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!