Definitions of communication

Email etiquette is important in an educational setting.  All communication from the teacher to students and parents shall be professional and formal.  It is important to put a proper heading on the email so that those receiving the email have an idea of the subject and can give it the correct priority.  I write email like they are a short letter.  I write a body with complete sentences in paragraph form.  I sign my name with an appropriate conclusion.  I usually put "Respectfully," but in less formal email use other closings.  The key to email though is to keep it brief.  Email should usually be a line or two or at most, a paragraph or two.

Tone is especially important in online communication.  Without face to face interaction, nuance is difficult.  It is best to avoid sarcasm in text based communication.  A good way to gauge the tone before sending electronic communication is to read the text aloud back to oneself.  

It is important to communicate in an online setting, particularly a teaching setting.  While asynchronous methods can deliver lots of good information, communication is essential to see that students are getting that information.  This is true to see if they are getting the ideas and it is true to make sure that they are completing the assignments.  Keeping students, parents, and other interested parties informed of progress and requirements requires active communication between all stakeholders and the teacher.  Stakeholders are all those that hold a vested interest in the learning success of the student.

It is easy to be connected in society, but still feel alone.  I think this is particularly true in an online education setting.  Students get information and a few opportunities for live or semi-live communication, but without personal contact, they often feel that they are on their own.  This gives lazy students a signal that they can slack on their work.  This frustrates students with questions and no immediate answers.  The only way to overcome this is with active communication (both real time and asynchronous) from the teacher and perhaps with other students.

Trend impact

There are a number of important trends in online learning.  Georgia Teacher Open Online training highlighted three such trends - mobile learning, gamification, and Massive Open Online Courses.  I have been asked to describe what I think the most important trend in online learning is.  Hands down, it is the MOOC.

Mobile learning is simply online learning with more mobility of place.  There is really nothing new here - just the frustration of trying to make web sites and links compatible across more platforms.

Gamification is again nothing new and most of the gamified education games don't provide the depth of learning that I think should be required to even merit the title.

MOOCs, however, are where it is at.  For the past two years I have been a huge fan of EdX.   This service provides high quality instruction from top universities around the world.  The education level is serious.  What is lacking for these services is a personalized guide to get people into the right MOOC.  While I have had great success with MOOCs, I think that a lot of people sign up for courses that sound cool to them without the requisite background to successfully complete the course.  Someone has to come up with a way to test the student's knowledge and direct to other MOOCs or online resources to get the necessary knowledge to meet his learning objectives.  This is the future of online education - a college adviser for MOOCs and other open source materials.

Personally, I love the old fashioned archived courses with video lectures.  MIT OCW has some of the best. But, the future requires the education be more interactive than those static models.  MOOCs provide the same course structure with course interaction.

Learning Management System Reporting - Analytics

In my Moodle training this summer, there was some mention of analytics, but it was not a focus of the course.  Honestly, until getting to this assignment on TOOL, I hadn't even thought about it, but I'm glad I did.  There are a number of options for tracking and analyzing student performance with Moodle.  I can try to explain them, but honestly, I can't do better than this video.

This is the video that I watched to explore analytics.  As I watched it, I tried out the features myself.  I'm just a few days into my course, but by checking the participants I could see their times of last log-in.  Most of them seem to be working hard and had accessed Moodle over the weekend (today is Sunday).  That tells me that they are working.  However, one student had not accessed the course in over three days.  That tells me that not only is he not working over the weekend, but that he didn't do anything in school on Friday either!

Some of the things covered in the video I have not tried yet.  I will use these analytic tools.  My first assignment for the course is due tomorrow.  So, at that point I can start analyzing grades and tie it back to views of various activities.

The analytics that I am using so far are student level - I want to see what the students are doing as well as how they are doing.

I will soon start doing course analytics to see what activities are getting multiple views.  This will let me know what students thing is effective based on where they are spending their time.

I will also use this to evaluate the course.  I will decide what activities are most effective and cull those that seem ineffective.

I'm not yet ready for program level analytics, but will become more interested as the year progresses.

Creation and investigation into course

This summer I was trained to use Moodle.  I was given access to a trial service and began building a course.  I am currently using a full version of Moodle to build a course for AP Environmental Science.  Below is an image of my course shell.

I have built the first part of the course, preliminary activities and am working on unit 1.  First, let me show and image of some of the content for the "Preliminary Activities" section of the course.  Then I will describe the process of loading the content and give some insights into my experience.

I have actually posted quite a bit more in the "Preliminary Activities" section, but that is enough to give you an idea.

In Moodle, once the course shell has been made, adding content is easy.  You click a but that says "Turn Editing On."  Then, within each section of the course there is a button that says "Add an activity or resource."  Clicking that button gives the course builder a number of options.  I'll give a quick image of some of those.

I then simply click the option I want and proceed by following directions.  Some are easy and only require one or two step.  For example, the PDF and text files above ore simply added by choosing "File" from the activity or resource list.  You can then choose to upload a file or share a file from Google Drive.

Choosing "Forum" from the list of activities allows one to add a forum.  There are numerous options for different types of forums, but Moodle gives a description of each and inserting one is simple is clicking and following directions.

All and all, my experience with Moodle has been very positive.  One criticism I do have though is when a file is added from Google Docs, it automatically tries to open on students devices as a Word document.  That's great if they have Word, but if they don't, the document won't open.  That has forced me to use more PDFs.

Tools within the Learning Management System

I have been working on completing the Georgia Teacher Open Online training.  The training is set up as its own learning management system.  A number of tools are used to relay information.

Videos - provide description and some instruction

Links - primarily to blogs, pages, and outside sources give information on the topics discussed

Badges - this seems to be used as a motivator to allow students to track their progress.  The system also motivates tracking by crossing out completed assignments prior to earning a badge.

Blog - while not within the LMS itself, the TOOL instructs students to make a Blog and it is used for completing assignments.

Forum - the forums are used for participants to share their experiences with each assignment and show their work to others.

Feedback - There is also a feedback tool, but I've never used it.

Videos and links within pages can be useful for instruction.  Badges provide incentive for students to keep going with the course.  A blog could be useful in an online course, depending on what a teacher is wanting students to do.  Forums can be helpful for asking questions and for showing examples.  Feedback can help the course designer improve a course.

Tools for deciding on a Learning Management System

Selecting a learning management system (or classroom management system) is not an easy task.  Fortunately, this is a task that was done for me at my school.  We use Google Classroom as a CMS and I am using Moodle as an LMS for my online course.

I was not involved in the selection process.  However, I am sure that the administrators in the county office examined the bullet points below in making their decision.  (These bullet points come from the Georgia Teacher Open Online training website.)

• Needs Analysis – define the goals of acquiring an LMS for the organization

• Requirements Gathering Process- meet with stakeholders from users to the implementation team to create a thorough rubric of requirements that meet the organizations needs. Be sure to identify items that are necessities on the list at the end of the process and the items that can be given up as needed via a ranking system.

• Vendor Identification – identify the potential vendors that match needs and requirements. Will this be an open-source solution or vendor?

• Request Information – request information from the vendors identified to clarify that the needs and requirements needed are in line with their product offerings.

• Request for Proposal – request proposals from the organization’s top vendors that met the requirements as identified in the gathering process to identify pricing models. In addition, to clarify that the organization’s top requirements match with vendors product offerings.

• Demonstrations – Schedule demonstrations and/or request a sandbox environment (sample learning environments) that stakeholders can use, test, and become comfortable with. Make sure to understand the product offerings and how it correlates to the organization’s stated requirements.

• Vendor Selection – After the team of stakeholders has gone through the steps above, analyze the match-up between the requirements gathered in the beginning of the process to the product offerings of the vendors.

Looking at the top providers for CMS and LMS, there are a number of names that I recognize.   Edmodo, Moodle, Blackboard, and Google Classroom stand out as the top names to me.  Many teachers in the system used Edmodo as a classroom management system before our school decided to use Google Classroom.  Edmodo is open source and teachers or school systems could use it for free.  Our system decided to use Google Classroom instead.  I suspect that is because google could offer more to the system.  Google provides email service to the system - all student and faculty emails are ran through Google.  This is a huge benefit and a weight off the tech department.  Classroom is a simple app, but it is effective and easy to use.

I used Blackboard in college in its early days.  It has been around a long time.  Our system decided to use Moodle for a LMS.  I'm not sure of the drawbacks and benefits, but it is adequate for our needs.  I imagine that the selection was based on price and service.

LMS tool categories quest

In your blog, discuss the most relevant features offered in an LMS, which relate directly to effective online instruction. How might these be used in the online environment?

Learning management systems offer a variety of tools for online instruction.  Most LMS offer similar tools.  

I have been using Moodle to set up my class.  Here is an image of the Moodle tools.

The grader and gradebook can be important features, but as a school system we use a separate gradebook program.  The participants tool gives information about the class participants, but for my purposes, all the important tools are under editing.  Here are my options for things I can add under editing.

For me so far, the most important tools are these.

• file - this allows me to add documents for students to view
• assignment - this allows me to give students an assignment, attach pertinent files, set deadlines, and tell them how to hand it in
• page - this allows me to create a webpage for instruction. I can insert video, links, and files within the page.
• quiz - allows me to give tests and quizzes to the student
• forum - allows me to give feedback and get feedback from my students

I'm still learning and I may change what I think is important as I go, but for now, those are the most important features for quality instruction.