April 17: Module 3: Developing as an Online Practitioner

Morning Session: 10.30 am – 1.00 pm (India)

Afternoon Session: 2.30 pm – 5.00 pm (India)

Login, check connectivity, grab a coffee and get ready!

Dr Katharine Jewitt
Module 3
Developing as an Online Practitioner
• Evaluating change to online practice using learning analytics
• Enhancing your practice online using feedback, reflection
and action research
• Developing support networks and professional
development
Learning Analytics
There are a number of different methods that we can adopt to evaluate
online teaching.
Oliver (2000) provides a detailed overview of some of these methods,
including:
• online synchronous focus groups (Cousin and Deepwell, 1998)
• web-based questionnaires (Phelps and Reynolds, 1998; Taylor et al., 2000)
• creation of an online feedback discussion area (Taylor et al., 2000).
Learning Analytics is a field of innovative
research
• Learning analytics is increasingly something that many educators and
institutions make use of through new tools, dashboards and reports,
using online data to investigate user activity. It helps to answer questions
such as:
• How many people visit the website / online learning materials?
• When do they visit / interact?
• Which links are popular?
• How many people complete the activities?
Insights can be gained without advanced
techniques and tools
In an online forum discussion associated with a particular online module
or course, a LMS could capture a range of forum data, including:
• who accessed the forum
• when they did this
• how long they stayed
• what operating system they were using
• how many words they added.
What is Learning Analytics?
Watch the video, and as you do so, make notes about:
• what kinds of learning analytics you would like access to regarding
your own teaching.
• When moving your teaching online, are there any of these kinds of
learning analytics that you could begin to collect?
• How might you do this?
 Feedback and Reflection
• Eliciting Feedback
• Understanding Feedback
3 ways of assessing teaching effectiveness and
course quality which are less likely to fall victim to
these biases:
• evidence-based teacher self-reviews.
• peer observations.
• external reviews.
Designing Online for Student Satisfaction
• Course design and time management are crucial components to successful
online learning (Song et al.,2004)
• Instructors need to ensure that there is alignment of objectives with
instructional methods, learning activities and assessment methods (Blumberg,
2009)
• Instructors should provide timely feedback and serve as facilitators of
discussion and interaction just as they do in traditional courses.
• Courses should provide opportunities for peer collaboration and sharing of
ideas in order to develop an online community of learners, rather than feelings
of isolation (Song et al., 2004).
• Use questionnaires to determine differences in perception between online and
face-to-face courses, among students and staff (Otter et al., 2013)
Effective Use of questionnaires
• Create up to five questions that you think would provide useful feedback
for you from your students. While doing this, think about the following:
• How would you make sure the questionnaire is not leading students to
respond in a particular way?
• Does your institution have a standard feedback questionnaire that is given
to students? If so, are there questions that you can take from this? Is it
appropriate to online teaching?
• What type of responses would you like? (For example, closed questions
on a scale, or open comments, or a mixture of both?)
• How would you analyse the results?
Reflection
• Reflection-in-action – thinking and responding quickly to events as you
teach. In online learning this might mean, for example, checking with
students if you notice that they are not responding in an online tutorial
session. In order to be able to reflect-in-action, you need to maintain
awareness of the situation. This might require you to regularly check
on student behaviours, like whether they are contributing on forums or
in tutorials.
• Reflection-on-action – considering what happened afterwards in a
deeper fashion. For online learning, reviewing student feedback and
analytics can be a good prompt for reflection-on-action.
• In addition, it can be valuable to consider how to include activities in
your online learning that ask students to reflect on their learning.
Action Research
Some key concepts of this type of research are:
• Teacher-initiated – it really is about using a research process to
enhance and develop teaching in your context.
• Empowering – it supports you to be responsible for your practice and
potentially to inform policies or principles used more widely in your
institution.
• Small-scale – it is manageable and something you can fit into your
schedule.
How to evaluate your online teaching
• Identify exactly which aspect(s) of your online teaching you want to evaluate.
• Identify from where or whom you will obtain the information you need.
• If using analytics, what kinds of data are particularly relevant to your objectives?
How can you get hold of these, or make sure they are being recorded? How will
you use the data to draw conclusions?
• If using feedback, which method(s) will you use? Synchronous or asynchronous
forums dedicated to feedback? Dedicated questionnaires? Peer observation?
• If using a questionnaire, draft some questions you might wish to use.
• Identify any other relevant people with whom you might wish to work to create a
community around your evaluation activity.
• As well as analysing the feedback received regarding your online teaching, review
the value of the data you have obtained. Would any modifications to the
evaluation process provide more valuable data?
Build Your Confidence in Teaching Online
• Reach out to others
• Form a network of peers who are all at a similar stage and can work
through teaching ideas together and offer moral support and shared
experiences
• Connect to people who have already achieved the objective you are
trying to achieve and can pass on useful advice.
• Find people with similar interests in using online learning to you, who
share findings or resources that they think are useful
Benefits of engaging with online networks
‘Most of the benefits of networking can be divided into
two generic categories: connectivity and sharing.
Networks allow computers, and hence their users, to be
connected together. They also allow for the easy sharing
of information and resources, and cooperation between
the devices in other ways. Since modern business
depends so much on the intelligent flow and
management of information, this tells you a lot about
why networking is so valuable.’ (Kozierok, 2005)
Benefits to participating in networking
activities
•Share Ideas
•Developing partnerships and communities
•Sharing Information
•Professional Development
•Making Contacts
Communities of Practice
(Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2015)
• A shared domain of interest (a community of practice is not just a club of
friends, membership implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a
shared competence that distinguishes members from other people).
• An active community, sharing and exploring the domain (members engage in
joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They
build relationships that enable them to learn from each other; they care
about their standing with each other. But members of a community of
practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis).
• An impact on the practice of those involved (members of a community of
practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources:
experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems – in short,
a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction).
Activity: Networking around you
• As a teacher who is venturing into the online world, you need to be aware
of the networking opportunities around you. Jot down some brief thoughts
in response to each of the following questions:
• Where might you begin to look for easy networking opportunities that may
be available to you that you simply don’t yet know exist? In which of these
would you wish to begin as a ‘lurker’? Are there any that you might feel
sufficiently confident to actively participate in now?
• What networking activity do you already participate in that could be
modified or refocused to bring you networking benefits?
• How could you harness the power of the networking opportunities that are
already around you to benefit your online teaching practice?
Ways to connect with Academics
• LinkedIn.com

• Academia.edu

• ResearchGate.net

• Twitter.com
 Have a Plan for social networking
You'll need to identify the tasks you wish to perform:
• gathering information on a particular subject:
• make a list of keywords or hashtags that you may wish to search for (hashtags can include phrases and
acronyms, but always without spaces, for example #teachingonline, #onlinelearning
• following and learning from experts in a particular subject:
• list the names of the experts you wish to search for.
• making connections with people in a similar position to yourself:
• brainstorm how you might find those people – how will you search for them? You may need to combine
some keywords or hashtags into a single search, to enable you to filter out information that is related but
not precisely what you are looking for.
• sharing your own work:
• identify precisely which items you would like to share, list some keywords and hashtags that might describe
your work, and practise creating a short microblogging message of the correct length that describes your
work succinctly.
• There are of course other tasks you may wish to do as well, such as following information sources for
hobbies and unrelated to your work environment.
Hints and Tips
• Start small and start now.
• Plan.
• Get permission.
• Don’t be a perfectionist.
• Reflect honestly.
• Collaborate.
• Share
• Listen to your learners.
• Learn from failures.
• Celebrate success.
Discussion: How do you share information?
• Think about any networks and communities you already belong to
(formal and informal). How do these communities share information?
What tools do they use? How could they use other channels or media
to improve that flow of information?
• How could you increase your connections and reach? How might
tools like Twitter or other social networking sites help you?
• How you might use networks and communities to help you achieve
your online teaching objectives?