Sorry folks for the lateness of this post, but I’m finding that time has not been on my side recently.

Here are some reflections from my reading of Ko & Rossen Chapter 3 and the Seven Principles article, and from touring sample websites.

As I’ve seen by reading many of our posts, there are so many options as to how we present our content to students to reach our learning objectives. I really found the Course Planning Template in the book helpful in getting me to think about each of the units for my History 100 class mentioned in my last post. As I’m teaching each unit of my f2f class this semester, I’ll be filling out the template.

When considering the delivery of course content I really liked the idea of preparing short lectures using either narrated PowerPoint slides or short videos. I’ve always written longer lectures than I should because I constantly think that the students are not reading the textbook –which they often aren’t –and I have to compensate for that. I think that low-stakes testing on the textbook through a CMS would be a great way to allow me to have shorter, more focused lectures and feel more confident that students would have the background necessary to understand the lecture within its proper context.

When discussing online teaching with skeptical colleagues, I’m often bombarded with the question, “How can you verify that the student is taking the test and not someone else?” I found that the book had some good strategies for preventing fraud, but wondered if there are other ways to combat this as well. It seems to me that fraud could be a much bigger problem with MOOCs than with smaller online courses.

I thought that the Seven Principles article was especially good in providing an overall set of principles when considering course design. I really see that faculty-student interaction is important as well as giving timely feedback. I feel that these two factors would be very important in keeping students engaged in an online class. I could see that without contact and feedback, students might think the whole course was on some kind of autopilot.

While reading through everyone’s posts I was also taken by Verena Roberts’ set of principles as well and will keep them always in mind when designing and teaching my course:

Let people learn for themselves
Be there for support – but don’t tell them what to do
Encourage leaders and promote great ideas
Be patient
Foster and develop authentic learning relationships…

Finally, I really liked touring the online courses. If only we could click around them as well. Again, I’m really drawn to the layout of Moodle over Blackboard, but realize that Moodle is only supported by one of the four districts that I teach at. It only we could take our platforms with us. As a historian, Lisa’s Moodle site gave me some ideas and I also liked the layout of Pilar’s Blackboard course. I also was very impressed with Jason Whitesitt’s World Literature at Yavapai Community College. Very cool and I learned about the great world literature resources at the Annenberg Foundation website. Also, he uses a Web 2.0 tool called Voicethread; has anyone used it?