OTL 301: Intended Learning Outcomes

This post is all about intended learning outcomes and associated learning activities that follow the design principles from the community of inquiry model. The following are 2 intended learning outcomes for a course on ecosystem ecology, my area of expertise: Understand and evaluate how published scientific research articles contribute to broader ecological theory Observe and …

OTL 301: Current Practice

In my first post for this course I described a teaching practice related to interacting with students at the beginning of the field research portion of the course. Reading the information on ‘teaching presence’ has not really changed my view of my teaching practice. I think my example is inline with the discussions on teaching …

OTL 301 Getting Started

Thinking about effective teaching practice reminds me of interacting with students when they are starting to plan their independent research project, which is part of their course. Students inevitably start to feel overwhelmed by the range of options of what they could study and once they get passed that then they have to figure out …

Learning Portfolio: Online Interactions

Ensuring appropriate online interactions is something I already do, but I am a strong believer in ongoing improvement. And…writing is an area I can always improve in. There are lots of resources out there on wording criticism and it is more than focusing on ideas vs. people. If I am going to get my course …

Learning Portfolio: Encourage Blog Use

This learning strategy is all about ways to encourage use of the course blog. I comment often and try to stimulate interest. Students are required to comment as part of their blog mark, but I find this often happens at the end of the course as task that has to be done to complete the …

OLTC 201 Integration

In general, this course focused more on topics related to asynchronous learning and the concepts of social presence and specific instructor strategies were the two concepts that most caught my thoughts related to improving engagement and retention. I think it is easy to rationalize implementing additional facilitation strategies and I think improving student engagement is …

Video Introduction

The task for this post was to create a video introduction or tutorial commentary that could be used for multiple courses. I think a video introduction is a great idea for an online learning course as it gives the students a chance to learn more about the course in a different sort of way and …

Learning Portfolio: Ongoing Interaction

One challenge with asynchronous learning is that with students learning at their own pace it can be a challenge to maintain ongoing social interaction, especially with students that go long periods between course activities. This strategy is about ways to improve ongoing social interaction. First, I will add to my welcome email how I will …

Learning Portfolio: Technical Assistance and Resources

In this episode of Learning Portfolio: providing technical assistance and resources to students. My course is already designed and includes clear tutorials for assignments and marking guides available for students and therefore, it is a bit of a challenge to find new strategies to employ in my online teaching. I provide technical advice one on …