Hi folks, below you will find my summary of learning.  Thank you everyone for a great class!

Course Overview

General Description:

My course is intended as a 4 week credit recovery exercise for grade 12 students taking Workplace and Apprenticeship Math 30 in the province of Saskatchewan.  This course deals with the buying and leasing of vehicles and corresponds to curricular outcome WA30.6. As I describe in my course profile, students attending my school live in a neighbourhood that is highly dependent on personal vehicles.  Therefore, this material is both relevant to their daily lives and required by curriculum.

Method of Delivery:

This course is mostly asynchronous with a some blended elements.  Students will complete the majority of material online, but will come into class once a week to demonstrate their calculation skills, give presentations, and check in with the instructor.

Content:

A full video overview of my course can be seen at the link below on YouTube.

As my course is not accessible to users outside my school division I have provided links to key items below.  This is not exhaustive however; please note that most assignments and quizzes are only viewable within the YouTube overview.

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Working Smarter Not Harder – Using AI to Automate the Mundane

“Outsource your workload, not your thinking.”

– Alec Couros

In this week’s video presentation Dr. Alec Couros explored the usage of generative A.I. in classrooms.  The presentation was quite compelling, as he demonstrated several practical applications throughout.  This seemed particularly relevant to the creation of my online course as time always seems to be in short supply.

Does this mean that I should have used an AI chatbot to create my entire course?  Obviously, no.

First off, academic misconduct was still a thing (last time I checked) and would betray the entire enterprise of learning (which being a teacher I have a particular affinity for).  Secondly, Alec (for clarification while I don’t know Dr. Couros personally, I took a class from him last semester and he was comfortable with students referring to him by his first name) was very clear that we (teachers, private citizens, corporations, or cats walking across keyboards) bear ultimate responsibility for any A.I. derived materials that we choose to post.  Factual inaccuracies and bias can not be eliminated from algorithms and any information that we distribute to our students must be thoroughly screened.  Essentially, content generated by A.I. must be adjudicated against our own knowledge base.  This means the average user cannot go into the process blind, or simply trust the material (for example Alec cited an example of a B.C. lawyer who was caught citing non-existent case law generated by AI).  That said, what we can do with A.I. is automate the mundane, menial, and time-consuming tasks that take away from the real goal of teaching: building relationships with students and engaging in thoughtful and meaningful conversations.

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Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Introduction

Firstly, before I discuss my feedback (on my first module) I would like to take a moment to thank the individuals who provided it.  As a teacher I often find myself working and developing resources in isolation (despite research indicating that teacher collaboration is fundamental to effective instruction).  It has been years since I have had a peer review my lessons and I respect and value the information that has been shared with me.  While I will not be implementing every suggestion (mostly due to time constraints), they will be used to guide this project long after this university course has concluded.

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Ladies and gentlemen, you’re about to witness…

I have to admit that I was a little nervous going into this week’s activities.  I had never heard of Lumi, or H5P, let alone used them before.  Turns out H5P stands for HTML5 package; essentially it uses JavaScript to create interactive elements that we can share on our websites.  Since my online course uses a lot of video elements I thought it would be most fitting to add interactions to several of them.

There was only one small problem – I didn’t have any videos yet.  So I decided to create a few from scratch.  But isn’t that placing the cart before the horse?  My course would certainly need a syllabus.  Right?  Okay, no problem I can put one of those together.  What about a teacher introduction?  A quick start guide?  How about several sleepless evenings of feverishly creating content so I could get back to adding interactive elements to the videos?

I forgot.  I hadn’t made them yet.

Cue the internal screaming.

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USMC-02659 by Staff Sgt. Thomas Perry, Public Domain.

Creating a Conversation

According to Michael Welsch an online course should feel like a conversation.  In his opinion, meaningful dialogue occurs when one engages in responsive teaching practices (integrating student questions and observations into lesson materials, using video introductions, etc.).  This builds a sense of trust and comradery amongst classmates and leads to higher engagement.

Looking at my own course it feels more like an awkward family supper with the in-laws.

Essentially, Welsch is emphasizing relationships, which is hardly a revelation to any veteran instructor.  So why is it so difficult to transfer these practices into online spaces? Why do I find planning a blended course so difficult?

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Hello Everyone.  In the interests of not spamming your blog feed with a really long post I have opted to link my course profile below as a Google Doc.

Click Here to read it!

Blender by Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0 DEED.

Blended What?

Sometimes the simplest tasks can cause the most trepidation.  Take for example this week’s blog entry: the relatively simple task of describing my experiences employing blended learning in my classroom.

Easy.

Except that until 48 hours ago I didn’t know what blended learning was.  But no matter, academia will come to the rescue.  Certainly there must be a measured consensus on what constitutes blended learning?  As it turns out the spectrum of modalities (and associated pedagogical practices) through which blended learning may be delivered has resulted in semantic chaos in the literature.

Okay, that may be a bit of hyperbole – but the fact remains that we need a working definition for today’s discussion or we will be chasing our tails all day.  For our purposes we will call blended learning “an approach to education that combines online educational materials and opportunities for interaction online with physical place-based classroom methods.” With that out of the way let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

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This post is just to make sure that my blog is still functioning.  More to follow!