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Designing a Course Worth Learning Part 2
I learned about assistive technology when I was on a graduate teaching assistantship and tasked with shadowing a senior graduate assistant before she graduated. I was to then take over her Assistive Technology course for pre-service teachers.Over the years, I’ve gained a greater awareness and understanding of disability and accessibility. But I still have a lot to learn. I believe every instructional designer (and instructor) must be equipped with the knowledge and skills to design accessible courses. As I plan to teach a summer online course, I want to make…
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Online Teaching is like Learning a New Language
Online Teaching is Like Learning a New Language Is online teaching like learning a new language? Do bilingual (or multilingual) teachers find it easier to switch from face-to-face to online teaching? For several weeks, I pondered these questions as I tarried at the intersection of two/three facets of my life — online teaching, online course design and learning French (Français or Française?). The second question is a hypothesis I intend to investigate! Le magazine de l’Alliance de Singapour 1993 [Back Story: When I was twelve or thirteen, I wanted to learn…
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The Making of a Course Trailer
The course trailer is up on YouTube. Although it runs for less than 2 minutes, it entails a tremendous amount of work. Many people chipped in to help out given the tight time-frame we had to churn it out. To them I owe a debt of gratitude. Their names were not mentioned in the credits and I would like to use this space to express my appreciation to them.Thank you, in no particular order, Alice Westerberg, Suzie Fairman, Molly Ransone, Emma Gauthier, Aditi Jain and Arianna DeCastro (both the actresses), Marcus…
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Olé, Olé, Olé
According to Wikipedia (Oops! The mention of this word might start a friendly argument!), the word “olé” might refer to several things, including a football chant, with the star footballer’s name added to the end. In my case, I refer to both a rah-rah cheer (Go! VCU OLE!) and a program the ALT Lab is running.Today was Day 1 of the Institute and has been a pretty intense time with lots of ideas presented to participants. We are all going to spend some time tonight doing HW, yup, Home Work!…
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Online Icebreaker: Songs My Mother Taught Me
[Note: This post began as a draft in June 2014 after I heard this tune on a plane. Video description: Antonin Dvorak’s musical composition, Songs My Mother Taught Me, performed by Itzhak Perlman]Different metaphors have been used to describe the learning process; learning is like a game, a conversation, combustion system, an ecosystem … What if learning is like music-making or an inspiration of song? This idea came about when I heard Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma play Dvorak’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” How about using this as an online icebreaker…
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Assessing Student Learning in Online Education Part 1
Assessment types. Besides learning engagement, assessing student learning is one of the top concerns (top 3?) of teachers. This burden is no less lighter for online teachers. Much as teachers might like to banish this bane of teaching from their jobs, assessment (evaluation, retention, accreditation, and all related concerns) won’t go away because “measuring” learning and giving a score/grade to course completion is a deeply embedded element of the institutional culture of formal education. How to give a grade meaningfully is a priority of mine. Recently, the role of rubrics…
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Online Teaching and “Body Language”
Image description: A quotation by Jenifer Ringer, “Terry taught ballet as if it were very important and precious.” Vignette 1: “Terry taught ballet as if it were very important and precious.” – Jenifer Ringer, Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet. Image Description: Feet clad in ballet shoes standing on pointe position A line in a book given to me during the early days of losing my parents; supposedly the heroine’s victory over her struggles would inspire me. A short sentence fraught with meaning and implications. I especially love…
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Help! I am teaching online
I thought about adding these 5 words (my blogpost title) to the trending hashtag in Twitter, #ScaryStoriesIn5Words. Those tweets made Halloween Day somewhat more Halloween for me, lots of drama and jokes. Scary? Not so much at the ALT Lab where I was stationed for livestreamed sessions from the Online Learning Consortium’s International Conference (OLC). Which is a good thing. The turnout wasn’t ideal but a real and urgent need of some faculty or future faculty members emerged from conversations with some attendees. Some major questions were: “I think I’m going to…
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Online Icebreaker: A Life Story Album Cover
As an online introduction, Tina Seelig invited us — participants in her MOOC — to design an album cover of our lives to construct a narrative of who we are. Add to that the creation of a 10-song playlist, fictional or actual songs, and we’ll get some bonus points. I created two album covers. Which one do you think I submitted? A or B? I think these ideas are excellent as icebreakers in online teaching. They afford students multiple means to participate in course conversations. It helped me to reflect,…
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2013 Sloan-C International Conference Notes: Good Work in Online Learning
I returned a call to a friend after returning from the Sloan Consortium’s International Conference at Orlando, Florida. “How was it? The same old people, right?” she asked. It has often intrigued me as a doctoral student that not everyone is interested in going to conferences, after all, it is part of a researcher’s practice, or so we were told — to disseminate ideas/findings and engage with one’s community of practice. Now that I’ve graduated, I still find it exciting to continue with the practice. But my friend’s comment made…
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3 days at Sloan-C ET4Online 2013
As an instructional systems designer/education researcher, I attended sessions at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies for Online Learning with the goal to inform my professional development. In some organic fashion, my interests somehow coagulated into three main areas: 1. How do people learn: what’s the latest in educational psychology and how is it applied to online education? 2. How is instructional design and development enhanced by new technologies? 3. Scholarship of online learning and teaching: What interesting research is being done? Using what methods or instruments?Instinctively, I feel that these topics…
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Accessibility, Uniqueness and Accommodations 1
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” – Anais Nin First, I don’t have a disability and do not speak on behalf of disabled people because I do not know what it is like to not be able to see, hear or not have mobility of all my limbs. Second, I do claim to be unique; I acknowledge that everyone is uniquely different, although some people may be more alike in several ways. Therefore, we each learn and process things differently through our filters.…
