Week 5 Reflection

This week was by far the most entertaining. I don’t know why. I liked learning about the process of the course design. I’m still not sure where our team lies in the process, Ali mentioned in her blog we were in the middle of the evaluation part. I think we are evaluating what we ended with in Givercraft and starting over at the design stage for our teacher training. Mia mentions that last semester we didn’t have enough time to create a teacher training and this will help guide teachers. She also mentions how creating a study guide will help teachers during the process and throughout the training. I couldn’t agree more. I think study guides will be great “grab and go” tools to use when needing to solve a problem, can’t get ahold of us (time zone difference)…etc Matthew mentions how it’s important to have a student centered learning experience. In all of my lessons, I ask the question to the students, but have them discuss their solution and answers/problem solving to each other.

            Letting students discuss with each other provides a deeper part of learning. With online courses, it’s important that the instructor doesn’t lecture only and tell the students what to learn. I mentioned this in my response this week, I am truly thankful that during our meeting Dr. Graham gave us ideas or thoughts to think about, but let us design our own training course for teachers. There were no steps or an outline of what we needed to have in the training course. This is our project and I look forward to making it.

            Our team last semester created Givercraft. It’s so neat to think that Givercraft was our design, our thoughts and no one told us the certain requirements that needed to be there. We were able to choose the book, design the scenarios, create the world….. I think with this kind of course design, students will be successful. If they’re only regurgitating the information, they will never remember or learn if they were more involved.

            I read on a peers blog that they were worried to let others complete a certain task for our project. I mentioned in the comment, how I was too uncertain when working in a group. I have never had a good outcome. I always ended up doing most of the work. I can honestly say, with Givercraft everyone who had an assigned task completed it and worked as a wonderful team. I think if we remember the steps to creating an online course and communicate with each other and ask for guidance if needed when designing we will have a product teachers can use for many years down the road.

            There is no I in team. This is so true. Everyone has to be open and communicate with each other. We need to pick tasks that we feel comfortable completing and trust each other. During our needs assessment meeting, I took the initiative and created an agenda for the meeting. This would help us stay on track and think about the outline of our course. While we were creating questions for the needs assessment, I created the survey to send to the teachers. I shared my screen and received positive feedback and suggestions from my peers.

            This kind of collaboration is key to creating a successful product. It was a lot easier creating the survey with everyone being able to view it. If I had to create it on my own, then send to everyone for approval, there would have been some miscommunication and it would have taken extra time to complete.

            I think with the student centered learning we were able to discuss and complete our needs assessment on a timely manner. I hope we can create the rest of the tools for the training with the same process.

            I’m glad we all agreed to video the trainings. It will be difficult to have all of the teachers attend the training due to time zones. We found this to be difficult during our handshake meeting with Givercraft last semester.

            I will use the course design steps in our next meetings and hopefully we will create a product teachers can use for many years.