I have gone through and coded each of my posts as falling into each of the categories of cognitive inquiry: triggering event, exploration, integration, and resolution. I definitely found that fewer posts fell into the resolution phase. Lots of posts made it through to the integration phase. However, the integration posts did make it through …
Author Archives: rreudink
Post 6: Reflection
The time has come to reflect on this course and finish my blog. I generally enjoyed the focus on teaching practice and bringing everything together from all three courses. The most important lessons I learned were around facilitation principles, many of which I already applied but would like to improve on. Overall, the course has …
Interview: OTL 301 Post 4
Below is a summary of my conversation with a colleague who also teaches continuous entry courses at TRU. Q1. What types of courses do you teach? Ecology and more specifically Animal Behaviour and Evolution Q2. What types of assignments do you find encourage either interaction with you or between students, for example, on a blog? …
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 …
Portfolio Update
Did you miss the Learning Portfolio, I’ve updated mine and link to it here or at the menu at the top of the page. Learn more strategies for effective engagement through improving social presence! https://rreudink.trubox.ca/category/learning-activities-portfolio/
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 …