CEP 820 Final Developer's Notebook Entry

Reflect on the critical design decisions and the critical pedagogical decisions you’ve made in the creation of your online course.  Explain the theoretical foundations that have grounded your online course design process.  Also, tell your audience (i.e., would-be online course designers) about the pitfalls you encountered and how to avoid making the same mistakes.  

My online course was created for 3rd Grade students at a small rural school where most students have limited connectivity anywhere other than school.  I decided to focus on the topic of Online Safety because a large population of my students do not have home computers or a reliable internet connection but a lot of them do have access to cell phones and electronic devices and this subject matter is applicable to those devices as well.  Because most of the 3rd Grade students I created this class for have very little online experience my most important goal in designing this course was to keep it simple.  Reanut, et. al. (2006) recommends that teachers “conceptualize resources fluidly and organize materials effectively” and by creating a course that includes lessons that follow a prescribed pattern I am hoping that my students will have little difficulty following the consistent lesson flow I built into the course.  

I also felt that because this subject matter and the forum that it is presented in are such new concepts to my students that building in a lot of collaborative activities would be important.  I included a lot of discussion forum activities that require students to respond thoughtfully to questions regarding the content of the course in the hopes of “inducing increased cognitive effort and reflection” (Murphy, et. al., 2011). These activities also require students to thoughtfully respond to their classmates posts as well, in the hopes that enriching conversations will occur.  In planning activities of this type I am really able to kill two birds with one stone.  Not only are students collaborating and reflecting but they are also learning how to use an important online tool that they will encounter many times as they progress through school.  The activities I have included in this online course such as discussion forums, email activities, and Wiki projects all work to teach my students about online safety while at the same time teaching them how to use discussion forums, email systems, Wikis, and practice keyboarding skills in one stroke.

The pitfalls in this process were relatively simple to overcome.  I initially thought that using a familiar online tool would be my best bet because I already knew the ins and outs and felt comfortable using its many functions.  I really thought that Weebly would be a good platform for my online course, but I soon found out just how short sighted my ideas were.  After formulating a plan for my course and weighing the different options I realized there are a lot of new innovations available online that really offered more useful options than my old tried and true Weebly.  Because I was very intent on having my 3rd Grade students experience online tools such as discussion forums and email systems both Coursesites and Haiku offered more options in that area than Weebly.  Ultimately I chose Haiku because I really felt like all of its options were easy to find and implement.  

The second pitfall I encountered was my intention to keep my design simple so that my students who are very new to this type of technology would be able to do a large portion of the course on their own.  I found more often than not that as soon as I added a content block to my course that there was something else that needed to be added to account for different learning styles.  I would work on each lesson trying to create activities that would appeal to my kinesthetic learners and allow all of the students to step away from the monitor for a few minutes and then I would realize that I hadn’t included any activities for my visual learners.  It was a very frustrating process at first, but I found that as I got more comfortable with Haiku and finally had a good grasp on the concepts that I wanted the students to learn that all of those things started to come more naturally.  The one thing that I found very helpful was using Audacity to record MP3 files of all the text on my course pages because with Audacity it is very easy to cut and paste new sections of recordings to an already existing MP3 file.  When I had to go back and add a content block to a course page then all I had to do was go back to my Audacity recordings and add a new recording sound byte instead of having to record the whole course page over again. By the time I was finishing up my last revisions to my Haiku online course I felt that I had mastered the site well enough to be able to make any adjustments that might be necessary once my students start testing it out in a very efficient and timely manner. Even though I had difficulty in designing my course in a simple and straightforward manner the many facets of Haiku allowed me to keep the material I included in my course simply and straightforward which really was the ultimate goal.