Week5: Online Student Role and stategies

Simply, I just want list the key roles or strategies for online students after exploring some of the student readiness checklist resources that Dr. Bonk posted.
- be self-motivated and self-disciplined
- have good communication skills (written communication skills, be polite ...)
- select the right online course that matches personal education needs and learning style
- become familiar with format of the course
- identify all equipment & tools for the course
- be an active participant
- elicit the help of support system
- be open minded about sharing
- create a peer-learning group

Below link includes that some of the student readiness checklist resources to explore.
https://oncourse.iu.edu/access/content/user/jahwang/week5_student_readiness.doc

Week 4 Small Group Notes: Online Teacher

This is the summarized notes of group discussion for Week 4.
(Week 4 Small Group Notes)

A. Our group felt that the two most pressing issues for an instructor online were

• The time it takes to effectively prepare the materials and other resources, facilitate discussions and collaborations, integration of technology into course
• The level of technical expertise that is required of the instructor and also the support and resources needed to learn existing technology available and ability to keep us with the current trends
• Degree of teacher participation in the online course
• When to intervene. Time to intervene.
• How to motivate students to keep them engaged
• Changing role of the teacher—tension between traditional instructional expectations and learner-centered ones
• Incentives needed to teach online
• How to confront pedagogical issues online
• readiness
  - willingness/ role change/balance between student-centeredness & course goals
• Online academic authenticity: how to deal with inauthentic work by students?
  
  
  B. The roles of the instructor that all of us felt were important we
• Teacher as learner
• Teacher as facilitator
• The instructor providing the infrastructure required for students to have an optimal learning environment.
• Roles are changing
• Teacher as parent
• Teacher as assister or guide to learning
• Teacher as facilitator to individualize learning
• Teacher facilitates student collaboration
• How to establish conditions for an online learning community
• The instructor providing the infrastructure required for students to have an optimal learning environment.
• community builder

C. Incentives we all felt would be important to consider were

• Release time, recognition and tenure
• The opportunity to use technology that might not other been available, instance laptops or PDAs
• Intrinsic motivators—the desire to improve the learning environment for students
• Internal things like satisfaction
• External things like rewards
• Real world activities and connections
• Newness—just to have a chance to do this
• Recognize and reward regularly
• More teaching stuff at one’s fingertips—
• New skills, new competencies, new learning
• Possible research publications
• learning new technology
• innovation & adaptability
• meeting different learner needs
• future employability
• flexible work
• promotion
  
  D. Support that instructors would find valuable
• Communities of learning
• Instructional Designers as resources to help instructors design online courses.
• Self-help if not getting support from organization
• Training
• Private consulting
• Mentoring and tutoring
• Course assessment development support
• Administrative support
• technical
• pedagogical
  
  E. Expectations
• Adequate funding, support and resources for technology should be available to help design and facilitate online classes.
• Students expect you to be available 24 hours a day.
• Technology would decrease the amount of time required to facilitate class
• Online 24 hours X 7 days X 52 weeks
• Technology will work
  Unrealistic expectatio
• Can develop a healthy learning community online
• Flexibility will be there
• Expect to try some new things
• get information quickly
• better quality of instruction
• students need to be prepared

Week 4: Teacher Issues, Roles, Incentives, Supports, and Expectations

Dr. Bonk asked: "As you complete your readings for the week, compile some notecards of teacher issues (I), roles (R), incentives (I), supports (S), and expectations (E) (acronym is I-RISE) in online environments."

Here are my opinions about this:
* Teahcher Issues (I):
- teacher roles/learner roles
- percentage of teacher's participation
- time for preparation
- effort
- funding
- mindset change

*Roles (R)
(I think the roles might be vary based on the particular circumstances of a specific event and prior knowledge, skills, or attitudes of learners.)
- establish the conditions for communication
- provide & organize information & resources
- organize the communication mechanisms
- facilitate student's learning: enhance students' motivation/engagement/ collaborative interaction (as a moderator)
- update the course materials effectively/ quickly
- provide dynamic teaching & learning activities
- support technologies (provide assitance of system)
- be a participant as a peer
- demonstrate & emphasize how to critically evaluate the quality of recourses/ information

*Incentives (I)
- internal incentives: satisfaction of learner-centered learning/ more active communication/ more students' engagement
- external incentives: faculty rewarding system

* Supports (S)
- technology (institutional support)
- training for both technology and mindset change (about technology and learner-centered)
- more time to integrate technology
- policy development
- funding

* Expectations (E)
- builds learning communities among faculty
- creats lifelong learners
- provides greatere flexibitiy for busy faculty
- transforms all teaching for more active learning
- collaborates among teachers/instutions

Week 3:Blended learning

As the readings indicated, I can’t say what a good definition of blended learning is: mixing of instructional delivery media? Mixing instructional methods? Just mixing of F2F and online?
Last spring, I took an IST course that provided students opportunities to write their own research proposals and short research papers for preparing their dissertations. We met biweekly or once three weeks in F2F to check our progress and get some valuable information such as research methods or inquiry strategies. In other times, students posted their own paper and the revised version continuously on the SSF and the instructor and students interacted through discussion forum of the SSF as asking questions or providing feedbacks. I think, unlike traditional instruction, this course was learner-centered and increased accesses and flexibility of peer feedbacks. Differences with today are the course didn’t provide multiple options (such as providing different tasks or roles) based on different learning styles or personal learning pace. This means today’s blended learning has more flexibility than before, I think.

I can’t say what certain percent of a course should be blended. I think it depends on the content of course, characteristics of learners (such as age, fluency level of computer skills, learning paces, or learning methods preferences), environment, and so on. I think there still are issues: What is the blended learning? Is the blended learning appropriate to all of the learning settings? How to design effective blended learning settings?

(I would like to see the figures of the readings on Handbook of Blended Learning soon. ^^ )

Week 2: Framework

Actually, I don't have much knowledge of online learning or distance education… but I have thought they have lots of anecdotal evidences but not enough theoretical bases. (Am I right?)
I particularly liked the critical inquiry framework. This framework describes the community of inquiry with the three elements - social, cognitive, and teaching presence. The focusing on higher-order learning, in particular, critical thinking is more attractive.
Last semester, I took some of SLIS courses and learned Information system success. When I learned DeLone & McLean (1992)’s a taxonomy that has six major dimensions or categories of Information system success – system quality, information quality, use, user satisfaction, individual impact, and organizational impact. I thought it was a wonderful taxonomy to evaluate online learning system because I regard online learning system could be one of information systems. Actually, I tried to assess an online course based on this taxonomy. However, I realized the taxonomy was not enough to assess any online learning or distance learning system because it doesn’t cover pedagogical issues. In this context, I think the critical inquiry framework that regards not only technical issues but also pedagogical issues and organizational issues is useful for distance education.