Month: October 2015

Coursera

I like my ‘Coursera’ post the best.

http://susant.trubox.ca/wp-admin/post.php?post=16&action=edit       

It seems to me to get just the right balance of personal anecdote and general knowledge so that I feel engaged and ‘on the inside’ but not overwhelmed by it. Also it has a certain economy of writing style which is well suited to the blog format.

In terms of what I’ve learned in this course, I think the distinction between surface and deep teaching and learning has been very important. There is a tendency in the on line education environment to rely on the surface and so lose sight of what deep education looks like. So I also found the alignment discussion very interesting.

I’d like to know how an exclusively on line asynchronous environment would impact most of the theories we’ve looked at, in particular, theories of feedback. I’m also curious about the degree of impact feedback has on excellent students?

Until there is a major rewrite of the course I teach, there’s not much that be done regarding alignment. But in another respect, as I noted elsewhere, I can improve alignment by bringing my comments more into line with the rubric which is available on the course website.

Feedback

I think about feedback a lot and when I do, I especially think about how difficult at first, providing it was for me.  I’ve always added a positive word or two when I thought praise was appropriate. So I was surprised that such words have no effect on learning. I don’t see it altering my practice.

I am currently working on aligning my feedback and the rubric I use on BlackBoard. The most difficult works to comment on are the really good ones!

Coursera

I recently signed up for a Coursera mooc. This was at the general suggestion of my eldest daughter and I was glad she did it. I chose  Plagues, Witches and War which was about historical fiction, something I really like. This was a valuable experience for two main reasons. One, I learned a lot about a genre I love, specifically historical detective novels. And two, I learned a lot about being an online student, specifically how it feels and how these feelings motivate the student to complete the course.

With few exceptions, most of my time spent on the course, I felt alone, on the outside. Sometimes this was fine and others, it presented an obstacle to learning. When was it successful? When the teaching did not assume too much about me. The right balance is difficult but not impossible to achieve.

I felt very disinclined to do the course readings relying entirely for my learning on the audio-video material. Nevertheless, I feel I learned a lot and was able to enjoy all the AV content. From this point of view, I did not find the course to be aligned assuming the teacher intended that his students read the books.

While I was happy that I did well on the quizzes (the only assessment), I found them to test only low level skills.

Cognitive Presence

Prior to the course, I did not know what cognitive presence meant. I now know that it refers to a sort of directionality in the development of critical thinking skills. As the authors of Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer Conferencing in Distance Education say, critical thinking involves a critical discourse methodology and just ‘dumping’ a bunch of ideas together won’t do.

My main question regarding cognitive presence is how to accomplish it outside a conference setting. As an OLFM, I teach courses that are pre-packaged and consumed by individual, isolated students. I assume that how the pre packaged courses are designed can play a role in achieving the right method but does this way of delivering course material fall short of what is required for proper cognitive presence?