Course Description:
To satisfy the requirements for core competency #1: Developing Discipline-Related Teaching Strategies, I took AL 891: Practicum in Blended and Online Learning. The course explored how to effectively design and implement blended and online courses through an open, project based approach. According to the syllabus, “The overall goal of this semester is to understand the process of designing, developing and assessing a blended or fully online course.” The course aimed to achieve this goal through a number of focuses, including copyright and usage assessment, online accessibility requirements, and trends in educational theory.
The course, by design, encouraged and necessitated exploration on my part. The course was general enough to teach me the basics, but I had to also seek outside readings and examples of blending learning to accurately contextualize and assess how blended and online learning works in undergraduate history classrooms.
Artifacts and Rationale:
This Google Drive folder, containing the course syllabus; weekly assignments; and my final project, holds the artifacts for this particular competency. All of these course materials reflect the myriad of information I learned throughout the semester and how I chose to reflect on and implement them in my own potential courses. The weekly assignments, for example, revealed the minute yet significant aspects of course development that other instructors or peers do not necessarily share or discuss. Copyright and usage is one case. Though it may seem relatively easy to shrug off copyright questions with claims of “fair use,” the class discussions on the topic made it clear that situations can be much more nuanced than that. As a future professor of black film, this lesson proved essential. Further, as my final project (a syllabus for a blended history course) shows, I thought critically about the ways that hybrid courses can foster deeper student discussion and engagement, especially with one another and amongst different learning types.
Reflection:
AL 891 taught me a number of important skills that will help me become a better educator. First, the weekly assignments reinforced the importance of engaging with scholarly literature on undergraduate education. Before this course, I knew that I wanted to be a better teacher, but was not exactly sure where to start. The assignments, which often included reflection pieces after the readings, served as an important starting place for finding, analyzing, and engaging in/ with SoTL. This is especially important as I often had to search for my own discipline-related reading materials.
While we explored the theoretic and practical reasons for creating blended and online courses, I would like to know more about hybrid courses and student learning. How can blended/hybrid classes promote more in-depth student learning as opposed to traditional classes? In a history undergraduate classroom, are there particular units that are more adaptable to hybrid learning?
As I teach online courses in the future, the lessons learned from AL 891 will certainly be helpful. One example is accessibility & user experience guidelines for course syllabi and websites. This can be seen with the syllabus created for AL 891 (mentioned above) and the course website created for my mentored teaching project.