2011 Campus Technology M02

July 25 2011

Boston 2003

Principles and Practices for Online Courses That Engage Learners

Judith V. Boettcher Designing for Learning University of Florida [email protected]

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Guiding principles: Presence, Community and Personalization Where are you on the novice to expert scale of online teaching? What kind of engagement strategies do you find useful?

2011 Developing expertise in any field takes time and is accomplished step by step, experience by experience, skill upon skill

BECOMING GREAT ONLINE INSTRUCTORS

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F

REQUENTLY

-A

SKED

Q

UESTIONS FROM ONLINE FACULTY

Do I really need to be on my course site every day? What activities really engage my online students?

But wait, how will I lecture? How do I give tests? What are the secrets for being a great online instructor?

How can peer review and collaboration work online? How do I get to know my students if I never see them? How do I know if they understand? What do I do when a student gets behind?

Directions: Get into groups of 2 or 3 based on proximity. Write your questions/challenges on a color stickie and also in your packet on p.3. We’ll post the stickies on the wall for sharing and for reference.

2011 Starting our thinking…. Where are we now?

1. WHAT IS YOUR TOP QUESTION/CHALLENGE IN ENGAGING YOUR ONLINE STUDENTS?

2. WHAT TOPIC WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO DISCUSS ON KEEPING STUDENTS FOCUSED AND SUCCESSFUL?

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2011

Social Media Research

   “Learners are particularly engaged when they experience feelings of "autonomy, competence, and relatedness.”  Katherine Hayles, 2007 Feelings enabled by web 2.0 – 3.0 applications Apps are more about and organizing creating, generating information and content rather than reading or listening to content Foundational feelings for engagement skills while connected to others…” – “An independent person who is developing 5

Environment for Engagement

Grouping & Teaming Strategies

Informal small to medium groupings, collaborative work, peer review Elements of community

Core Learning Principles

Active, involved, doing, zone of proximal development, personalizing

Online Best Practices

Presence, balanced dialogue, core content, continuous assessment Shared experiences, overlapping goals, mutual support, trust and presence*** 2011 Who are the members of a course community? The learners and faculty mentor and any content assistants. Why does building a community support learners and learning? 6

2011 A Selected Set for Today

Core Learning Principles and Best Practices That Matter and That Work

Neurons -P Z Myers 7

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Sources of Ten Learning Principles and Ten Practices

• Inspired and derived from research, instructional design and theory • Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky - My personal favorite • Also inspired by J. Dewey, J. Bruner • Current researchers, writers, such as • Daniel Schacter (Memory) • John Seely Brown (Cognitive apprenticeship) • Roger Schank (Schema theory, knowledge structures • Instructional design theory and practice • Friends, colleagues, many faculty

Ten CLP

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Ten Core Learning Principles

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Ten Best Practices for Teaching Online

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Simplifying a complex process….

only four elements of design 2011 Core Learning Principle 1

EVERY STRUCTURED LEARNING EXPERIENCE HAS FOUR ELEMENTS WITH THE LEARNER AT THE CENTER

LEFramework stage 11

All the world’s a stage… and learning happens on it.

Learning Experiences Framework

• Learner • Mentor-Director • Knowledge-Content Problem • Environment-Context Inspired by Lev Vygotsky… 2011 12

When designing for engagement, need to consider all four elements of instructional experiences – what is the role, function of learner, faculty, content and context? 2011 Core Learning Principles Two through Five (2-5)

GOING DEEPER: LEARNER, MENTOR, KNOWLEDGE AND ENVIRONMENT

CLP Learner 13

What are learners’ baselines? Where are they coming from? Where do they want to go? 2011 Core Learning Principle 2

LEARNERS BRING THEIR OWN PERSONALIZED MENTAL MODELS, SKILLS AND ATTITUDES TO LEARNING EXPERIENCES

Learner's mind 14

In course design, we design for the probable, expected learner; in course delivery, we flex the design to the specific, particular learners within a course.

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VERY IMPORTANT DISTINCTION

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2011

Impact on Learning and Engagement

• Learners will lean forward, step forward when they are reasonably confident that they can build on what they already know • Learners volunteer to lead, write, speak, if they have a reasonable expectation of success and not look stupid • Learners ask questions if they feel safe within the atmosphere of trust and community Move from listening and reading to “participating in the flow of action.” 16

2011 Core Learning Principle 3

FACULTY ARE THE DIRECTORS OF THE LEARNING EXPERIENCES AND MENTORS OF THE INDIVIDUAL LEARNERS

Faculty functions 17

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Roles and Responsibilities of Mentors/Directors

• • •

Designing

and experiences

structuring

the course • Can often be accomplished with a team of faculty and designers for tutors

Directing

and

supporting

the instructional events learners through • Absolutely!

Assessing and certifying

student learning outcomes • Normally the case • Robots (automated systems) and rubrics can help • Also integrate and leverage peer and expert reviews 18

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Impact on Learning and Engagement

• Faculty time is best invested in designing, “teaching presence”, mentoring, coaching and guiding • As a mentor, they step back and let learning happen, step in when appropriate • Watch for difficulties • Watch for frustration • Watch for success and innovation • Support thinking, assess with focus on growth and success 19

2011 Core Learning Principle 4

ALL LEARNERS DO NOT NEED TO LEARN ALL COURSE CONTENT /KNOWLEDGE; ALL LEARNERS DO NEED TO LEARN THE CORE CONCEPTS

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Four Layers of Content

2011 Core Concepts and Principles Applying Core Concepts Problem Analysis and Solving Customized and Personalized 21

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Content: Impact on Learning and Engagement

• Provide core content experiences as basis of shared experiences • Provide range of choices for initial applications and problem sets, scenarios • Design personalized, customized experiences allowing for wide range of content choices and exploration of wide-ranging content Shift from “knowing about” things to “knowing how to be” John Seely Brown and others 22

Core Learning Principle 5 2011

EVERY LEARNING EXPERIENCE OCCURS WITHIN A CONTEXT OR AN ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH THE LEARNER INTERACTS WITH THE KNOWLEDGE, CONTENT OR PROBLEM

Context Examples 23

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Core Learning Principle 5 Environment

• Design for the when, where, with whom and with what resources… • All of these elements make up the environment within which learning occurs Holodeck 24

The Holodeck — Rapid Learning and Entertainment

For authentic, situated learning Dr. Christoph Sensen in the CAVE 2011

Reflection

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2011 Let’s think

Reflection – Engaging Possibilities

• Stop and think • Putting the learner at the center of the design • Consider learner as independent, competent, member of community • Identify one or two impacts of these principles for your thinking? For your colleagues?

• Find a colleague right next to you…(Pair up ) • Share ideas…actions… 26

2011 Be sure to “use your voice”

The Reflection Process

• Sharing the ideas and actions CLP #6 Zone 27

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Core Learning Principle 6

• A very core, very basic idea from Lev Vygotsky (1978) • Enhanced by later work on situated cognition and cognitive apprenticeship by John Seely Brown and others (2006) • Extended by research on embodied cognition (Shapiro, 2010) 28

2011 Core Learning Principle 6

EVERY LEARNER HAS A ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT THAT DEFINES THE SPACE THAT A LEARNER IS READY TO DEVELOP INTO USEFUL KNOWLEDGE

ZPD Definition 29

Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development

2011 A student’s zone of proximal development is… “the distance between the

actual

developmental level as determined by independent problem solving …and the level of

potential

development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers”

Vygotsky, 1968

Using the Zone in Design 30

2011 When learners are ready they want to ”do it themselves”

Implications of ZPD for Design

• Concept of ZPD is similar to “readiness” principle • Suggests the likelihood of a fairly narrow “window of opportunity” or “teaching moment” • What kinds of problems can students solve independently? Or with help? • What is the "task model" that produces the evidence that demonstrates proficiency?

• When can you design in choices and options so natural learning can meet requirements? • How is guidance provided?

• “Just enough help so that students feel as if they did it all by themselves.” 31 Stages of the zone

Stages of a Zone…

2011 Assistance provided by more capable " others” Teachers, experts, peers, coaches Stage 1 Assistance provided by the self Using references, job aids, automonous Internalization, Automatization Fossilization

Continued assistance… can be disruptive and irritating…

De automatization Recursiveness through prior stages Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4

From R. Gallimore and R. Tharp, 1992

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2011

Growing New Concepts

• Important what you know now…these are “receptor cells” • Growing flowers, bushes, thickets, with sticky “stuff” • More you know, the more you can know… • Maybe fast learners are fast because… they have ready templates and receptor cells • Similar to “mind melds”

Fish is Fish

by Leo Lionni 33

Each brain is its own world… (Adapted Mexican Proverb) 2011 Customizing learning means designing learning experiences for the learner. To do this we need to know the learner and what the learner knows and thinks

CONCEPTS, MENTAL MODELS AND LEARNING ZONES

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2011

Getting to Know Learners – How do you do it?

Crowd-sourcing – have students develop the tests and suggest key concepts • How do I know my learners? • What is your favorite strategy for finding out what learners know? • Automated quizzes • Pretests at course beginnings • Open discussion on concepts • Project proposals • Informal questions • Analysis of their questions, comments 35

Let’s brainstorm a few ideas and what works and doesn’t work for you

How Do You Know Your Learners’ ZPDs? (1)

• Listen to what they think • Get them talking and writing about what they know, think they know, might know • Why do they know what they know? • What evidence or data supports that "knowing?" • Structure task scenarios • Ask questions • “Fire” their brain cells • Find their point of knowledge, find their weeds, plants, nodes on which to grow, extend their knowing…

Bloopers

36 2011

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How Do You Know Your Learners’ ZPDs? (2)

• Have them “do” things — evaluate and create • Work through processes • Adopt different perspectives • Suggest solutions • Modify problems • Role play, assume different identities • Develop metacognitive skills • Get them thinking and discussing and asking questions about how they are learning • Ask them to plan their next steps on making the knowledge useful to them

Bloopers

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Statements such as these can reveal the state of concept development 2011

Peeking inside the Brain

• Most of the houses in France are made of plaster of Paris • Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them • The death of Francis Macomber was a turning point in his life… • Definitions • A vacuum is a large, empty space where the Pope lives • A virtuoso is a musician with very high morals • One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second • To keep milk from turning sour, keep it in the cow. • Republicans are some of the sinners featured in the bible. 38

2011 Core Learning Principle 7

CONCEPTS ARE NOT WORDS; CONCEPTS ARE ORGANIZED AND INTRICATE KNOWLEDGE CLUSTERS

Concpt Principle 8 39

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Core Learning Principle 7

• Concepts are more than words. Concepts are organized and intricate knowledge clusters. • Concept formation occurs as a series of intellectual operations between the general and the particular with ever-increasing differentiation. (Vygotsky) • Words, words, words…(Hamlet) only symbols, where is the meaning? • Practice of “making a learner’s thinking visible” helps to determine the state of maturity, richness, completeness of a concept. This practice can show/reveal how the concept formation is progressing... "One-minute summary" Flash of Insight… event 40

2011 Meaning Concept

Concept acquisition is a journey, not a one-time event

Useful concept Osmosis, diversity, mediation 41

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Concepts vs. Words

• "Words take over the function of concepts and serve as means of communication long before they reach the level of concepts characteristic of fully developed thought." Russian Georgian psychologist Dmitri Uznadze Kozulin, Alex. (1990) Vygotsky's Psychology: A Biography of Ideas It’s easy to be misled into thinking students have developed useful concepts. They can often use the words, but they do not understand or know what they mean.

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Peter Senge www.solonline.org

Concepts are Building Blocks of Mental Models

• "Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.” Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline 1990 Mental Models – also called frames, scripts, patterns 2011 43

2011

Processes for Creating Mental Models

• Case-based reasoning research suggests… • Learners iteratively apply what they are learning with real feedback and persist until they are successful • Learners reflect on their experiences, extract what they are doing and articulate it for self and others • Useful resources and activities include • Well-indexed libraries of expert cases and ideas and lessons of other learners • Writing, reading and preparing cases Kolodner, J. L. 2006 44

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Summary: Knowing Our Learners

• Understanding our learners means understanding • What they know, what they think they know and what they are able to express • What they think they want to know • Their understandings are encoded in their brains (Jungle or Tundra) • In their concepts, representations and perspectives of the world • Learning is growing and shaping those encodings and representations 45

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Knowing Your Learners

• Learners • Goals - Grow personalized and customized knowledge; not standardized brains… • Consider their brains — a jungle, a tundra or prairie, a small garden, a flowering plant? • How complex is their network of neurons and dendrites? • How complex and intricate are the images and patterns of their knowledge? • How are their life experiences expressed in their knowledge structure? • What are their “zones of proximal developments?” Fish is Fish 46

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Challenges in Designing Engaging Learning

Design learning experiences where learners are apprenticed to experts and can engaged in "doing" within a cognitively rich and stimulating environment fit to their zone of proximal development. It may be that simple and that difficult.

Challenges - What are the future skills and where are the experts? 47

Reflections and Questions

2011 • Have we answered any of our questions? • What potential insights on our challenges? • What do you expect of your learners? That’s why XXX works or might work!

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2011 Next Session – Session 2 — Linking Principles and Practices to the Questions/Challenges

Let’s Collaborate and Innovate…

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2011

Appendix Slides

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Presences – Social, Teaching and Cognitive Build a learning community Really, really clear expectations and directions – “Teaching presence” 2011 Practices 1, 2, & 3

THREE (OF TEN) BEST PRACTICES

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Garrison Anderson

For Today — Practices 1, 2, & 3

• Be present at the course site • Being there” for your students — your social, teaching and cognitive presence • Create a supportive online community where learners are responsible for each other • Build and use community with learner support and dialogue • Develop a set of explicit expectations for your learners and for yourself • Being very very clear regarding expectations and reinforcing core concepts, and teaching with discussion wraps and a weekly rhythm Brookfield 2011 52

RULE OF THUMB All communications – except confidential messages — are visible on the course site!

Best Practice 1: Be Present at the Course Site

• Launch a course with a strong social presence • Become a 3D person, not just “the expert voice” to your students • Liberal use of tools — announcements and discussion board postings – • Communicate that you • Care about who your students are • Care about their questions and concerns • Be generally "present" to do the mentoring and challenging that teaching is all about.

2011 53 BP1 - Be present 2

Policies on Presence

A Good Practice Have a forum for questions to diversify dialogue and extend responsibility for learning support • Be very clear about how often you and your learners will be "in" the course site/classroom • You — posting/reading/being there every day if possible; "obviously, significantly present" by posting three-four times a week • Learners — minimum of three-four days a week, although highly variable • Be specific about how learners are to "be" present in discussion postings, supporting learning and each other • Institutional policies • Responses within 24/48 hours • Students’ presence in the course site • FAQ Forum, place for peer questions and help 2011 Note: "Teaching Presence" refers to the design, direction, facilitation and feedback, from a faculty in a course. 54

Social Presence Teaching Presence Cognitive Presence 2011 The three presences are based on

Online Collaboration Principles

by D. R. Garrison (2006) and

Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education

by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000)

LOTS ABOUT PRESENCE THE THREE PRESENCES

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Social Presence - Faculty

• Being a person, being "real" to your learners • Social presence - the ability to project oneself socially and affectively in a virtual environment • Some Ideas • Picture — in context • Short bio • Favorite food • Interesting stories • How you relax… How do you “make yourself known” to your students? As an expert, as a mentor, as a 3D person?

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Social Presence – Learners …Launching Your Course Community

• An initial get-acquainted discussion forum for learners to get acquainted • Have learners share… • “My favorite movie, or book, or meditation or relaxation is….” • Post one/more of their favorite pictures • Share a pix of where they study/work/learn • Describe their morning commute.. :-) • Where they are in their program, where they work, their strengths, weaknesses, needs • A significant or favorite life experience related to the course to come 57

2011 Syllabus

Teaching Presence – Ready for Action

• Materials prepared in the design and development of the course • Syllabus • Assessment plan with assignments and rubrics • Course framework • Mini-lectures, tutorials, concept introductions, using text, YouTube, podcasts • Posting questions • Project description • Bibliographies, resources, selected texts • Week-by-week overview Note: "Teaching Presence" refers to the design, direction, facilitation and feedback, from a faculty in a course. 58

Teaching Presence – Suggesting, Guiding, Challenging Showing the Way

The three presences “ebb and flow” over the phases of a course (Akyol and Garrison, 2008) • Group presences • Announcements, reminders, guideposts • Supportive, monitoring, questioning, affirming comments in the discussions and forums and blogs etc. • Q&A sessions • Individual presence • Encouraging and shaping of individual and small team projects • Individual feedback, support as may be appropriate 2011 https://voicethread.com/?#q+http:voicethread.comq.b3352.b3352.i28616

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What works for you in getting “inside” your learners’ heads? 2011 "Cognitive Presence" refers to the construction of meaning through sustained communication in a climate of trust.

COGNITIVE PRESENCE

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Entry Statements — Why are you here? What do you want to learn to do? What difference will this make in your life?

Creating a Climate for Building Meaning - "Cognitive Presence"

• Get to know your learners "cognitively" as well as socially • Get to know what learners know now; • In Vygotsky's terms, what are their zones of proximal development? What are they ready to learn? • Identify the knowledge and skills they want to develop • One strategy - Entry Statements • 200-300 words • Personal goal statements • Adapting, making personal course outcome goals 61 2011

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Best Practice 2: Create a Supportive Online Course Community

• Design a course with a balanced set of dialogues • Faculty – learner; learner to learner; learner to resource • Design phases of community • Getting acquainted and sharing goals • Accessing, researching and discussing content activities • Collaborative work on problems, projects, products • Peer-to-peer review and support 62

How many hours per week is an average expectation in your institution?

Best Practice 3: Develop a Set of Clear Expectations

• How you will communicate, how often and response times and methods • How students should be communicating and participating • How much time approximately students should be working on the course each week. • Weekly guide and overview • Set up a "weekly rhythm" for your course 2011 63