Week 5 Reflection

A.

School leadership must take into account several considerations when planning or implementing instructional technology learning environments to a campus. I have been a campus facilitator in my work experience for a 5A and 6A, 9-12 high schools that on average enrolled between 2,350 to 3,510 students per year with approximately 225-250 faculty, staff and administrators.

I worked closely with our district’s educational technology directors and coordinated with our principals on a variety of issues. In addition, I’m a Texas Beginning Educator Support System Mentor Teacher (TxBESS) and was an active instructor in that initiative from the Texas State Board of Educator Certification from 2005 to present to provide systemic support for teachers to incorporate cohesive instructional technology practices.

Some of the primary considerations for instructional technology begin with, “What is our purpose? What are we trying to accomplish?”

For example, are we talking about day-to-day operations and support for student learning in a computer science course? A writing lab? Teacher instructional support? Different classes will have different needs.

If we are talking about academic instructional support we must determine what available resources we have. Are there going to be back-to-back classes of different sizes using the same equipment – do we have enough resources? Do students have security credentials to login to the computers – is this a beginning class with freshman the first day of class or a class of seniors in the last grading period of the year? Is the appropriate software and resources loaded and available for the course?

Instructional design is done best when all the infrastructure questions have been asked and accounted for. In an ideal setting, they will be. For this discussion, we’ll assume the school has all the equipment they need, and all the students are fed and no external issues to distract from learning.

Many external elements influence student learning (Bates, p.312-318) and we have researched many examples and theories over the course of the DLL program about those elements – there is not one single theories on design practice that is a magic bullet to address every situation.

The challenge for all levels of instructional leadership is to be adaptive and flexible and I think most importantly – listen to what your front-line instructors have to say and be supportive of their efforts and provide constructive help as needed. Secondly, encourage and facilitate your campus instructional staff to collaborate and pool resources.

In terms of design theories, I advocate for a constructivist approach to instruction with the application of active, experiential and authentic student learning. My experience is that sometimes teachers get lost in the woods of district standardized curriculum that they can’t always see opportunities to teach in different ways. An example, could be in geometry class students are designing a structure versus just working problems from a workbook or like in a journalism course, students are out reporting, writing and publishing stories instead of just reading about current events or conceptual ideas.

An article and passage I discovered and cited in earlier courses, “Grounded Practice and the Design of Constructivists Learning Environments” by Hannafin, Hannafin, Land, & Oliver, (1997, p. 107) deconstructs that the overall goal in designing instruction is to provide an environment with the resources for learners to create and control their work and gain understanding. I would add that learners do need guidance or coaching to synthesize information within certain parameters to keep coherence to the lesson.

Active learning environments are a good way to engage students and I think has a secondary benefit of helping teachers control classroom management. It is a bit like holding a wolf by the ears, it can be loud and boisterous, but it can also be fun and allow a variety of learning activities to manifest.

B.

The implementation of my UbD started as a conversation with my colleague Andy Coughlan, director of student publications at Lamar University, about requiring mandatory e-portfolios for all students that contribute to the University Press for academic credit or that are on the student payroll.

Andy Coughlan and I have very copacetic ideas about portfolios in general and he allowed me to fully develop the e-Portfolio requirement. We consulted with the Communication department chair, Natalie Tindall, and the Dean of Fine Arts and Communication, Derina Holtzhausen, and both agree it was a great idea and to provide reports and results of the program. Both the dean and chair added that they would like to use my plan as a model innovation for the Communication Department. In addition, the dean and the chair convened a strategy committee to develop an overall communication department innovation plan and I was asked to participate and submit proposals.

From that point, I developed the first generation of the e-Portfolio plan and Coughlan and I implemented it in Summer 2016 with 3130 Practicum and 4361 Advertising Internship and other 4300-level internship programs. Coughlan supervised and monitored the practicum students and I the internship program. We started off with 12 total students for the summer (comprising Summer I and II, and the mini-sessions).

The framework was presented in a blended environment using a shared Google Drive for class resources, a private Facebook group for discussions and announcements, and free WordPress for students to build their e-portfolios.

The summer production schedule is much different and fragmented compared to a regular 16-week semester. A majority of the interns are working off-campus in industry settings and all students are doing such a disparate variety of work, not all of which is suitable for a typical e-portfolio post or was proprietary and not permissible for public release. We set a goal for students to have at least six (6) posted artifacts with cross-posting to individual and UP social media and web platforms.

Over the course of the summer two students dropped from their internship. One for medical reasons and a second for personal issues. Of the 10 remaining interns, all 10 posted at least six artifacts ranging from narratives of projects, to published stories and projects. One student presented over a dozen artifacts comprising mostly of video and photo web galleries of events from a public relations internship.

We monitored and communicated almost daily within the Facebook chat, held several one-on-one coaching and counseling sessions from the Perkins Newsroom. Eight students responded that incorporating the e-portfolio was an easy process once they created a time management plan. The Facebook page and chat was reported to be an easy and flexible platform for everyone to use.

Two students reported difficulty with posting artifacts because of the proprietary nature of the content they created at their internships and had to rely on personal narratives versus concrete examples. While their grade wasn’t affected by their content, they weren’t pleased with quality of artifacts versus those of some of their peers.

A challenge was the short time period between the end of the first generation and the beginning of the Fall 2016 semester. Adjustments I made were to post a more detailed syllabus outlining permissible artifacts and links to other successful e-portfolios. We retained the Facebook private group and chat.

We had 23 students start the Fall semester with 20 students completing the semester and 16 students completing the minimum requirements for the e-portfolio and four students did not. Four students created and posted approximately two dozen artifacts apiece.

Fall 2016 marked the first responses from students using their e-portfolios for employment applications with students from the first and second-generation reporting. Primarily students applying for positions that had a strong writing or graphic component were required by prospective employers to submit a portfolio of some kind, but all emphasizing digital access to the information. Ten of 28 students from the first and second generation reported being required to submit an e-portfolio and an additional six graduates reported submitting an e-portfolio as supplementary information during an application process.

The third generation was for Spring 2017 and we began to assess whether to create a Blackboard version of the e-portfolio program and to expand it as a departmental-wide initiative. We kept the Facebook private page and chat along with the shared Google Drive. Students accessed the Google Drive less in Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 preferring to research their own questions about WordPress and other platforms or meeting in small groups in the Perkins Newsroom for peer-to-peer tutoring and collaboration.

The Spring semester began with 18 students contributing to the UP and required to create e-portfolios and all 18 students completed the semester with a minimum of six posted artifacts. I am still gathering information from graduates about their employment experiences with their e-portfolios.

C.

Online learning can be a valuable resource for a variety of learners. It serves the opportunity to learn somewhat at our own pace, with some exceptions, notably the five-week class cycle. The online environment provides the opportunity for a broad range of research resources and topics, however from discussions from current and former students, there is some discussion of concerns to the retention and ability to process copious amounts of information in so short of a period of time. The long-range challenge is the retention and use of course related information over time and how it relates to their work environments. One of the criticisms of online learning and e-portfolio use is that the frequency of use tends to cycle down as more time passes from when a student leaves a course (Harapnuik, 2016). I think for the students in the course that are actively or routinely designing courses, the effects and relevance of the program will be longer lasting because it will be assumed they are using the program knowledge on a more frequent basis and that action is self-sustaining function.

From my perspective, I already see how I’m using this information in a day to day basis and I presume that will not change, but only develop more as I’m able to fine tune what I’m doing and with the opportunity to expand my knowledge and abilities into other courses.

The model that online learning seems to serve (especially if you watch the marketing campaigns) the prospective audience is that of older, employed learners seeking to acquire skills to achieve workplace mobility or to re-train from obsolescent occupations or skills to more desirable and technical skills. Online learning, depending on the nature of the instructor, is suitable to both rhetorical and experiential learning, but a lot variables come into play for a course and learning environment to be successful with student achievement. Teaching is more than knowing content, it’s about making a connection to your students. It’s much like what makes a good actor or how to tell a good joke – it’s all in the delivery. The DLL program is no different, there are a variety of instructors with a wide range of delivery styles and, undoubtedly, they all have extensive knowledge about their subject, but to inspire and motivate their students is a different matter entirely that can’t always be defined by a syllabus. It’s not a negative, it’s just reality.

D.

The most enduring understanding that I’m taking from this course is the exposure to the plethora of learning and instructional theories that I’ve been able to research. From the beginning of the program, I have written in several assignments about being excited about being able to provide a framework for my methods that I’ve been using all my career, but had no definable way of describing it other than, “that’s the way I do it” or “that’s the way I saw someone do it.”

During my teacher certification course work some years ago focused primarily on Bloom’s taxonomy and Skinner’s definition of Behaviorism and that was pretty much it.

This program has exposed me to so much more and it has challenged me to think in a more visceral sense of learning takes places and how, as an instructor, I can influence and shape learning to help my students be successful in their learning goals. The program has also exposed for me a better understanding of different research methods.

It’s difficult to calculate everything that I will apply to my teaching because I don’t think I yet, know everything that I would use. Every course has literally been an example of discovery learning because I find so many things that I find useful, relevant and interesting.

Bates, A.W. (2016). “Teaching in a digital age.” Creative Commons CC BY license. Retrieved http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

Hannafin, M. J., Hannafin, K. M., Land, S. M., & Oliver, K. (1997).  Grounded practice and the design of constructivist learning environments.  Educational Technology Research and Development, 45(3), 101-117.

Harapnuik, D. (2016) What if we gave students enough time to learn. Retrieved August 19, 2017 http://www.harapnuik.org/?p=6336

Mayer, R. E. (2009). “Multimedia Learning” (2nd ed). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Planning Questions 22-26

Enter list of successful online programs that you have discovered through your Discussion forum using the space you need.

-The Poynter Institute – www.poynter.org
-The American Copy Editors Society – www.aceseditors.org
– Lynda.com- www.lynda.com