Online course module (OCM) construction has been an intriguing mystery to me ever since I tried to use Canvas as part of my student teaching experience. It was a disaster and I walked away feeling frustrated. When I started CEP classes at MSU, I felt new hope that online classes could be beautiful, organized, and effective. Learning, in part, how to accomplish that as I created my own OCM was a dream come true.
I chose to condense one of my 15-day reading units into a simpler, 4-lesson module on Google Classroom (each lesson represented about a week of work.) I had to transpose reading strategies from in-person to online activities and found Flipgrid, Padlet, and Google Docs to be useful tools in doing so. Pedagogically, I used Rosenblatt’s (1986) theory of reader transaction: Rather than focusing so much on the historical aspect of the novel, which would mean reading with the goal of gaining information from an efferent lens, I wanted students to have an aesthetic experience, to feel the emotion and color of the book as they read it.
Through the design process of this OCM, I tried to choose simplicity over complexity so the students’ interactions with the novel could shine as their central source of learning. Google Classroom was the learning management system that, to me, made the most sense. It is clean-lined, straightforward, and easy to use (mostly–there were certain drawbacks like no text editor or ability to embed content into the lecture material itself.)
I relied upon online teaching theory as I learned how to create this digital course. First, I referenced the Quality Matters rubric for online teaching, which helped me know what needed to be included and at what caliber. Then I revised what I had created using the Universal Design for Learning framework to increase my lessons’ accessibility. I also acted on what I learned about the importance of developing social presence in a virtual space (Dunlap and Lowenthal, in press), adding small touches like a personal introduction, personable text, and an additional synchronous class meeting.
As this was an experience in design, there were many pitfalls; I’ll list a few. Planning the lessons felt extremely messy and overwhelming–Perhaps an alignment table used from the beginning would have been helpful. Exploring exemplar OCMs was helpful, but I only looked deeply into one or two. Examining many more would have given me additional ideas and options for my own course.It was difficult to balance the demands of a rich, deep learning experience with a desire to make it simple for the students to navigate, especially when it came to assessment. Perhaps looking at more examples would have helped guide that balance. Ultimately, I failed to ask for guidance in the questions I encountered–Now that I’m at the end of the project I wish I would have sought more feedback along the way, which would have yielded an even higher quality result.
Overall, the experience of making my own online course module was rewarding and empowering. I look forward to creating another again soon!
References:
Dunlap, J. C., & Lowenthal, P. R. (in press). The power of presence: Our quest for the right mix of social presence in online courses. In A.P. Mizell & A. A. Piña (Eds.), Real life distance education: Case studies in practice (pp. 41-66). Information Age Publishing. http://catalog.lib.msu.edu/search~/X?search=%22real+life+distance+education%22.
Rosenblatt, L. M. (1986). The aesthetic transaction. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 20, 122-127.
Still a Teacher 