My First Ever Blog Post

So this is my first ever blog post.  I am pretty excited about it, although I think I’m pretty late in the game.  It’s 2011.  After all, I’m pretty sure Elmo already has his own blog.   I wanted to think of a clever title, but nothing has struck me as yet.  I’ll keep you posted... Wait, that’s IT!

I have followed a couple of blogs for a few years, the first of which was written by our younger daughter who chronicled some of her experiences in medical school.  emilymedstudent.blogspot.org    As Emily got further into the program, her articles became fewer and farther between, but I remain her biggest fan.  (Emily graduated in 2010 and is now a second year emergency resident in Syracuse, NY.)

Day one of EDU 523 was a good one.  It was really nice to be part of a group of adults in a face to face class.   There were so many college and graduate level instructors there that I felt kind of like I had snuck into a faculty meeting.   
After having taken 4 or 5 online courses, it was interesting to hear the instructors talk about the teaching side of an online course. Ironically, the only course I will not be taking online at Post University is this course on Designing and Delivering Online Instruction.   Some of the concerns they expressed were that they were afraid students sometimes had a “surrogate” student take tests for them.  None of my courses have had tests associated with them.  I wish they did.  I much prefer taking quizzes and tests over writing papers and designing projects.  Really.  The instructors also talked about other kinds of plagiarism and I found out the university has some technological ways of detecting such things. There was some discussion about students trying to sneak late assignments onto a discussion board. 

It was such a natural extension of my Post University experience to begin to learn about an “instructor’s” perspective on Blackboard.  We got to play around in a “sandbox,” which really meant we got to begin to experiment with designing little pieces of an online course.  In keeping with the metaphor, we could “dig” in.  I needed to “sift” through some of the parts that didn’t seem to apply to the unit that was already beginning to “form” in my mind.   I could see that many of my colleagues were being exposed to Blackboard for the first time and that they were a bit more overwhelmed than I.

I am also enrolled in the course on Instructional design, so the ADDIE model of instructional design is very fresh in my mind.  The acronym refers to a linear progression of the following steps in design:  model of instruction Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. It is quite serendipitous to be taking these courses together.  Although I have taught K-12 for 17 years, I am finding many gaps in my own understanding of designing instruction.  And I also find that even the very basic things bear repeating.  It is often in the basics of instruction where we fail our students.  The following link contains much more information about instructional design and I would encourage you to turn to page 3 of the booklet and see the relationship that is suggested in one iteration of the ADDIE model. The evaluation step is sort of the hub of the wheel and there is the implication of revision in between each step.   http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED477517.pdf. (Gustafson, 2002)   I find that frequent revision of instructional design is necessary in this profession.  While we don’t want to keep reinventing the wheel, we do want to make meaningful improvements and adaptations for the changes in the road our students are on.

Gustafson, K. a. (2002). Survey of Instructional Development Models. . Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse.

 It is so easy to see things from our own perspectives and forget WHO we are designing and planning for.  For example, the online portion of Post University courses usually contain planned redundancy in order to help the students find several ways to get to the information they need.

I liked hearing how much the Post instructors emphasized keeping in mind the needs of the students.