Considering Continuous Improvement in Online Ed

In my face to face course, I'm remembering to review not only the material we covered, but how it was learned. Today I used Moodle chat and had student give similarities and differences between 3 operating systems. I remembered to ask students (using a Consensogram) if they thought the activity helped them understand the differences and similarities. I wasn't surprised that the vast majority enjoyed the chat experience, but I was surprised the some rated it "not worth the time." It's important to keep up with students' learning experiences so that you understand how the minority is learning. If I forget the minority, we may as a a class, never reach the highest mark of 100% proficient in the skills/concepts I'm trying to teach them.

To translate this to the online environment, I will post some surveys and ask students to rate their learning activities over the next few weeks. This will help me decide the kinds of activities they should repeat and those I should reconsider.

Mission Statements and Community Building in Online Ed

So, I'm sitting in a Baldridge training today (again), and the presenter is showing us how to create a class mission statement (again), and I begin wondering if a mission statement would work in an online course.

I'm not knocking mission statements or Baldridge training. I think mission statements do the trick for getting students and teachers relating about why they are spending about 180 hours together. Will it work in the online course?

There are specific processes for developing a mission statement: all stakeholders have a voice, usually in the form of a post-it note; ideas are shared; the majority is represented; clarification of the components (what will be learned, who will be involved in the learning, and what is required to learn the material) occurs.

How can this process be paralleled online? Will it help foster a sense of community? Will it help those struggling students understand why we're here? Will it help the instructor recognize if some material/assignments are irrelevant?

Essential Questions

I've used essential questions in my planning of assignments. I have (on occassion) remembered to highlight those essential questions for my students and have them consider them before a lesson. I have also (on occassion) brought the students back to the essential question at the end of a unit/lesson to help them guage their learning.

Exercising this methodology with every lesson is a strategy that helps students develop their metacognitive skills. I must apply this with every new concept in my online and my face to face courses. That's one of my goals. Implementing it and analyzing its effectiveness will take some organization.

Twitter in Education

I've been thinking a lot about using Twitter to get my students connected not only to a text they read, but also to each other as they read it. Some students are amazing at finding support material to help them understand the context of a novel. Some are good at reviewing summaries of dense text before reading. It would be great if they relied on each other for support as they read a novel. Twitter to the rescue! Managing students in an online course as the learn about Twitter and then post helpful information is probably going to be a challenge, but I'm going to try it.

A great resource for educators wanting to learn more about Twitter
http://isabellejones.blogspot.com/2009/04/twitter-in-educationspreading-word.html