Tag Archives: online course design

Backward Design

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Backward Design is a method of designing courses that works backwards from the desired end goals of a course rather than beginning with a list of content and activities that will be taught.

To begin the backward design process, you identify what your students need to know and be able to do once they have completed the course. These are your course goals or outcomes.

Next, you identify what evidence you will need to determine if your students are meeting those goals. How will you know they are able to do the necessary tasks you identified as your course goals? Will a test truly tell you if they have mastered a skill or will they need to create a project?

Finally, you design the activities and coursework students will complete to develop the skills and knowledge and result in the evidence you need to assess them.

This backwards process ensures that your students have all the content and activities that they need to achieve the goals of the course. It also helps eliminate extra course content that may not work towards those goals creating a focused and streamlined course and allowing plenty of time for students to practices their new skills in ways that are meaningful and directly relate to the content.

The two videos below will provide you with a couple of examples of backwards design.

 

Visible Thinking

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Visible Thinking is a research-based approach to making learning visible so that it can be reflected on and built on. It emphasizes three core practices: thinking routines, the documentation of student thinking and reflective professional practice. It is the difference between teaching skills and teaching students to think creatively and critically. The use of thinking routines encourages the development of habits of observing and analyzing situations and problems. Project Zero developed thinking routines as simple structures that help students work through complex information to make it accessible and then to reflect back on what they have learned.

View the video below for an introduction to Thinking Routines. Then review the tools to find one to begin using in your classes now.
 

Introducing SAMR

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Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition, otherwise known as SAMR.

www.commonsense.org

www.commonsense.org

SAMR is a model for integrating technology into your classes that was developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura. The strength of the SAMR model is that it allows you to start small with the knowledge you already have and to begin using technology to do a task that you already do. For example, you may substitute your paper calendar for a digital one. Later, you may decide to step up your technology use by sharing this calendar with others to coordinate scheduling, augmenting your use of a digital calendar in a way that you could not have done with a paper calendar. For more examples of integrating technology in small, but manageable steps, take a look at SAMR and Bloom’s Taxonomy and listen to Dr. Puentedura describe his model in the video below. 

Getting Ready for the Fall

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It’s that time of year again. Summer is winding down and the first day of Fall classes is approaching… too fast. We’ve gathered together some past posts and links to tutorials to make your prep easier and your myLesley course awesome.

Getting Your Content into Your Fall Course
The first step is to get your content into your upcoming myLesley course site. If you’ve taught the course before using myLesley, there’s no reason to recreate all that content from scratch. Just copy it. Review the directions for copying myLesley courses or request a course copy from eLIS.  

Once your content has been copied over, you will need to make a few updates for the current semester, such as updating your syllabus and updating all those dates. You can easily update your syllabus and all the links to it throughout the course in one easy step. Review Updating Your Syllabus in myLesley to learn how.

Did you use the calendar tool, release dates, or due dates in your myLesley course? Think going through and manually updating them all is going to be a major task? Think again. Use the Date Management tool and update them all on one page.

Check out Adding Content to Your myLesley Course to update or create new content items.

 

Communicating with Your Students
Now that your course content is ready go, it’s time to welcome your students. If you use Announcements or the Send Email tool in myLesley, you don’t even need to know their email addresses. Communicate with everyone in the course at once.

Take the normal text announcement or email up a notch and post a video announcement to introduce yourself and the course. Kaltura Media is built right into the text editor and will allow you to quickly and easily record a video message to your students using your webcam.

 

A Few Tips
To help you get ready for the upcoming semester, we have a few tips from our instructional designers on what to do before your course begins, the first week of your online course, and how to manage those busy online discussions.

Don’t forget about our support site at support.lesley.edu. We have a slew of tutorials and information from both eLIS and IT. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, submit a ticket and someone will follow up to help.

Have a great semester.

Animal Minds: Exploring Animal Cognition, Emotions and Experience

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Gay Bradshaw at sanctuary with dog.

Gay Bradshaw at sanctuary with dog.

Gay Bradshaw has recently designed and taught Animal Minds: Exploring animal cognition, emotions and experience, a new online course for Lesley University, focusing on the exciting new field of trans-species psychology. Trans-species psychology reflects science’s understanding that humans and animals have common capabilities to think, feel, dream, aspire, and experience consciousness. While neuroscientists knew that elephants, orcas, dogs, cats, parrots and all other vertebrates share with humans the same brain structures and processes, it was Gay’s discovery of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in free living elephants that galvanized the new field. Similar to humans subjected to violence, abuse, and war, elephants are vulnerable to the trauma caused by widespread poaching, culls, and shrinking habitats. Animal Minds uses trans-species psychology as a lens to explore animal minds and the effects of stress and trauma.

Gay collaborated with eLearning and Instructional Support to design her course. Various topics covered in the course are presented through voice-narrated video lectures, readings, and other visual and audio media. Course concepts are illustrated with a diversity of species, including elephants, great apes, orcas, parrots, reptiles, fish, and farmed animals. Also threaded throughout the course is a critical fieldwork component through which students experience, study and reflect on direct contact with animals in the field. Course learners connected with local organizations such as animal shelters and sanctuaries where they engaged in hands-on work with animals in need. In addition to study questions that explored course topics, students reflected on the course content in relation to their field experience in the Animal Accompaniment Blog. The blog also served as a virtual community space for ongoing sharing and conversation with classmates.

About Gay Bradshaw:
Gay holds doctorate degrees in ecology and psychology, and has published, taught and lectured widely in both the U.S. and internationally. She is the author of Pulitzer Prize-nominated Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach us about Humanity, an in-depth psychological portrait of elephants in captivity and in the wild. She is the Executive Director of The Kerulos Center, based in Oregon where she cares for The Tortoise and The Hare Sanctuary. Kerulos is a grassroots, collaborative, and non-profit organization which builds and maintains cross-disciplinary and international programs seeking to empower individuals and groups to create a world in which animals live in freedom and dignity.

For more information about the Animal Minds course or Gay Bradshaw, please contact elis@lesley.edu or John McCormick (jmccormi@lesley.edu)