dominating your CMS

Here’s an article to make you think about whether you are conforming to your Course Management System (CMS) or whether you are making it conform to your pedagogy. Lane suggests that novice Web instructors who learn the basics of their institution’s system before they think about the principles of teaching their course are working backwards and risk forgetting what they know about teaching well. The CMS dominates their course organization and, consequently, their teaching.

As someone who supports faculty use of Blackboard, and who is involved in the ritual training in its features, this article has me thinking. As an online instructor, it has me wondering how to evaluate what I’ve been doing. I think I started with the course and course objectives, and then moved into how it could be expressed within Blackboard, but we’ll see when I get a chance to reflect at the end of the semester.

If you have recently been trained to use Blackboard, do you think it has been dominating your pedagogy?

Lane, Lisa M. “Insidious Pedagogy: How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching.” First Monday 14.10 (5 October 2009).

Filed under: course design, online learning, pedagogy, teaching, technology

here it is, again

Here’s that new semester, the fall renewal, even though it’s still pretty hot outside. We are all excited about starting up again, before the complexity of courses, grading, student conferences, and committee work start to fill up all those moments we had planned to learn about new innovations in teaching and learning. Some of us have new ideas we’d like to try out in the classroom, whether on ground or online, and hope to keep up our excitement long enough to put the ideas in motion.

Pardon a personal note: I’ve been reading about online teaching, since I’ll be teaching online for the first time, reading about translating face-to-face practices into online experiences, all the while trying to keep three areas in mind–student/content interaction, student/faculty interaction, and student/student interaction. That doesn’t seem like a difficult organizational plan, until you start to fill in the blanks. Assignments and due dates are easy enough, but creating experiences that engage students as they work through those assignments is the hard part. All of a sudden I feel like an orchestra conductor waiting for the sheet music, and discover that I am the composer, too. I know that if I feel overwhelmed, students may have the same reaction, so my first order of business has been to retreat from displaying all the content of the semester at once. In a f2f course, I would never hand out all the assignments on day one, so why would I try to make them all available on our LMS? I’m giving myself permission to slow down and judge how the course is going in the first few weeks, leaving room for adjustment. I’m sure it would be nice to have the whole course and its content created on day one and just turn it on, but for this first time around, I need to test the waters a little. I’ll be busy in the evenings and on weekends.

Here are a few of the things I’ve been reading online:

Instructional Design for Online Learning: http://www.ibritt.com/resources/dc_instructionaldesign.htm

Getting Started Online: http://vfc.project.mnscu.edu/index.asp

Principles of Online Design: http://www.fgcu.edu/onlinedesign/index.html

Instructional Design Handbook: http://www.psuonline.pdx.edu/docs/id_handbook.htm

Guidelines for Teaching an Online Course: http://tltc.findlay.edu/onlinesupport/Guidelines/index.html

Teaching Strategies: Online Teaching: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/tstrategies/tsot.php

Send me your favorites to post, whether about online teaching or not.

Filed under: 7 principles, course design, education, learning, online learning, pedagogy, student-centered learning, teaching, technology

form follows function?

I missed last Friday’s post because of all-day training with WIDS software, so I guess I should talk about such software and its application in course and program development.

WIDS (Worldwide Instructional Design System) allows you to generate documents from information you input into a variety of database forms, such as syllabus–in GREAT detail. I am a novice, having had the introductory training (only the first of two sessions) and just beginning to fill in forms for myself. First, I’m seeing how one of my own syllabi fits into the template; then I will probably see how it might work for both a program of faculty development and individual workshop planning.

But even as a novice, I do have some impressions of WIDS.

1. For faculty it’s a little overwhelming at first. After having taught and created syllabi at several institutions, it seems like overkill for faculty. I’m guessing that the up front investment of time is high, but that it becomes easier and more useful the more you use it. For the organized of you out there, it will beome the place for all course information modules. 
2. In the long run, it could help ensure that all your syllabi and course information is consistent from course to course. Could you be consistent using your own documents as models rather than filling up a database, yes.
3. The real value seems to be for program directors who need to organize standards and collect course data for accreditation. The ability to create documents about course and program requirements for new faculty would be an added bonus.
4. I have not seen how the software aids in course design, only in document creation. I have not found any forms that discuss course design, so I’m not sure how it lives up to that claim. 
5. If I can be forgiven one negative impression, having only gone through half the training, it is that the whole idea of filling in forms and conforming to a rigid glossary of terms is stifling. I would prefer that we promote and learn the core elements of good courses and learning methods and creatively design from those. Teaching is the kind of craft that works differently for different personalities–both teachers and learners–and there needs to be some flexibility to stretch for it all to work. I’m willing to be persuaded that WIDS can work that way, and will come back with an update, when I find out how.

Filed under: administration, course design, document delivery, software, work