Category: What’s New

Those who desire to return to school have many concerns. Will I be able to juggle all of my responsibilities? Can I afford it? Will the degree really help me advance my career? And, can I succeed? School of Public Policy professor Steve Ruth understands these concerns and has designed two flexible and valuable courses that all dedicated students can succeed in – PUBP 710 Internet and Public Policy and PUBP 503 Culture, Organization, and Technology.

Can I juggle all of my responsibilities?

Many students in Mason’s School of Public Policy Masters and PhD programs have full-time jobs and very limited free time. So, Professor Ruth created online courses to reduce the time demands placed on them. His online students saved nearly 70 hours in one semester previously spent commuting to campus to attend lectures.

Ruth’s online students actively engaged with each other in online discussions regarding weekly video lecture topics. They were also required to complete all of the same assignments as the face-to-face courses. Thus they received most of the benefits of a full classroom experience.

Professor Ruth says that the results were outstanding with as many as 100 student discussion posts per week in each course. “The students don’t just post comments,” explained Professor Ruth, “they also share URL’s and other references to themes related to the week’s topics. And of course, I interact with them online quite a bit as well.”

Will it help me advance my career?

Professor Ruth aims to help students advance their career goals through his online courses. In PUBP 710 he tailored major assignments to areas of student interest. Additionally, students developed an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) portfolio where they could specialize in regions, technologies, and applications that matched their career goals. Examples of portfolio topics include: 3-D printing, broadband deployment, network neutrality, big data, cybersecurity, internet voting, green IT, etc. Many students commented that they were able to use their portfolio findings in their own professional work.

As director of the International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology (ICASIT), Professor Ruth has expertise in a wide variety of information technology fields and serves as a rich resource for his students, no matter what their technology interests. Through ICASIT, Professor Ruth has carried out grant funded projects in over twenty countries and done extensive research on methods for reducing university tuition through technology interventions. His projects have been supported by organizations like the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and the Center for Innovative Technology in Virginia, among others.

Can I succeed?

To ensure student success, Professor Ruth utilizes instructional approaches that have proven most effective for the student population in the School of Public Policy. He ultimately desires to have the effect of one-on-one tutoring through his online courses. His online courses are designed so that students can, in the words of Stanford Professor Peter Norvig, feel like they are “sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who is explaining something they haven’t grasped, but are about to [1].”

Much of the individualized tutoring feeling is created in Professor Ruth’s original course videos and weekly online lectures. Even the course syllabus includes a brief YouTube video. This guarantees that students know right up front what is required for them to succeed.

Professor Ruth is giving his all to remove any barriers to student success. Give PUBP 710 and PUBP 503 a try, and you’ll see for yourself.

“Guest lectures” by Mister Spock, King Arthur, and Aristotle were part of Professor Star Muir’s strategic course design to help digital age students focus their attention in COMM 300 Foundations of Public Communication online. Professor Muir’s academic research focus is Digital Natives and the impact of continual partial attention to different media streams on the mind, mental processing, and mental habits. Since he is keenly aware that many students today have difficulty focusing, Professor Muir developed course videos, activities, and writing assignments that could effectively engage them.

Professor Muir used unique themes, humor, and ethos in course videos to captivate the attention of Digital Natives. Accordingly, he impersonated Mister Spock in the COMM 300 Welcome Video, pretended to be Aristotle while giving an overview of the history of rhetoric, and feigned he was King Arthur while teaching about mythic criticism.

In reference to the course videos, one student in an end-of-semester review stated: “I felt they were informative and kept me interested since [he] had a unique theme for each one.” Another student noted that the videos were so engaging that her son would watch them with her when she studied at home.

Students also identified the course “playsheets” to be an outstanding course component in their reviews. Playsheets were designed based on Guided Discovery theory and composed of a sequence of critical tasks. The first task encouraged students to simply recall information. Subsequent questions required students to perform deeper cognitive tasks such as evaluating and creating knowledge.

Professor Muir explained that playsheets “were designed to engage students and develop their capacity to make arguments about rhetoric.” He expounded, saying that they “empower students to use their technologies for their own learning, engage them about the quality and reliability of their information, and make excellent study resources.”

A third highly empowering and engaging aspect of the course was faculty feedback. “I thought the best part about the course was the feedback given for the different writing assignments,” one student shared. “It was very thorough and helpful for future assignments,” he continued.

Over the years, Professor Muir has identified the most common problems in COMM 300 students’ writing and composed comments to help correct each problem. These comments include a description of the issue, URLs for helpful resources, references to page numbers from the readings, and correct examples. He uses a macros system that allows him to insert relevant comments with a single keystroke every time he identifies an issue in a paper. The macros system also freed up Professor Muir’s time so he could examine the papers’ content, structure, arguments, and use of vocabulary more meticulously.

If you have ever played on your phone during an entire lecture or been victim to “death by PowerPoint”, Professor Muir’s online section of COMM 300 is the course for you. As a COMM 300 online student, you will find yourself looking forward to each lecture and anxious to see who the weekly “guest speaker” will be. You will be invigorated by the guided deep thinking with the playsheets and see your growth as a writer. Register early to ensure your spot!

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COMM 300 fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the BA in Communications.

“The Mason tagline, ‘Innovation is Tradition’, is not just fluff,” Professor of Special Education, Dr. Neia Izen, stated in a conversation with the Office of Distance Education. ”It’s incredible how much support you can get for developing innovative online learning courses at Mason,” she expounded.

While Professor Izen raved about the support Mason provides to pioneering instructors, Office of Distance Education staff marveled at her determination to innovate. Her objective for innovation is highly focused: discover methods to engage students. Her efforts to innovate are exhaustive. She has joined a design partnership with an instructional designer, completed five professional development courses for online instructors through Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), and participated in two workshops offered by the Division of Instructional Technology (DoIT).

Design Partnership

During the Spring 2012 semester, Professor Izen joined a design partnership with an instructional designer to develop a fully online, asynchronous section of EDSE 501 Introduction to Special Education. Her colleagues, Professor Anya Evemenova and Professor Peggy Weiss also joined the partnership. The three instructors served as subject matter specialists and standard bearers. The instructional designer shared the professors’ common goals but fulfilled distinct roles as the learning strategies specialist, the design consultant, and the technology specialist.

The resultant online section of EDSE 501 was an innovative approach to engage a unique set of students with limited time availability. The majority of the students took the course as the first step towards receiving their Virginia State Provisional Licensure in Special Education. Some students only had a few weeks during holiday breaks or right before starting new jobs in which they could take the course. The asynchronous format allowed students to begin and progress through the course material on their own timetable.

Sloan-C Courses

After EDSE 501 online was created and launched, Professor Izen continued to develop herself as an online instructor. With funding from the Office of Distance Education, she participated in five courses by Sloan-C, the leading professional society for e-Education. These courses include Essentials of Online Teaching, YouTube for Learning, Managing Synchronous Tools, Embrace Web 2.0 Tools, and Embrace Asynchronous Tools.

“More than anything, the Sloan-C courses helped to make me more thoughtful about ways to maintain the quality of my course,” explained Professor Izen.

Furthermore, Professor Izen found the online community in the Sloan-C courses to be stimulating. By joining the Sloan-C courses, “you suddenly have access to a network of other people with similar goals who can share their solutions,” she said.

While taking the Sloan-C courses, Professor Izen developed and began teaching a second online course: EDSE 547 Medical and Developmental Risk Factors for Children with Disabilities. She was able to apply innovative teaching methods to this course that she explored in the Sloan-C program. For example, she integrated synchronous webinars which are very popular with her students.

DoIT Workshops

Although Professor Izen is quickly becoming an expert in online teaching strategies herself, she has continued to take advantage of the expertise of the DoIT instructional design team. She has attended two DoIT faculty workshops: Charting a Course Plan for Online Learning by Katrina Joseph and Facilitating Student Engagement in the Virtual Classroom Using Blackboard Collaborate by Rick Reo.

Tradition of Innovation

It is not a huge surprise that Professor Izen is willing to look outside of the box for innovative teaching solutions. The College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) in which she teaches has a tradition of innovative graduate programs that accommodate the needs of local educators. Since the mid-1990s, CEHD’s Kellar Institute for Human disAbilities has offered a cohort model that provides educators with licensure and master’s degree courses at their workplace. These conveniently located courses are taught by Mason’s highly qualified full-time faculty and adjunct faculty.

In addition, this Fall semester, CEHD launched four new fully online Master’s and Graduate Certificate programs. The programs boast reduced tuition rates for out-of-state students. Now, for a feasible price and without relocation, students from all over the world can learn from CEHD’s nationally prominent scholars in education and human development.

Professor Izen and her colleagues in CEHD are truly following the admonition issued by President Ángel Cabrera in his inaugural speech: “We need to keep the students as our top priority, to remain committed to innovation and inclusion.”

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For more information about resources available to Mason faculty developing online courses, please visit the DE Faculty Services webpage.

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” This Confucian philosophy served as a guide for Mason Professor Arie Croituro and instructional designer Katrina Joseph as they developed an online section of GGS 680 Earth Image Processing.

Earth image processing refers to the manipulation of digital images using computer algorithms, or step-by-step procedures for calculations. Rather than relying on typical ready-made software programs for running the image processing algorithms, GGS 680 online students learn to develop their own software tools using Matlab. Students are more likely to gain a comprehensive understanding by simultaneously doing the programming and learning algorithms.

Recognizing that concurrently learning algorithms and programming could be a challenge for students, Professor Croituro created 70 instructional videos. In these videos, he sought to anticipate and address roadblocks that students at any level may have. All 70 videos are posted on youtube.com and are available to students at any time.

As demonstrated by these videos, a major benefit of online learning is the unfettered student access to instructional materials. Course analytics show that last semester, on average, each GGS 680 online student reviewed every video roughly 2.3 times.

The 70 videos can be divided into two categories – “theories and tools” and “tutorial and hints”.  A fundamental theories and tools video is included in each of the 15 weekly modules. Once students grasp the theories, they are expected to complete lab assignments on Matlab. They are given a model to follow for solving each lab assignment in the “tutorial and hints” videos.

The “tutorial and hints” videos utilize interactive teaching software which simulates a face-to-face teacher’s instruction on a whiteboard. Students can watch Professor Croituro write out steps of algorithms as he verbally describes the process. The tutorials are divided into digestible segments based on the amount of time that research indicates students can focus on instructional videos. Most course videos also include a variety of music to keep students engaged and transcripts for students who learn better by reading.

One student noted, “I found the lab tutorials to be extremely helpful in understanding the code writing process and understanding the concepts taught weekly.” He also mentioned that the course pushed him to explore further than he would normally attempt and thus was a bit intimidating at first. However, he had an important realization after learning the basics of coding – “It is not as scary as I thought and I should not second guess myself,” he said.

GGS 680 online challenges students to do something they may not normally attempt. They aren’t left to do it alone though. Register today for GGS 680 online and you will find that Professor Croituro will virtually be by your side every step of the way, guiding you to a deep understanding of earth image processing.

Last semester, one student in CONF 501 Introduction to Conflict Analysis and Resolution, travelled with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Another student was back and forth between Belize for work. Others needed to return to their home countries during the semester. Still, none of them missed a class thanks to Professor Rob Ericson’s online section.

The fully online CONF 501 section was created in response to the frequent requests of itinerant or distance students. Professor Ericson, from the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR), partnered with instructional designer Susan Campbell to develop the course. It will serve as a model for the remainder of the S-CAR Master’s program courses which will soon all be available online.

Conflict Case Studies

In this course, students consider appropriate responses to a variety of conflicts. One case study asks them to compare stakeholders’ responses in the ideologically caused conflicts of the Waco, Texas incident, the MOVE group case, and the Koran burning episode. Another study discusses how US Officials could best help to resolve the social conflict in Congo spurred by coltan mining. The diversity of the students’ life experiences motivates an array of resolutions to these authentic issues.

One student, Dale Robinson, began the class with 20 years of conflict resolution experience under his belt. He works at Virginia Tech as the Compliance and Conflict Resolution Manager. “People thought it was odd for me, as an expert in the field, to take this introduction course,” he noted. “But I was really able to broaden my scope through it. I learned about the history of the field and how my skills can be applied for peace building and in an international setting.”

Let Every Voice Be Heard

Each student develops a resolution to the case study conflicts and posts them on an online “discussion board” where their classmates are encouraged to comment. The online discussion model allows for every voice to be heard.

“In a face-to-face course, there are always a handful of students who dominate the discussion and those who rarely contribute. When you have an online discussion, it gives everyone – the shy, the unconfident English speakers, etc. – time to think about how they want to respond. You hear from voices you normally wouldn’t,” explained Professor Ericson.

Students also participate in virtual study groups during the semester which provide a means for constant discussion and support. “I was impressed with all the different tools provided in the course to interact with the professor or other students,” explained Dale. “I saw that you really can learn information in many ways besides just reading from a book.”

Learning from the Best

As students review the conflict case studies and discuss their solutions, they are instructed in key concepts of conflict via video segments. The video segments are unique – several are made by Professor Ericson, others by the former director of S-CAR, Professor Richard Rubenstein, and some by a former US Ambassador, John McDonald.

“I try really hard to not let the course ever get boring!” said Professor Ericson. “One aspect of the course that appeals to students is the variety.”

At the end of the semester, students give a final presentation over Skype to Professor Ericson. “It is not intimidating at all,” recounts Dale. “Early on in the semester, Professor Ericson meets with everyone on Skype and he is available to talk to you all throughout the semester. So, by the time the final presentation arrives, you have already developed a rapport with him.”

While CONF 501 is a pre-requisite for all students in the S-CAR Master’s program, it is open to non-majors as well. Are you preparing for a career in business or at an educational institution? Are you currently working for a government agency or international development organization? Will you ever be part of a religious group, community center, or union? If so, the skills you will master in this class will be critical for your success, and the online format is certain to fit with your lifestyle and schedule.

“As students study the Solar System, they learn the value of the Earth. It is the only planet known to support life. Learning about the Solar System should give students a feeling of responsibility to care for the Earth,” explains Professor Rebecca Ericson.

Professor Ericson has lofty goals for students in ASTR 111 Introductory Astronomy: The Solar System, a general education course at Mason. A central goal is that they develop an ability to apply scientific knowledge and reasoning to personal, professional, and public decision-making, especially decisions affecting the well-being of our unique planet.

To achieve these goals, Professor Ericson recognizes that students cannot just sit in a lecture. Instead, they need to be active learners, engaging with course content through activities which promote scientific inquiry, discussion about scientific procedures, and analysis of scientific observations and theories.

Backward design approach was used to develop active learning opportunities which would lead students to achieve the pre-established goals. The National Science Teachers Association explains that “with this approach, instead of moving linearly through a series of labs and activities, conscious effort is made to emphasize particular skills and knowledge needed to meet specific learning goals” [1].

Throughout the semester, students perform an at home experiment or assessment every week. They are encouraged to involve family and friends in their home experiments whenever possible because it builds understanding to explain what is happening in the experiment and why. With “sweet” labs such as measuring the speed of light with chocolate chips and a microware, family and friends are generally easily enticed to participate.

Students also actively engage with course material through discussions with classmates. For example, they discuss Olber’s paradox, the argument that if the universe is static and filled with an infinite number of stars, the sky should not be dark at night. The fact that the sky is dark is evidence for an expanding universe with a definite starting point.

At the end of the semester, students perform peer reviews on individual projects, another key element of active learning. As recent research noted, “writing a peer review involves cognitive processes that encourage deep learning” [2].

In addition to the ASTR 111 fully online section, Professor Ericson, Professor Michael Summers, the Director of the School of Physics, Astronomy, and Computational Sciences (SPACS), and other SPACS faculty will be teaching a hybrid section combining ASTR 111 and ASTR 112. This means that students now have four different pathways to complete ASTR 111 and ASTR 112 – both online, both face-to-face, one online and one face-to-face, or the hybrid course.

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References:

[1] Hendrickson, Sher (2006). Backward approach to inquiry. National Teachers Association: Science Scope, 30-33.
[2] Wessa, P., & De Rycker, A. (2010). Reviewing peer reviews – A rule-based approach. International Conference on E-Learning, 408-418.

What would your ideal online course be like?

Students in Professor Cui’s Spring session of AVT 420/619 Advanced Web Design considered this question carefully. Then, they got to work and developed it themselves.

Preparing Students for the Emergent Job Market

These Art and Visual Technology (AVT) students came to Professor Cui’s class with experiences in the typical web design project – creating company websites. Professor Cui decided to have students develop an online course instead to gain broader insights into user behaviors and social, cultural, and contemporary issues in web communication.

Additionally, Cui desired to prepare her students for the field of online course design since she sees it as a promising job market. Confirming the demand for designers of online courses, a company reached out to the AVT 420/619 students hoping to hire one for a Spanish course development project.

To be further prepared to enter the workforce, AVT 420/619 students compiled booklets that outlined their online course design processes and showcased their final products. These booklets can be added to the students’ portfolios and highlighted in job interviews.

Students Reflect on the Experience

“I learned a lot from creating an online course, but the greatest take away was definitely mapping out the site itself,” AVT 420 student, Sarita, recounts. “Trying to understand how someone might actually navigate their way through the site [was] a daunting task. Not only did I have to think about things from the students’ perspective, but I had to envision how the professor would use the site as well,” Sarita explained.

Another student, Paul, reported that “from the online course development experience, I learned how invaluable user testing is.” He expounded by saying, “What may seem like a logical solution to a designer may not be intuitive for the user, especially regarding basic functionality and navigation of an online course. Even limited testing of a few users reveals a wealth of information that should be incorporated into the design.”

Features of Student Designed Courses

The students all concurred that interaction within the class community was a one of the most critical facets of successful online learning. So, they came up with several original ideas to build a learning community. These include an open-access gallery displaying student classwork, a rotating student feature section, profiles of past and current students, and notifications of classmates’ entrance and exit into the course platform. The students also utilized typical course interaction tools such as message boards, discussion forums, and audio/video features.

Go ahead and take a look at the other features of the student created courses at http://www.petzrick.com/619/webfundamentals/.

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With approximately 4,500 to 5,000 Mason students taking at least one Distance Education course each semester, undoubtedly many of you have opinions on what course features are essential to your success in online learning. Let us know! Submit a note about your favorite aspect of your Distance Education course on our twitter site @MasonOnline2.

Currently, no one knows why solar storms happen. Nor is it known in which direction or how fast the particles they produce move.

To solve these mysteries, students in Professor Gabriele Belle’s online section of ASTR 112 Introduction to Astronomy Lab have assisted professional scientists in a citizen science project called Solar Stormwatch. With the help of ASTR 112 students, and many other volunteers, scientists will be able to build a space weather forecast. A forecast of this nature can give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way, can predict possible power outages caused by the highly active particles that are emitted from the storms, etc.

Effective development of an online course necessitates much more than posting the previously crafted face-to-face course content online. It requires adaptation that fully integrates online resources. When properly integrated into course design, technology has the potential to create a more student-centered course, a greater degree of student independence, student controlled pace and learning pathways, and active student engagement with subject matter [1].

Professor Gabriele Belle, who has taught face-to-face Astronomy courses at Mason since 2009, believes that it is actually more effective to teach astronomy online than face-to-face. She explained that an online asynchronous course allows a student to work through each step of a process at their own pace and to be actively engaged with all of the material. She also commented that “Astronomy is great to teach online because many organizations are putting data online.”

The other two unique assignments in the online section of ASTR 112 teach students to simulate optics using high level tools and encourage students to solve problems using knowledge of the night sky. Thanks to the e-Science movement, students have access to tools online that are often expensive or scarce to complete these assignments.

The “Properties of Light” lab teaches students to use a high-tech java simulation of optics. The goal of the lab is to understand the basic properties of light and its interaction with matter. This is important because light is one of the types of electromagnetic waves which scientists rely on heavily for information. In Astronomy, scientists use both space-based and earth-based telescopes to collect the electromagnetic waves.

During the “Navigating the Sky” lab, students use a free, open source, online planetarium called Stellarium. Students are virtually stuck in the middle of an ocean and have no indication of direction except for the realistic 3D sky shown by Stellarium. In order to figure out where they are and in which direction they need to go to return home, students must identify objects in the sky and apply their knowledge of different coordinate systems used in astronomy

Students in ASTR 112 online don’t just learn about Astronomy, they learn to be astronomers.

So, what are you waiting for? Help discover why solar storms occur, learn how to gather information from analyzing light, and get to know the night sky! You can do all of this and more by registering now for ASTR 112.

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ASTR 112 is the lab section for ASTR 111. Both courses fulfill the Natural Science requirement for Mason Undergraduate General Education. Register now for this course through Patriot web.

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References:

[1] Torrisi, G., and Davis, G. (2000). Online learning as a catalyst for reshaping practice – The experiences of some academics developing online learning materials. The International Journal for Academic Development, 166-176.

Recipe for Effective Learning in a Management Online Course

You have undoubtedly noticed the countless cupcake stores that have sprung up around the nation these past few years – Georgetown Cupcake in D.C., Sprinkles in California, and Crave in Oregon. Students enrolled in the fall semester MSOM 302: Managing Information in the Global Environment online section joined the craze by simulating ownership of their own cupcake store. This simulation contextualized course content and contributed to the first of three critical realms of course interaction – student-to-content interaction, student-to-student interaction, and student-to-teacher interaction.

Student-to-content interaction

“Students have five homework assignments that are wrapped into one business scenario,” explained MSOM 302 course professor, Melissa Martin. A new scenario is used each semester; the Spring 2013 class is currently “managing” a family furniture business. Professor Martin says that “it is important to connect new skills to real life. So there are even conversations between the employee and the boss where they are solving a problem with the business.”

The course covers a wide range of content related to management of information systems at an introductory level. In addition, it covers the use of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access to create reports that support business decision making.

By interacting with this content in the context of a realistic project, MSOM 302 students are able to immediately transfer their knowledge to business settings. As one fall semester student excitedly reported to Professor Martin, “I am so glad we spent more time on Excel because no one at my job knew how to do it and I was able to jump in and be the expert!”

Student-to-student interaction

At the beginning of the semester, students are asked to introduce themselves to the rest of the class.  They tell about their academic and career goals, reasons for taking the course, hobbies, etc.

“In the future, I would like to use my graphic design skills and my knowledge of managing a business to start my own graphic design service,” said one class participant. “Ultimately I would like to start an event planning service that specializes in personalized events with graphic design being the focus.”

Students are then encouraged to read and respond to their classmates introductions to help support one another.

Several other features are included in the course structure to ensure meaningful student-to-student interaction. Discussion board groups are arranged so that students in the same major and can easily connect with each other. Additionally, students are allowed to work with a partner on assignments and Blackboard’s “student lounge” and “email a classmate” features are activated to facilitate communication among students.

Student-to-teacher interaction

This past month, MSOM 302 was recognized by a panel of faculty reviewers and instructional designers as an “Exemplary Distance Education Course.” The panel was particularly impressed by Professor Martin’s effort to be available to students whenever there is a need. “The faculty for this course leverages several methods such as Skype, Blackboard Collaborate, virtual hours, and office hours to meet with students and teach complex concepts,” one reviewer commented. Occasionally, Professor Martin even video records herself explaining the solution to a student’s question and emails the video to them.

Professor Martin plans virtual office hours around the time that assignments are due so that students can pop online and get help from her right when they need it. Since she is a night owl, even if the students are up late working on an assignment, she is still available to help.

“One student had an older version of Excel than what others were using and needed help finding where the features were located on that version,” Professor Martin recounted. “Using Collaborate, I was able to pull up her screen on my computer and show her exactly what to do.”

The satisfaction of helping students is what drew Professor Martin from her long career at Hewlett Packard to earn her PhD and begin teaching 15 years ago. Professor Martin provides her students with a proven recipe for effective learning – a contextualized project and three realms of interaction. One student this semester raves that it is the best organized online class he has ever taken. So register now for MSOM 302 online and get a taste of management of information systems.

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MSOM 302 fulfills an elective requirement for the fully online Bachelor of Applied Science (BAS), Technology and Innovation Concentration.

You may have blogged to share travel adventures, details of daily life with family and friends living far away, or maybe even to promote your small business. But have you ever blogged as part of your formal education?

In Mason’s EDCI 546 Integration Technology in Elementary Classrooms: Literacy, that is exactly what students do. Research in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning suggests that two vital ways that blogging fosters learning are by 1) providing an ideal atmosphere for students to participate in learning communities and 2) offering an effective method to support reflective learning [1].

Engagement in the world through learning communities encourages intellectual progress according to educational researcher E. Wenger [2]. With this in mind, EDCI 546 Professor Debra Sprague and Instructional Designer Joe DiPietro created a course capable of connecting students to a world-wide community of K-6 educators.

Sprague and DiPietro integrated activities in the curriculum such as reading blogs that focus on literacy and technology issues, contributing to discussions on these blogs, maintaining a personal blog, and writing fan fiction stories to share online. Students who complete these activities gain knowledge as they actively engage in the world and work on mutual goals with others.

When EDCI 546 student Ms. Hardin tapped into the blogosphere, she discovered a lively community of teachers exchanging teaching practices which could help her achieve her classroom goals. One of her goals was to integrate art into literacy. One blog that Ms. Hardin reviewed gave her the idea to have students make a cover picture for the story they read or draw images of book characters.

“One of my favorite ideas off of the blog was that the artist did a whole unit on drawing fish from Dr. Seuss books,” declared Ms. Hardin. “My kindergartners are getting ready to read and learn all about Dr. Seuss books and this would be so much fun for their art center.”

Ms. Hardin did not just take great ideas from other teachers but actively collaborated, sharing her great ideas through blogging. On Ms. Hardin’s Blog Spot, anyone can access her digital story called “Cookies”, which she initially created for her own students.

Additionally, Ms. Hardin and her classmates in the EDCI 546 class composed fan fiction stories that teachers, students, and parents from anywhere can read any time at the Kid Fan Fiction website.

Another EDCI 546 student, Cara, proved that blogging supports reflective learning. Reflective learning is a “process meant to increase understanding and provide direction for further exploration” [3].

In one of her rocking technology blog posts, Cara discussed an article that made her reflect on what she wanted her future classroom to look like and how to make reading a great
experience for each of her students.

“A great way to encourage more reading for students would be to create book clubs or have a book-a-day challenge. This helps students interact with each other and discuss different types of books and their ideas,” says Cara. “I cannot wait to do this with my own classroom and make reading a fun and an enjoyable experience!” she exclaimed.

As Cara reminds us, learning should be fun.  As the EDCI 546 course exemplifies, Mason online courses have the potential to use fun activities such as blogging to help students learn effectively. Check out Mason online course listing page to find the right online course for you! Or sign onto Patriot Web to register for an online course.

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References:

[1] Kerawalla, L., Minocha, S., Kirkup, G., & Console, G. (2009).  An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25, 31-42.
[2] Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
[3] Horvitz, B. & Vellom, R. (2012). Using blended learning to enhance reflective practice among science teachers. National Teacher Education Journal, 5(3), 77-83.