Ross virtual blendedlearning

Editor's Notes

• #3: I started teaching 25 years ago this year in the small town of Clute, Texas, in Brazosport ISD, after graduating from UT Austin with my Master’s degree in Music. I taught there for 3 years and then 7 more in my home state of Virginia. I was chaperoning students to an event at Virginia Tech, when I was offered the chance to go back to school for free. I got to work with the marching band but study instruction design. After graduating from Tech, I worked for 10 years an educational non-profit where I managed parts of two multi-million dollar grants from the U.S. Department of Education, focusing on technology integration. That work helped me to connect with teachers, district personnel, and leaders from many states—especially in the Southeast—and some of the staff at the U.S. Department of Education.I’m the co-author of the first college textbook to address the new ISTE National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers which will come out in it’s second edition next year, and—perhaps the reason I’m here today—I released a book about online professional development last year for Corwin Press that includes a framework for developing your own online PD and stories from successful programs from across the country. I continue to work with schools and districts across the country, including several district-wide blended learning and BYOD initiatives and one nearby 1-to-1 program in Durant, Oklahoma, just over the border. I talk about technology planning, integration, and online professional development a lot, but I’m glad to be here to work with you on one of my favorite topics—instructional design. To me, it’s the essence of teaching, and no matter what I’ve done, the one thing I feel most comfortable doing is teaching. So that’s me. Let’s learn a little bit about you.
• #4: I’m sure some of you have used or seen Poll Everywhere. It’s a free, real-time poll you can use to gather information from an audience. You can text one of these codes to the number 37607, or if you have a device with a web browser, you can submit the code at PollEV.com. The options are:
• #5: My colleague, Kathy Cennamo (another UT grad), taught me that the role of an instructional design is to be an advocate for the learner. And so today I thought I spend a little bit of time going over how I do that as an instructional designer. I’m sure you often do that as teachers, but teaching online or in a blended situation can be unique, but the end goal is always the same: successful learning.So today, we’ll go over these topics…
• #6: Technology’s Blinding EffectHistorically, educators and others have had some interesting reactions to technology, even educators who like technology like you and me. For some reason, technology has what I refer to as a “blinding effect,” when it comes to it’s use in learning. Sometimes we get so carried away by all the cool things that technology can do that we forget some of the basic principles of what we know makes good teaching and learning. If you were teaching in the 80’s when I started, you’ll remember how PCs began popping up in classrooms and labs across the country. They were going to revolutionize teaching! Unfortunately, the only software available to us at the time was pretty darn awful. It might have used colors, some basic animations, and allowed students to practice basic skills, but in terms of learning it was pretty poor. So poor, I actually got a Thesis out of it. In those cases, the technology took precedence over learning and good instructional design. Times are different now in terms of instructional software. We’ve evolved past that early stage and actually have some very effective software applications that support student learning, some of which you probably use in your own classroom.Unfortunately, as history is wont to do, it has been repeating itself. About 10 years ago, when the then-new web 2.0 applications made it easier for anyone to create and share information online, we suffered that same blinding effect of technology as early online programs began to be established, especially in industry and higher education. In these early endeavors, many programs focused on the technology with rudimentary presentation of information but ease in collecting and reporting student data. The result, once again, was a lot of boring and ineffective instruction with super low completion rates. Rates no face-to-face school would have survived. Again, we’ve progressed through some of those early experiments and there are model programs for online learning that again rely on designing good instruction and focusing on the learning first. That wave hasn’t gone out to sea, however. The fastest growing area of online learning now taking place in the K-12 arena, especially at the district level, which is probably why we’re all here today. But what we’re seeing flooding the market, once again, is poor instruction masked by bells and whistles. Read-click-yawn. Read-click-yawn. We don’t need to make those mistakes again, so today will be about learning a little from the past so we can skip forward to effective instruction.There are other recent cases of the blinding effect of technology. It seems like we’re doomed to repeat ourselves. Yes, there may be an app for your phone or iPad for just about anything, but if you’re trying to incorporate some of these new mobile technologies into your teaching and learning, you know how many poorly designed apps you have to wade through until you find a winner. And teachers across the country are blending and flipping their classrooms, but in many of those settings I see the technology taking center stage and learning falls out of focus. Students everywhere no longer need to listen to a boring lecture in class and take home a worksheet for homework. Instead, they can view a video of a boring lecture at home and work on that worksheet in school. We can do better. We do that by focusing on learning.
• #7: Unfortunately, as history is wont to do, it has been repeating itself. About 10 years ago, when the then-new web 2.0 applications made it easier for anyone to create and share information online, we suffered that same blinding effect of technology as early online programs began to be established, especially in industry and higher education. In these early endeavors, many programs focused on the technology with rudimentary presentation of information but ease in collecting and reporting student data. The result, once again, was a lot of boring and ineffective instruction with super low completion rates. Rates no face-to-face school would have survived. Again, we’ve progressed through some of those early experiments and there are model programs for online learning that again rely on designing good instruction and focusing on the learning first. That wave hasn’t gone out to sea, however. The fastest growing area of online learning now taking place in the K-12 arena, especially at the district level, which is probably why we’re all here today. But what we’re seeing flooding the market, once again, is poor instruction masked by bells and whistles. Read-click-yawn. Read-click-yawn. We don’t need to make those mistakes again, so today will be about learning a little from the past so we can skip forward to effective instruction.There are other recent cases of the blinding effect of technology. It seems like we’re doomed to repeat ourselves. Yes, there may be an app for your phone or iPad for just about anything, but if you’re trying to incorporate some of these new mobile technologies into your teaching and learning, you know how many poorly designed apps you have to wade through until you find a winner. And teachers across the country are blending and flipping their classrooms, but in many of those settings I see the technology taking center stage and learning falls out of focus. Students everywhere no longer need to listen to a boring lecture in class and take home a worksheet for homework. Instead, they can view a video of a boring lecture at home and work on that worksheet in school. We can do better. We do that by focusing on learning.
• #8: There are other recent cases of the blinding effect of technology. It seems like we’re doomed to repeat ourselves. Yes, there may be an app for your phone or iPad for just about anything, but if you’re trying to incorporate some of these new mobile technologies into your teaching and learning, you know how many poorly designed apps you have to wade through until you find a winner. And teachers across the country are blending and flipping their classrooms, but in many of those settings I see the technology taking center stage and learning falls out of focus. Students everywhere no longer need to listen to a boring lecture in class and take home a worksheet for homework. Instead, they can view a video of a boring lecture at home and work on that worksheet in school. We can do better. We do that by focusing on learning.
• #9: Another thing that history has taught us is that educators, I believe at both the individual and organizational level, often move through a continuum of adoption when it comes to technology. The first people to determine this were researchers for the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow project in the late 80’s, but several different continua have been developed over the years, including the new 4-stage continuum developed by ISTE. ACOT’s original continuum had 5 stages.No matter how many stages you can or want to identify, generally, when technology is introduced into the mix, we do the following (if we go down the continuum and don’t just reject it altogether).The first thing is we figure out how to use the technology to do what we already know how to do. If we know how to use worksheets we figure out how to use technology to do worksheets. If we can do inquiry learning, we figure out how to use the technology to replicate inquiry learning. Replicate is a good word for this part of the continuum. We use technology to replicate what we can do. And while not always the case, on this early stage of the continuum we tend to see more teacher-directed instruction.As we become comfortable with the technology, we learn that it can do other things for us. I can replicate a five-paragraph essay with a word processor, but I can also let it run spell check or use the commenting feature to have kids peer review their essays. Maybe they can even collaborate on a document online and import images, videos, and links to other resources. Common descriptors of these kinds of behaviors are Adoption or Adaptation.Over time, we might see that the technology can help us do things we couldn’t do without it. We can take a virtual field trip of The Louvre without leaving our classrooms. Or our students can create multimedia documentaries of their families and our communities and create an online living memory project in which current and former residents share information. There are many other examples, but when we get to this stage, it’s often called something like Innovation or Transformation. Learning environments in this case are often more student-centered. What’s important is the technology helps us do something we couldn’t do without it. And hopefully, that’s all tied to good learning.So, what makes good learning?
• #10: Consider a time where you participated in a really successful learning event. This can be formal or informal, in school or elsewhere, and you can have been the teacher or student. Think about that learning. What made it so good? Share your ideas with those around you and come up with one word to typify good learning. Then, I want you to share your word through another poll. I’ll pull that page up while you’re talking.
• #11: Let’s see if I came up with some of the same words:These are the two words that most people I work with want out of their online learning. They want it to be engaging and interactive. When they say these things, however, what they really mean is they want the TECHNOLOGY to be engaging and interactive. They want sounds! Bright lights! And especially video. They want avatars and games! They want to be the George Lucas or Steven Spielberg of online learning—and usually Harrison Ford, too, because they usually want to star in their own videos. And I assure them that if their checkbook is big enough there’s no reason they can’t have it. But what I try to do in most cases is refocus their attention. Yes, they can have engaging and interactive, but the LEARNING has to be engaging and interactive. The technology just supports it. Consider what we’ve done already. If too many of you aren’t checking your e-mail or Twitter accounts, then so far maybe this has been a little bit engaging. You can tell me later whether it was or not. Or maybe you don’t have to. And have we had any interaction? Were we interactive? Did we need any technology for that? You don’t have to tell me, but what’s been your favorite part so far? My guess is it was the simple act of having you access prior knowledge, reflect on your own understandings, share your ideas and experiences, and come to shared understanding. In other words, our small group activity. But all of these things are good instructional strategies. They can be supported by technology, such as our little poll, but they don’t have to be. What was more important?
• #12: There are several instructional design models out there. In a recent study by another colleague of mine, Peg Ertmer at Purdue, Peg and her graduate students found that instructional designers use these models to varying degrees, some more than others. They don’t necessarily follow the models every time step-by-step, but they use them as a mental check-up to jog their memories and make sure they’re staying focused on the learning. I’m going to share two models I use with you and then look into one in a little more detail.The first one may be one that many of you may be familiar with and may use in your own instruction. It’s the “Understanding by Design” framework developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. This is a model that uses a process commonly referred to as “backwards design,” because the designer—who is usually the teacher—focuses on developing an assessment early on and then working backwards to ensure that all of the content, practice, and activities that lead up to that assessment are adequately covered in their instruction.Backwards design is a bit of a misnomer, though, because the process is actually very goal-oriented. Unfortunately, I run across a lot of teachers who have some general or basic knowledge about the term “backwards design” and related it to the Understanding by Design model, but it’s very surface-level knowledge. Understanding by Design, which I really like as a design model, is actually the embodiment of a larger philosophy that does play out with some practical steps you can follow to design good instruction. It uses the concepts of Big Ideas and Essential Questions, which are important for helping students transfer their knowledge and skills into new settingsGoals and Learning outcomes, which are usually determined by content standards, andPerformance Tasks, which go beyond they typical unit test or summary project and are often complex, open-ended problems with no one correct answer that require students to “do” the subject being studied—sometimes “do” multiple subjects at onceUbD also encourages ongoing formative assessment and differentiated instruction. UbD used these terms before they became buzzwords in our current lexicon. But UbD is not plug-and-play and not everyone is ready for it. Remember the continuum? If your on the more teacher-directed end of the continuum relying on lecture, isolated practice, and corrective feedback, you may not be ready for UbD. HOWEVER, if UbD is widely accepted and used in your current situation, you can use it to design effective blended or online learning. Because ultimately, what the model asks you to do is…
• #13: Set learning goals (based on your Big Ideas or Essential Questions which are drawn from your content standards)These goals dictate what type of assessments will give you the evidence you need to know your students know and can do what you want them to do.And these assessments will inform the type of instructional activities you’ll design.Based on all of these factors, you can find technology that supports all of these facets of the process. If your goals dictate a certain type of performance and you have technology that supports that performance, you can incorporate that technology in your assessments and instruction. This is actually a good step for beginning to determine appropriate technologies in any learning environment, online or not, because in this model learning comes first and technology choices are based on desired learning.
• #15: Now, I know that you deal with your students day in and day out, but I think it’s worth the time for you to take just a few moments to really consider who’s going to participate in your courses and why. You need to understand their motivation for taking your courses, and what kind of supports they might need while they’re there.Very often, people set out designing courses for what I call, the “Super Learner.” The Super Learners knows how to follow directions, is self-directed, can make meaning from text, and will sit through boring videos or click and read and click and read all because he or she knows how the game of school is played and this is what you do to be successful at that game. Unfortunately, many of the people who enroll in our courses are not Super Learners. And that’s becoming especially true with online learning at the K-12 level as more and more courses are being offered. My home state of Virginia has followed the lead of some others, and that is the governor just passed legislation that all students must complete at least one online course before they graduate. That means every child—regardless of their motivation, literacy or numeracy skills, learning abilities, or even whether they have access to an online course—if such a course actually existed, must be enrolled. The Virginia Department of Education is scrambling! Sure, there are companies that will offer your child a course online, but how good is it? When you talk about a high-quality course that enrolls people other than Super Learners, you’ve got a big challenge.
• #16: My suggestion is you get to know your learners a little better. Here’s an example we did in West Virginia. The Department of Education there was embarking on a journey to provide 24/7 access to high-quality learning for all K-12 students and their parents any time, anywhere. What we did there is create some scenarios of students, one high, one moderate, and one that had more challenges to success. This short video is for the last of those students.This is an example of something called scenario-based design, but you don’t have to get that fancy. We ended up using short written scenarios of each student type. We did have some fun with them and posted them on a fake Facebook site we called Spacebook, but it had all the same information. It wasn’t too difficult to come up with the scenarios, and debating about how accurate they were was actually helpful in conducting our audience analysis. We’ll cover that more in my later sessions.Just keep the learners in mind. To better understand the students who will be enrolled in the courses you are designing, talk to them. You can do a formal survey, but sometimes just talking to a few of them can help. And talk to their parents, since they will often play an important role in how successful your students are. A simple way to keep your learners in mind is to collect pictures or make a collage of the students you plan to serve. Keep them on your desk or your desktop as you are working and refer to them often.
• #17: Once you have a more thorough understanding of your learners, another step I suggest you consider is doing an instructional analysis. You probably have the beginnings of these or even some mature versions of these in your scope and sequence documents, which some districts use to create pacing guides. Those are good resources to use. If they do the work for you, great. But you may want to take a little bit of time to dig just a little deeper.Remember that both of these instructional design models are goal-oriented. They’re intended to help all of your learners reach some goal. So what an instructional analysis does is start with that goal—the description of a successful learner—and works backwards. Once we’ve come up with a goal statement we’re comfortable with, I ask the question, “What do I have to know and be able to do to do that?” That starts the conversation going and begins to break the goal down into parts. Every time I break it down into a component part, I ask again, “What do I have to know and be able to do to do that?” At some point, someone will say, “Well, they should already know how to do that,” and you can stop—after you list those things. Those things are your prerequisites, which can be important to identify. They’re also good marketing material, because now you know that the prerequisite is not sitting in some class somewhere prior to enrolling in this one, but it’s a list of things you should know and be able to do to be successful in this course.The instructional analysis also gives you those benchmarks you’ll use to create your assessments. When you come to key skills, skills and knowledge that are necessary to move up to the next level, you know you’ll need an assessment there. So, in effect, you’re actually preparing for that step.Your instructional analysis also gives you more important information, and that’s a suggestion as to how a student should demonstrate those skills. This begins to suggest different types of technologies that may be useful to support successful performance. If the instructional analysis says that your students need to demonstrate their skills and knowledge by using a graphing calculator, or a spreadsheet, or a data probe, or a basketball, or a clarinet…you’re going to need to incorporate these things into your instruction AND assessments.I do encourage you to start with your scope and sequence documents. Save yourself some time whenever you can, but if those documents go far enough and don’t explicitly demonstrate how the skills and knowledge are connected together, how they should be demonstrated, and what you’re NOT going to teach, you may want to spend some extra time going through this process.
• #18: Motivational Design is not a step in an instructional design model. It is, however, something that is easy to understand and one that I find really useful. I use a model for promoting higher levels of motivation, called the ARCS model, developed by John Keller from Florida State. It’s a simple acronym that has been really helpful. ARCS stands forAttentionRelevanceConfidenceSatisfactionAll this means is that you have to purposefully design your instruction that:Grabs and keeps the attention of your learner. You want to draw them in at first, point their attention to critical information, and keep their attention throughout the course. You can do this in a variety of ways, including engaging media, having activities that are enjoyable and challenging, and visually through arrows and charts and highlighting and the like. You want to be careful about going overboard. Having too many different colors and fonts and bright, shiny objects actually decreases attention. Be judicious.
• #19: Relevance is something that will come from your audience analysis and instructional analysis. All throughout your instruction you should provide information that makes that connection to the learner. They should clearly know and be able to answer, “Why is this important?” or “Why do I have to study this?” You make content relevant through your choice of imagery and writing style, by incorporating examples that are relevant to the content AND the audience, and by helping the learner develop relevant skills they’ll use after the class is through.
• #20: Throughout your instruction, you want to help encourage your students to be successful. You want to instill confidence in them so they believe they can be successful. One way to do this is by building a trajectory activities that begin with something everyone can do and then building complexity over time. Of course, you can do this through language and by providing examples of people “just like me” who have done this very thing before. Confidence may not be something you’ve considered developing into your instruction, but, I know you can!
• #21: Finally, satisfaction suggests that the learner feels a sense of accomplishment. Because your content is relevant and has kept their attention, they’ll be satisfied when they successfully complete activities, and ultimately finish the course. One of the best ways to promote satisfaction is to provide activities that are of a moderate challenge—ones that are not too easy so students aren’t bored, but also not too hard that they can’t do them, or worse, give up. We’ll talk more about this in my later session, but I just want you to keep these 4 letters in mind as you work through your courses. I try to consider them up front, and then I do a reality check at the end. Did I grab and keep their attention? Did I promote confidence? You can do this. I know you can.
• #22: As educators, we’re all very familiar now with the term Formative Assessment, which we use during instruction to monitor how well are students are doing as well as the effectiveness of our instruction. That’s why I’m hoping the idea of Formative Evaluation of the courses you will develop will be one you’ll embrace. You already know how important formative assessment is, because it let’s you know way in advance if you need to change your instruction. The same is true of formative assessment of your course. If you wait until the end to find out that the content is too hard—or too easy—or that your movies or too big or the students don’t like your graphics, it’s too late. I’ve seen this happen over and over, however, and it ends up in delays, disagreements, and unfortunately, digging deeper into your budgets to make things right. I’ve even seen some projects abandoned because they didn’t collect feedback along the way and there just wasn’t enough time and money to fix it.There are many different ways to conduct formative evaluation, and I’ll go over some of them in my later sessions, but basically you want to have members of your target audience react to some of your content at some point—hopefully pretty early on. Generally, if you can get a module done and even mock up the graphics and other media, you can have people work through it and give you feedback. And you don’t need a lot of people, but you need the right ones. I’m a big fan of Jakob Nielson, who’s a usability expert, and he suggests you only need 5 people, because after that the difference in the feedback tends to plateau. So, finding 5 people to review early drafts or prototypes of your courses shouldn’t be that difficult. You’ve got access to thousands. But just be sure they’re the right people, and by that I mean people who represent your target audience—and not just the “Super Learners”! Get a range of learners.
• #23: Through all of this and we didn’t really talk about technology. But in essence, what I’ve prepared you to do, is to make a better informed decision about the role technology plays in your instruction. Some of your technology choices will be decided for you. For example, you may have to work within the constraints of a given learning management system. But even in that case, there are so many different ways you can pull in content and resources from the web or that can rely on students generating and sharing digital information, that you can move beyond click-read-yawn and really get your learners involved. The message I want to leave you with is that once you’ve made good decisions up front, you can then select the right technology that matches what your audience knows and has access to, what the content dictates, so you can design instruction—and by instruction I mean teaching activities and assessments—so that you’re learners can be successful. And that’s what good instructional designers do.