Blended Content and Assignments

ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY

Designing an integrated (F2F and online) blended course with a focus on a modular structure of diverse content and learning activities requires careful planning, experimentation, and ongoing feedback. 

REACTION    

Opportunities (and Challenges)

The list of Technology tools for teaching and learning is seemingly endless, continuously refreshed with updated and newer tools, gradually leaving others less tended to behind. There is the consideration of ease-of-use cost, obsolescence (e.g. Google Reader, Dropio, Zaption), and most significantly its potential for learning and assessment. Faculty typically adapt their school's learning management system and after an initial comfort level explore technologies that complement what the LMS lacks or insufficiently provides. 

Help for Faculty

There are number of teaching focused Twitter feeds and chats, blogs, conferences, and courses (in addition to BlendKit of course) that can assist faculty with course design, teaching strategies, and choosing technology materials and tools that have been tested and evaluated by others.  A partial list:

• @facultyfocus
• @profhacker
• @MERLOTorg
• #CanvasChat (for instructors using Canvas)
• Canvas.net (free online courses)
• The Teaching Professor Conference
• FutureLearn.com
• ProfHacker’s list of faculty development blogs including Of Courses Online

Technology Tools and Outside Course Resources

There are blogs, Tweets, free courses, and these teaching with technology lists:

• Technology Tools for Student Engagement for student engagement could use an update
• Berkeley commits to accelerating universal open access
• Teaching and Learning with digital behavioral and social science data

but there is no substitution for face-to-face interactions (meetings, conferences) with faculty, instructional technologists and designers, and students. 

Course Design (including integration into LMS)

The chapter points out that uniformity guides students through the content and helps reinforce learning. To add, a diversity of content provides students with different experiences and perspectives. Instructors can align their structured content and activities into learning management system modules, which are included in most new systems such as Canvas, which will be used in the examples in this post. HTML pages, links, documents, lecture recordings, and videos can be added as course materials to these modules. For activities instructors can include quizzes, discussions, conferences, and collaborations.  

The Canvas.net course United States History is module based as shown in the diagram below.  Regardless of LMS modules and content/activity tools, course organization, learning resources, student engagement, and assessment depend on teaching excellence.

Content creation Tools

The chapter referred to content creation/screencasting tools such as Jing, Camtasia, and Audacity (audio). Snag-it, Screenflow, and Microsoft Office Mix are newer tools that allow instructors to add embedded video, audio, call-outs, and annotations to PowerPoints. Although screen recording software has evolved with more features and improvement, the time to create and produce lecture videos can be considerable. Some instructors prefer the simplicity of PowerPoint’s build-in recording tools to add audio annotations for each slide. However, this process requires students to download the final PowerPoint lecture to their desktop and having the software available to open and play. 

Ideally, enhancements to online presentations tools such as Google Slides will evolve to include live recording and embedding multimedia onto slides such as audio, video, and annotations so that live lectures can be viewed and played online.  

MOST IMPORTANT TAKE-AWAYS

• Designing courses by modules facilitates integration of F2F and online environments
• Uniformity guides students through the content and helps reinforce learning.
• technologies are adopted more readily when cast in the “context of existing teaching and learning activities
• freely available online learning resources provides an opportunity for educators to either link to or create derivative works based upon many educational resources
• Implementing different and new technologies for the first time in a course can be challenging. Start simple to help ensure success for students and faculty and then explore other tools. 

MY FAVORITE QUOTES

“I'd devote more attention to integrating what was going on in the classroom with the online work. This was true even though the project's faculty development sessions repeatedly emphasized the importance of connecting in-class material with out-of-class assignments.”

"When applied to learning, certain activities can be utilized to greater effect when appropriate matching occurs between: the technology used, the learning desired, the context of use, the learner experience, the instructor experience, and the nature of content."

HELPFUL LINKS

• Technology Tools for Student Engagement (needs to be updated)
• MIT Open Courseware
• OpenStax: access to free education materials 
• UCF Educational Repositories
• Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)
• Merlot’s JOLT magazine and the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) have merged their journals into the OLC Online Learning Journal 
• Past issues of JOLT
• ProfHacker’s list of faculty development blogs
• Tweeting in Higher Education: Best Practices
• Opening Up Education
• Berkeley commits to accelerating universal open access
• Flipped Classrooms vs. Blended Courses vs. Hybrid Courses