I liked the Fink reading this week. I chose his taxonomy last week as well. His holistic approach to both the taxonomy and overall course design, and I expect many other things in life, work well with the way I like to approach learning things. It doesn’t hurt that his simple and direct way of speaking are pleasant to interact with. It was helpful how he walked us through pulling all the different elements of course design together to form a cohesive unit and mentally fit all the familiar pieces of a puzzle into a model that is practical and makes sense. I think he would be an interesting fellow to meet.
As I was reading I was continually finding the parallels with the way this course is structured, as well as with our active and reflective learning assignments. In the process of taking an online class we are also actively observing the process from a student point of view while also designing from an instructor point of view. It was an interesting exercise reading about what we are and have been doing from so many different perspectives at once. Very interesting to wrap your head around. Like finding a road map of where you have been and where you are going and discovering they are the same…but different.
What I have learned about myself during this unit is that I tend to write using more jargon and in a style that I don’t actually enjoy reading. I have to work on that. And I have learned that I approach the act of doing a complex activity with much more confidence than I approach the idea of learning something complex. I have also confirmed that a holistic approach speaks well to my personal learning style. I like the background, I like the big picture, I like working a puzzle with the picture in front of me.
“In the process of taking an online class we are also actively observing the process from a student point of view while also designing from an instructor point of view.”
Right! Isn’t that kind of weird? Good on you, Owen, since you seem to be doing a lot of the things that our readings say you should be. It’s very cool to be in an online class about designing online classes because it’s making everything so easy to conceptualize because we’re given an automatic framework through which to view our readings. Almost everything we’ve done so far I’ve looked at this way. We have just as many students as course designers (seems better than “teachers” in this context) so everything is sooo loaded. I’m really enjoying it. I don’t think the class would make nearly as much sense face-to-face.
Now all we need are some researchers and students evaluating our work and interactions from outside, maybe while they are evaluating other courses. This would escalate the meta-level experience one step deeper.
I’m glad you both are aware of the multiple levels available for experiential learning.
One of my colleagues once said, “imagine if we’d been teaching online for a couple of hundred years and suddenly started teaching face-to-face… we’d be talking about all the amazing potential…but unless you’d experienced it, it would be hard to grasp.” I think the same is true for online. This course is one type of online experience, more of an experience analogous to a face-to-face seminar, than a lecture course. I’ve had successful and less successful lecture courses online as well.
What did the article that Nicholas suggest? There’s a recipe around somewhere.
Nice work, Kim.