Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash</p?

I did not really know what I wanted to discuss so I hoped that others would have ideas. Turned out people had really good ideas and there were a few rooms of interest to me: data and privacy, using social media in classrooms, student engagement through blended learning, and building learning communities between remote classrooms using synchronous and asynchronous technology. I attended the last.

We had some sharing of individual experiences of online learning, both synchronous and asynchronous and chatted about our experience with our current program. The two big takeaways for me were that discussing or interacting in some way in a small group is really important to build enough trust to interact, and that a backchannel is valuable to build on this and to incorporate new members into your trusted group. It gave me practical examples of how the C of Communication in learning design that I had been reading about in Conole, Baran and Conole and Brown’s articles could be actually be incorporated into a resource as opposed to a course.

 

So What?

Reflecting on my own experiences in asynchronous online learning and correspondence courses (where there was absolutely no community), I can recognize how implementing small group work and backchannels affected my learning. In the correspondence course, feedback was extremely slow to arrive (yes, back in the day of snail mail). There was no connection at all to other students and you regularly received feedback on an assignment after you had already submitted one or two more assignments. If there had been some community, there would have been more learning from other people’s comments. Eight years after my Philosophy course (in which I received a paltry 68%) a friend took the same correspondence course and it wound up being the same teacher. For the major paper, he was now handing out an exemplar, WHICH WAS MY PAPER THAT EARNED A 68%!!!! Had I given my consent? No. Was my name still on it YES!! Did I have any recourse to complain about it? At the time, no. But I was sort of proud, although I questioned it being an exemplar when I did not receive a great mark on the essay. If there had been some sort of community, I would have found out about this long before AND realized that this professor thought a 68% to be an exemplary mark in an introductory philosophy course. How did the university not recognize that none of his students performed well and that possibly the problem was his marking was extremely stingy?

For my asynchronous courses, the early ones had only a virtual bulletin board/forum system to connect with others. The posts were meant for clarifying questions for the teacher, not community building. It did not feel much different than the old snail mail correspondence course, though you could get responses more easily if the teacher looked at the board more than once every week or two. More recently, courses I have taken (other than for my masters) include separate forums for personal introductions (required) and sharing of thoughts as well as questions. There are group assignments to encourage community building. These courses also provided an opportunity to reach out to others in a backchannel by directly contacting other participants through the course site. If you want to continue communication after the course, some of the platforms allow access to the real emails (as opposed to communication only through the platform), some allow you back in to email through the platform so it goes to the real email and the person can choose to share their real email with you, and some of the platforms require you to set up real communication before you complete the course. As the asynchronous courses have developed, the design has recognized the value of student to student communication and made it possible to continue connecting during and after the course.

 

Now What?

So, how will this affect my math resource? That is a good question. Originally, I had planned a static type of resource, but I can see that the motivation and self-regulation components would benefit hugely from communication with a teacher and a community of students. Why I did not recognize this before is a shear lack of connecting the dots – any students I gave summer work to always had the opportunity to connect with me, and the successful ones usually did. Having an anonymous board could be the solution so that current and past users of the resources could connect. I would need to monitor the board so that it does not get abused, but I think I can manage that as part of my volunteer work in my retirement. As the users of the board will (should) be underage students, I am not comfortable setting up something where they can interact without observation when I am the person monitoring the entire resource.

Will my website skills be up to this? Well, hopefully I can get my literature review close to done ahead of time so that I can concentrate on the development of the elements. If I start at only one area/topic of the mathematics curriculum, that will likely be sufficient for my project.

As for hosting, I currently maintain a simple website on HostPapa. Years ago, we chose them as their servers were in Canada (and remain in Canada) and they support green energy. I will be doing research again on various hosts, with the aim to find hosts with servers in British Columbia whose privacy policy takes into consideration our province’s privacy requirements.

 

Readings

Baran, E., Correia, A.-P., and Thompson, A. (2011). Transforming online teaching practice: Critical analysis of the literature on the roles and competencies of online teachers. Distance Education, 32(3), 421–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2011.610293.

Conole, G. (2018). Learning design and open education. International Journal of Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://www.ijoer.org/learning-design-and-open-education_doi-10-18278-ijoer-1-1-6/

Conole, G., and Brown, M. (2018). Reflecting on the Impact of the Open Education Movement. Journal of Learning for Development – JL4D, 5(3). Retrieved from http://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/314.

Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. (n.d.). Retrieved November 11, 2019, from http://www.bclaws.ca/EPLibraries/bclaws_new/document/ID/freeside/96165_03#section30.1.