28 Days of OLLIE: Day 12

We hope you were able to participate in the CITE online conference on Blended Learning over the past three days.  There were many great sessions for schools and teachers alike.

We are now turning our focus to the design process.  It is one thing to know that you want to use blended learning, but it is a different one to actually deliver it.  Online learning design (often referred to as "instructional design") requires an artful touch to it.

Scenario:

 Meet Ms. Sanchez. She has been teaching for a few years, but she has never thought about teaching in an online setting. She has heard from other teachers about blended learning, and putting together a Moodle course, but she wasn't sure what that was. Her sister teaches in a different district that uses Canvas, and she knows her sister likes using the tool, but doesn't really know if she is creating online courses correctly.

When she looks at her sister's course, as well as courses from other teachers in her building, she can't help but feel something is missing. It just seems to be a bunch of PDFs and power points uploaded. It feels more like a resource place for the class, so that they can download files from home, than it does true online learning. She doesn't think her students would take much interest going through a power point or reading a PDF without understanding what it is, and if she is explaining it in the classroom, then basically it is just like assigning homework.

But, today is Day 12, which means that the OLLIE Community is beginning to look at instructional objects. She has never heard the term before, but she finds out an instructional object is a catch-all term to describe online instructional lessons, online collaborative activities, and online assessments. "Yes," she nods to herself, "this is what I was looking for."

Ms. Sanchez takes a look at the discussion for Days 12-14 as well as the Instructional Object sharing database. Whoa! There are a lot of ideas here that people are sharing. She sees some good ideas, but also realizes, she will need to find out a bit more information tomorrow before she can contribute. But, her sister might benefit from looking at this right away.

To-Do:

• Visit the Instructional Object database in our community. As you search through the database, think about what strategies makes sense in your curriculum?

• Take a look at our discussion forum for days 12-14. This will ask you to reflect on the database and share with community members something that you found that would enhance your classroom practice.