Week 3 Reflections

For our reflections this week we’ve been asked to address the following questions:

• In what ways have your interactions with people in your CoP and with people in this course caused a change in your ideas about instructional design? 
• How might you integrate those changes into your daily ID practices at your institution? 
• Do you think you'll have to overcome any resistance to those changes? 
• What new information have you learned towards your learning goals stated in Week 1 from your interactions in your communities this week? 

I don’t think that any of my ideas about instructional design have been necessarily changed, but rather they’ve been expanded upon and reinforced. For example, I am more convinced than ever that good instructional design is imperative to the success of a course and the learners involved. This statement is common sense within the context of this course and the CoP I’ve joined, however, many educators, program managers, etc. still believe that F2F courses can simply be ‘put online’ as they are.

As a faculty member, I’ve been learning a lot about good instructional design practices that I can integrate into the development of my own courses. What I hope to be able to do in the future, is to help my institution standardize our online programming and include some of these instructional design practices. At the moment, a learner will have a very different experience moving within courses in our online programs. I believe there’s a lot of wasted time as students have to orient themselves to each new course. As the literature points out, this adds to the cognitive load for the student and serves as a distraction from the objectives of the course. I don't foresee any major resistance to this change, as the college realizes this need and is taking steps towards a more standardized approach to online learning.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been very successful in finding information about e-portfolio use in the CoP that I’ve chosen. Perhaps it’s not a current topic? I have, however found more information through my own research. I’m going to spend some time looking at a resource compiled by Dr. Helen Barrett that lists several free online tools for e-portfolio development.

With respect to micro-learning, most of the information I’ve read continues to center around corporate training, however I did find this interesting posting about micro-learning being used in higher education in The International Institute for Innovative Instruction, titled How Do Students Respond to Micro-learning? I’m still not quite certain how to apply it to my context, so I’ll keep researching.

My research into one of the theories I’ve chosen to look at has proven to be very interesting and relevant to my context. The Theory of Multiliteracies looks at how English as a global language is changing (due to globalization and immigration) to include other kinds of Englishes. It also looks at how technology and the use of multimedia is changing how we communicate. Given these changes, education to evolve to reflect these multimodal ways of communication. I found this interesting blog posting about Multiliteracies Theory.

For the upcoming weeks, I’ve registered for a few webinars on assessments using VoiceThread and ways to energize virtual learners. I’m also continuing my involvement in the CoP that are more relevant to my context of language learning (LearnIT2teach and Tutela) as well as the new groups I have joined through the course. The learning continues!