old best practices which stated that opening within the same tab could make students lose track of where they are and become distracted or even accidentally close the tab. Katia pointed out (and it is supported by accessibility standards) that now the best practice is to open links within the same tab, as opening new tabs can be disorienting for screen readers.

Lastly, there is an accessibility improvement that we would like to make, but are unable to currently do so. As mentioned in our course profile, we are using a paid Ebook as the textbook for this course. Despite combing through open access resources, the instructor we are working with was unable to find one that was satisfactory. This brings up a cost consideration. Adding additional cost to a course can be inaccessible to many students according to Teaching In a Digital Age. We have brought this up with Michael and he is aware of the barriers the added cost can bring up. As a result, he has told us that he is considering exploring what might be involved in developing his very own open textbook as a future project. This is not something that we can develop right now, but we are hopeful that in the future this may be something incorporated into this class!

We will be meeting with Michael later in the week and we can’t wait to share all of the beneficial advice, suggestions, and recommendations we’ve gained by being able to use GER 111 as our course prototype! We are so incredibly thankful for this opportunity and know that the Michael is thankful too! One step closer to making this our best course development yet!

As someone who works in instructional design, humanizing the asynchronous course has always been at the top of my mind. Over time as our LMS becomes more and more capable, this aspect becomes easier to do! Something that I encourage my instructors to lead every class off with is an instructor introduction! As suggested by The Innovative Instructor Blog, this practice shows students there is in fact an instructor on the other side of the screen, humanizes them by sharing personal details and interests, and helps them become more comfortable in the course! The instructor we are working with is not super tech savvy, and that is okay! There is no need to be get fancy expensive equipment and a camera crew, simple videos are effective, and in fact, Michael Welsh explains how simple videos can actually be more engaging for students! With this in mind, we have explained that his videos do not have to be very fancy to engage students.

Similarly, we do not want students to feel that they are taking the course in isolation. At the start of the course before the first synchronous sessions, students will be instructed to participate in an introductory forum. As teaching in a digital age explains, communication forums on their own are not impactful unless logically designed. For this reason, we are planning to design the introductory forums to be multi modal, encouraging students to submit video posts using Moodle-supported Kaltura!

Kaltura Logo. Public Domain. Wikimedia

With these instructions, students will be able to create their introductions as quick videos, review their colleagues’ videos, and reply in either text, video or voice format! Recognizing that every student has different comfort and ability levels, there will also be options to complete this introductory forum in text, voice, or illustrative formats as well. This multimodal format will allow students to play to their strengths, and not feel limited by restricting them to one single form of submission. Along with instruction on how to complete the introductory forum, students are going to be provided guidelines around making these interactions more meaningful and engaging. With this in mind, students will be instructed to review their colleagues’ introductions and respond to at least two of them, making connections or asking follow-up questions. Students will also be provided guidelines for respectful conduct for the online discussion forums. These components and guidelines lead to engaging and meaningful online discussions according to the University of Waterloo.

Additionally, students will also have the opportunity to engage in synchronous conversation with each other and the instructor via the weekly synchronous zoom session. In these sessions the instructor will be monitoring breakout rooms where students will be practicing their German together. Students will be encouraged to help each other out in these exercises by giving feedback about pronunciation and understanding of the language to each other. Of course, the instructor will be taking part in this as well, as they will be cycling through the breakout rooms. The class will also participate in these activities together in the main zoom room when the topic enables it appropriate to do so! These weekly synchronous sessions will also add that human element as it will put a face and voice to the names of the people they interact with during the asynchronous activities! We have not yet decided if participation in these activities will be completely formative or if marks could be awarded for participation. Stanford department of education claims that these synchronous sessions will also lead to strengthened community building through interactions, and faster information exchange for students as they can ask questions in real time! I imagine that by the end of the course the zoom rooms will be so lively they might look something like this:

Lastly, we will be encouraging the instructor to post regular announcements and check-ins with students during the asynchronous time. The instructor will be encouraged to make these weekly announcements focused on topics that were brought up during the previous synchronous session. This will keep things relevant by providing additional resources and tips centered around the needs of the students. These regular updates are expected to further support that interaction component of the class by showing students the instructor is listening to where they need more help and is providing relevant resources to meet their needs! Dr Nathan Pritts explains how this is an important step in building relationships, and when students feel that they are heard, they are more likely to remain engaged in the class.

The combination of all these components should form an inclusive, engaging, and productive online learning environment with ample opportunity for the students and instructor to connect with each other!

Working in instructional design is always interesting. We get the opportunity to design courses for topics that we know little to nothing about, which always keeps things interesting and fresh! Does this change when the course being designed is in a language that we do not understand? Well, it certainly is more daunting of a task, but nothing we can’t handle! That’s why when Josh and I were asked if we would be interested in taking on an introductory German course, we jumped at the opportunity!

For some quick background information, we work in instructional design at the University of Regina. We do not have classrooms and students for ourselves, rather, we help instructors translate their traditional face-to-face class into online or blended learning environments! We used an ADDIE template when planning the development for this course.

Course overview

This course is intended to expand the reach of introductory level German at the University of Regina by providing a more flexible delivery mode than a face-to-face course. Students who take this course will have little to no German language background, but will gain skills in reading, writing, speaking, and understanding German. Since this course is offered through the university, it is aimed at adult learners. This population is wide and diverse. We expect enrolments from students who are in various points of their post-secondary education journey. They could be taking this course because they have an interest in the German language, or they could be fulfilling a language requirement for their degree. Additionally, because this course is offered remotely, students can also be located anywhere in the world, though we highly suspect the vast majority will be located within Canada, and even more specifically, Saskatchewan. 

Learning a language is difficult, and we imagine, nearly impossible if you were trying to do it on your own with no practice. As a result, we decided that the best approach for a class like this is blended. Recognizing the various definitions of blended delivery, we are using the University of Regina’s definition, “Blended courses employ a combination of the following: face-to-face, LIVE-streamed, online and/or video-conference instruction.” Specifically for us, this course is going to include online asynchronous components, with a weekly synchronous zoom class. As an entry level course it is likely to be a better option than fully online as many first year students might not be prepared to handle a fully asynchronous course.

Pedagogical considerations

Many pedagogical considerations have been made when designing this course. One of the most prominent strategies is that we are taking a flipped classroom approach. The flipped classroom involves assigning students specific material to ingest before attending the synchronous session. When the synchronous session does come, instead of listening to an instructor lecture, the students are expected to participate in hands-on application of what they learned that week. For a detailed book on this strategy, we recommend checking this book out!  We combine this with an active learning and constructivist pedagogy.

Active learning

While the students are exploring the asynchronous material such as textbook readings and pre-recorded videos, they will also have access to interactive H5Ps where they will be able to immediately engage with their lessons. These tools will let students practice what they’ve learned, testing their knowledge, rather than just passively consuming the lecture material. Tools that we have identified as being useful for students in this class are: Dialog Cards, Dictation, Drag the Words, and Fill in the Blank activities. H5P has a whole suite of useful tools when it comes to reinforcing learning, and we might think of new tools to integrate along the way!

Image by Maupao70 on Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0

Constructivist pedagogy

This is where the synchronous sessions come in! Each week during the synchronous zoom sessions, students will be applying their knowledge from the lesson by interacting with the instructor and each other! The instructor will use breakout rooms to group students and assign spoken word activities to apply lessons. The instructor will supervise the rooms, rotating through them and providing advice when it comes to pronunciation and grammar. Through this experience, students are actively engaging in what they learned, applying it, and improving their understanding through experience and interaction with others. Experience such as this would be difficult to orchestrate if the course was completely asynchronous. 

Learning objectives

Throughout the course students will engage in lessons on a variety of common introductory language course topics such as the weather, time and place, family members, greetings, common phrases, German culture, and many more. There will also be some time spent educating students on proper pronunciation, colloquialisms, and German grammar rules.  Ideally, by the end of the course students will have gained the following:

• The ability to read, write, understand, and speak basic German
• An understanding of concepts such as word order, definite and indefinite articles, and grammatical gender.
• Access to higher-level german language courses

Delivery

Image by Lasay0414 on Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0

As you have already ascertained, the course is being hosted online, but “On what platform?” you might ask. Our institution uses Moodle, and as a result, this is the platform we will be using! By utilizing Moodle it means that students will be able to access the plethora of course materials on any device with internet access. The university’s specific version of Moodle has also adopted Kaltura which is a video hosting hub, meaning all video lectures and related video materials can be stored directly on the website ensuring easy access for edits or replacements if needed in future offerings of the course. Hosting videos on Kaltura ensures that all students have access to them regardless of their location in the world. If the videos were hosted on third party sites such as Vimeo or YouTube, geographical restrictions could prevent students from accessing the material. Using Kaltura’s editing tools we can also automatically generate captions for all of the videos. These captions do require manual review to ensure accuracy (especially when dealing with two languages), but the time spent editing is worth it to help make the course more accessible. 

Moodle books will also be used to construct the asynchronous lessons. Books are tools used to “chunk” lesson material into small digestible portions, aimed to lighten students’ cognitive load by not presenting too much information all at once. The books will also contain callouts on pages containing learning objectives, aimed to grab student attention and direct their learning to important topics.

Ebook

The course will also be utilizing external learning material hosted on the publishers website. Students will be required to purchase access to the online ebook. We had conversations with the instructor about using open learning material, though after searching resources we were unable to locate a combination that met the needs of this course. An important feature that the ebook brings is built-in assessment activities. 

Assessment

The course is going to include both formative and summative assessment. As previously mentioned, H5Ps are going to be used extensively in this course. Although these tools are excellent for engagement and reinforcing ideas, they are not good for summative assessment for a variety of reasons. As a result, the H5P tools will be used as a formative assessment tool that allows students to test their knowledge on the lessons in a zero-stakes environment with immediate feedback built in. Additionally, the spoken word group exercises are also considered formative assessment components of this class as they provide students a chance to practice their German skills and receive feedback to improve, without needing to worry about marks. 

When it comes to summative assessments, there are a few methods that will be employed. 

• • First, there will be regular textbook assignments through the ebook platform. The publisher’s site allows the instructor to select specific topics to test on and allows students as many tries as needed in order to get a mark they are satisfied with. These assessments also link to the relevant areas in the book where the students learn about the topic being assessed. This is a low-stakes assessment due to the fact that students have unlimited attempts which may motivate them to continuously try and review until they have a solid understanding of the relevant topics. 
  • Next there will be regular quizzes in the course hosted on moodle. To negate misconduct, a wide testbank of identical difficulty but different in content questions will be made. A set number of questions will be randomly chosen from the question bank for each student, meaning no students will have the same test. These tests will include multiple choice, drag and drop, matching, short answer, and spoken word questions. These quizzes will be open for one week at a time, but once students begin the quiz they will have only 30 minutes (standard without accommodation) to complete them before the attempt closes. This is a higher stake assessment that students will be expected to study for ahead of time. 
  • Lastly, the course will include Kaltura video assignments at various points. These assignments can be recorded as many times as the student wishes until they are happy with their submission. The purpose of this assignment is not only to test students’ ability in speaking, but also track their progress as the course proceeds and expectations rise.

Addressing Commons Concerns

In this course there are several difficulties students may run into so we will try our best to design the course in ways where these issues won’t arise. Some potential issues are:

• As previously discussed, the creation and review of closed captions for all videos. This will allow students to both hear the spoken word, and see how it is spelled, to reinforce their understanding.
• Ensuring all activities, especially activities with audio, have the proper pronunciation and spelling. With so many activities and neither of us being German experts we must spend the time now with the subject matter expert to ensure nothing is being taught incorrectly, otherwise we risk spreading incorrect information each time the course runs due to the inability as non-German speakers to catch such errors.
• Adequate equipment requirements. Because this course is delivered completely remote, students will need access to equipment that meets the demands of the course. There will be a statement in the syllabus outlining the minimum system standards for accessing the materials in this course. That being said, any modern computer/tablet/mobile phone will suffice for the requirements of this course. If students do not have equipment of their own or no internet connection they should be able to use their local library facilities.
• How will the students contact the professor in-between synchronous sessions? The professor is setting virtual office hours available to students in-between synchronous classes on specific days/times, as well as by appointment. In addition to this, the course will have a built-in email communication tool where students can contact the professor. Finally, with the idea of continuous improvement in mind, we will design an anonymous feedback tool in the course that allows students to submit anonymous feedback to the instructor as many times as they would like. This tool enables students to submit their feedback and questions without their name being tied to the submission. 

As with all classes offered through the university, students who require special accommodations will be able to fill out the accommodation form found on the University of Regina accessibility page. As the instructor informs us of these situations we will be able to make adjustments as needed. This way every student receives a proper learning experience.

Through this careful planning and design, we believe German 111 will be an engaging, and accessible course full of rich learning experiences!

While working as an instructional designer I have quite a bit of experience in integrating technology and blended learning in my professional work life. Although the majority of my projects are working on 100% online asynchronous courses, I do have the pleasure of working on a few blended courses. For the purposes of my work, I use the university’s definition of blended learning “a combination of the following: face-to-face, LIVE-streamed, online and/or video-conference instruction.”  What this typically looks like in courses I help design is 70% asynchronous online learning, and 30% synchronous remote learning completed via zoom.

Challenges:

There have been some challenges when it comes to my role and online/blended learning. Un-surprisingly, based on our last lecture, much of the challenges come from the multiple meanings of the terms used to describe class modality. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, things seemed pretty clear-cut with students and instructors knowing the differences between online, synchronous, livestreamed, or blended classes. During and after the pandemic, things became a lot less clear. As Katia stated in our last lecture, even this class we are all enrolled in right now could be considered “online” since we never meet in person and it is 100% delivered through zoom. Though, this does not meet the university’s definition of online. Confused yet? This class would be considered remote, which is basically the same as a face-to-face course, except the synchronous learning happens through zoom. The U of R has 7 different terms for courses, and all the definitions of those modalities are not even easily found in one location! For example, I had to look at an open textbook, and U of R website to find them, they should all easily be found in one location! Without looking at these resources, try reflecting on what you think each of these would mean. Here are all the terms:

• Face-to-face
• Online
• Blended
• Hybrid
• Hyflex
• Remote
• Live-streamed

Confusing, isn’t it?! Students and Instructors alike are unsure of what all these terms mean. Challenges have stemmed from this ambiguity in terms where instructors are scarred to develop “online” classes, as they think back to when they took their synchronous face-to-face courses online during the pandemic. For most, this was a bad experience, and many instructors associate this with “online learning” when in reality online is so much more.  As stated in Chapter 4 of Teaching in a digital age, “…students studying online are in a different learning environment or context than students learning in a classroom, and the design needs to take account of this.” As an instructional designer I work with instructors, taking these special needs into account, showing them that online is so much more than just lecturing through a webcam. I show them the possibilities of building h5p interactive content, breakout rooms, discussion forums, annotating activities, recorded activities, and so much more! By the end of the projects, instructors have a new opinion on online learning, and it is always in a positive direction!

Experiences with Blended Learning:

When designing blended courses, the instructor and I often design with a “Flipped classroom” pedagogy in mind. According to Irvine, a flipped classroom is when content is learned first asynchronously through resources such as readings, recordings, videos and more, then synchronous time is used for discussing questions and/or applying that material. This approach has been game-changing for some instructors. For example, I am currently developing a language course with an instructor who has only ever taught face-to-face before. We are designing a blended course with one synchronous 50 minute session per week. The instructor is already very excited and enthusiastic about the enhancements we can make using our LMS. This instructor has told me that through the use of technology we are being able to include exercises that would normally take 50 minutes to go over in class condensed down into 10 minute online activities! Additionally, now students are able to explore the weekly material on their own time, and come to class prepared with questions, instead of learning the material in class and sometimes not having enough time for questions! The class experience has been transformed for the better by taking a blended approach!

Moreover, using the definition of blended learning that we are using in this class from Teaching in a Digital Age, ch10, another instructor I worked with has created a blended learning environment in their regular face to face course by integrating aspects that we designed for their online class! Previous to working with me, this instructor did not utilize our LMS at all and taught his courses entirely face-to-face. After working with me to develop an online course, he saw many opportunities to integrate aspects of it into his face-to-face environment. As a result, now his face-to-face course has components such as formative assessment with immediate feedback, pre-recorded lectures, and interactive learning components. All of this has supplemented the student experience and I have been told by him that the student feedback has been very positive.

Overall, I am a huge supporter of blended learning environments. Prior to taking this class, my definition of blended only included classes that had both synchronous and asynchronous components. After this weeks lesson, I have expended my definition to be instruction that includes technology and other modalities of instruction outside of typical “sage on the stage” lectures.