EdTech 522 course reflection

Having come to the end of the course, I will reflect first on the technological and pedagogical skills and knowledge acquired during the course, and then on how what I’ve learned will likely impact my teaching and future practice.

The biggest novelty in this course was becoming an administrator on Moodle and using it to set up an online course. Navigating Moodle as an administrator was both less intuitive, and easier than I had anticipated. It was non-intuitive in that there were constraints and limitations that didn’t seem to make any sense to me. For example, I couldn’t understand why one had to choose between inserting a “document,” in which case the only text accompanying it will have to come immediately before it, and a inserting a “page,” in which case one couldn’t include a document to be downloaded. And yet, I found that I was able to include all the major elements I wanted to in my course, in spite of these seemingly random limitations.  I was also able to create something that held together coherently, and delivered both useful content and practice, within the scope of my lesson objectives. I was particularly pleased with the use of discussion questions in my course. My experience with discussion questions on courses that I have taken is that they are, more often than not, not very motivating, interesting or challenging. When crafting these questions, it’s important to take care that they are both firmly grounded in the material that has been provided for reflection, and sufficiently challenging to force students to stretch themselves in answering them. They should also lead students to provide responses that are personalized enough that they will feel motivated to comment on each others’ posts. Making it mandatory for students to reply to each others’ can in fact backfire, and decrease motivation levels, if they feel that they are merely repeating each other, or what they’d already written in their own initial posts. Rather than providing the basis for increased social presence on the course, a feeling of resentment can grow out of the intuition that they are being forced to do what they perceive as “busywork.”

Within a few months, I will have to put all of these skills to use in a professional context, as I will be working as an online teacher trainer on the pre-service Cambridge English CELTA course in teaching English as a foreign language. The course uses Moodle as its platform, and the actual course content is prepared in advance by Cambridge English. My role will consist of moderating and organizing the course content as well, although it isn’t yet clear how much latitude I will have in terms of creating new modules. That said, I fully intend to use the Moodle course I prepared here as supplemental materials. It is also possible that I will suggest to my company that more, similar supplemental materials be created and made available, not only for our online learners, but also for our face-to-face learners, either before the start of the course, or during the course. If I had the choice though, I would certainly experiment with, and possibly request that we use a different course management system to Moodle, not only because I found its limitations cumbersome as an administrator, but also because I have generally found its use non-intuitive as a learner. This is important, because many of our trainees have little to no experience with CMSs, and might be frustrated and discouraged by the steep initial learning curve. I will nevertheless be searching with a CMS that at least offers the functionalities that are offered by Moodle, including the possibility of embedding multimedia content directly in the course in a variety of formats.

Designing a Lesson with Moodle for my EdTech 522 Online Learning Assignment

Due to personal circumstances, I was forced to spend less time on this project than I it would have warranted, and this in itself turned out to be a learning experience for me. It reminded me of my first steps as a classroom teacher: limited time to prepare, a lot of concepts to take on board, and instinct guided mainly by emulation of what I had seen done right in the past. I spent little time thinking about andragogy and focused on the content of the lesson. The end result was rough around the edges, but I’m not sure how much better it would have been had I devoted a lot more time to it.

This is partly because I have found Moodle to be frustratingly un-intuitive and difficult to use. Why is it impossible, when inserting a Word document, to include separate remarks both on the main Moodle page and the page that will open up with the document? Why is it impossible, when inserting a “page,” to upload a Word document? These are just a couple of examples of the stone walls that curtailed my creativity and drained me of valuable project time. What is interesting is that I have faced the same frustrations when using Moodle as a student.

A major, related takeaway from this project is that it is essential, when including tutorials on an online course, to make sure that the tutorials match the latest version of the tool. This obviously requires more work from the instructor, who may be recycling a previously designed course. The alternative, though, is a situation where the tutorials are counter-productive to the extreme: I spent a lot of time trying to make them work on a newer version of Moodle, before having to give up and use Google to find the solution for myself, or else e-mail the instruction for help.

I am sure that Moodle can be tamed, as my colleagues have turned out magnificent work that I can only envy. My assumption is that either this tool is not suited to me, or else, like many other tools, there is a steep learning curve before things become easy and fun. I like to think that I am near the top of that learning curve. Only time will tell.

Community of inquiry vs the fad of social presence

The community of inquiry, a framework for online learning which I discovered this week (Stavredes, 2011), was something of a revelation to me. Like Kolb’s experiential framework, it intuitively made sense to me, and helped me to reorganize my perception of online learning.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi33p3yuvrNAhUFbj4KHTUfCNUQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FCommunity_of_inquiry&bvm=bv.127178174,d.dmo&psig=AFQjCNH6gIdpXPT_40t1MA-i3Nbb7_Arfg&ust=1468843582300312

The three types of presence were not new to me; however, their complementarity, the way in which they support each other mutually, is new and interesting to me. What I find particularly perceptive about this model is that it doesn’t content itself with underscoring the importance of social presence, which is a topic that I find has preoccupied researchers a tad excessively.

The focus on social presence has even appeared at times to me to be something of a fad. By definition, fads are trends that are instigated by a minority, and it seems like that minority here is made up of learners who rely more on social presence to learn, or at least who are ideologically supportive of individualized, collaborative learning, and the “constructing” of knowledge. In language learning, this trend has expressed itself under the guise of “communicative, student-centered” language learning, and elsewhere phrases like “the guide on the side” exemplify this type of thinking. The ideology behind these approaches is transparent: rather than coming from a figure of authority, tradition, or the past, knowledge is created by a group of collaborating individuals. It is the child of, rather than the counter-reaction to behaviorist approaches. Behaviorism is equally individualistic and liberal in nature–after all, one of the famous claims of behaviorism, as championed by the Soviet Union, for example, is that it can make anything out of anyone–, but also more centralized, as a reflection of the 19th to early 20th century movement towards consolidation of the nation-states of Europe and North America. What they have in common is that they are typically, not to say traditionally, of Western make and fabric.

Which is not to say that I am arguing against the focus on social presence, nor am I arguing against communicative and student-centered language teaching. However, rather than a lens through which teaching should be seen, they represent just a part of the pedagogical picture. The more balance view presented in the community of inquiry framework–which both gives equal weight to the content, peer collaboration, and the instructor, and goes into depth on the interactions between these three fundamental factors of learning–is therefore, in my opinion, all the more valuable.

EdTech 522 Module 1 Reflection

Criticisms of Andragogy

The criticisms of andragogy, as discussed by Taylor and Kroth, are the following:

• There is a lack of empirical evidence that andragogy works, partly because andragogy itself has been difficult to define. There is disagreement as to whether it should be considered as a theory of education, as a science, a theory on learning, or a general framework of reference when dealing with adult learners. The other reason why there is a lack of useful empirical evidence is because it would require empirical results, typically based on quizzes and tests. The theory of andragogy, however, is based on a refusal to reduce education to the ability to succeed on quizzes and tests.
• Andragogy has also been criticized because its assumptions about adult learners are both too narrow and too broad. In other words, the assumptions don’t all apply to all adult learners, and, at the same time, the same assumptions can be made about many children.

My own feeling is that these critiques seem to be reasonable ones. I feel particularly strongly about the second critique. In fact, every time I read about how adults learn, it makes me cringe, because it speaks volumes about the assumptions being made about how children learn, i.e., that they don’t have self-concept, don’t learn through experiences that add to their own experiences of the world, etc. Basically, andragogy seems  like a (probably) non-deliberate insult of children. I would hate to imagine how the theoreticians behind andragogy would teach children–as if they, unlike adults, really were just vessels to be filled with knowledge.

Where I stand on Grow’s SSLM

I would consider myself to be at the fourth stage of Grow’s Staged Self-directed Learning Model, that of the independent learner. Whether working online in a structured setting, or doing research on subjects of personal interest to myself, I have been capable of setting my own goals, I tend to manage my time well, and am in the practice of monitoring my own progress and self-evaluating.

The most pertinent implication of this for my role as an online instructor is related to the fact that people tend to teach the way that they like to learn. As an independent learner myself, the temptation for me would be to treat all my students as independent learners, providing them with little more than self-evaluation strategies, and support when it is needed. On the contrary, it’s important to keep an open mind regarding the various stages that my learners will have attained, and to provide strategies to these learners that would cater to each of the four stages.

Post-Reflection on the PBL Process

The Singapore Migrant Project is extremely ambitious, possibly to a fault: it includes numerous products and performances, many of which are complicated and complex, and spans to curriculum areas, English and Humanities. It also deals with a potentially sensitive, and clearly political subject: the presence, status, and role of migrant workers in Singapore. Both the entry and culminating events are high impact, and involve numerous stakeholders from a variety of boards. It is clearly not an overstatement to say that running the project in any school will involve some risk. As such, in order to reduce the risk level in subsequent iterations, it is essential to have the tools in place for an objective and transparent evaluation of the project itself.

The post-project reflection and evaluation process will have to involve the students as well as the migrants the students will have worked with. Their opinions will be solicited via a survey, in which their feedback will be solicited on their level of engagement in the project, the impact it has had on their lives, and the project’s ease of use. Feedback from the migrants will be collected via quick face-to-face or telephone/Whatsapp interviews with the migrants, and will focus on the impact the project had on their lives, and suggestions for how it can help to make a greater positive impact the next time the project is run.

Because two curriculum subjects are implicated in the project, it would be important for the lead teachers to give each other feedback as well, and receive the same from department heads. The focus here would be on gauging the success of cross-curricular planning and cooperation.

For an ambitious, long-duration project such as this one, an impact can be made not only on the direct participants and stakeholders, but also on the student body, parents of students, and other teachers. To a certain extent, it is a project that can lead to some soul searching among those who come into contact with it. This soul searching is fertile terrain for evaluating how its scope and its long-term impact, and so tools–probably electronic ones–should be set up to allow the collection of feedback well after the project is finished.

With these tools in place, we will have the means to judge whether it is worthwhile to run the project again, and, if so, what improvements can be brought to bear.

Technology in the Singapore Migrants Project

Here is the link to the Singapore Migrant Project.

In this project, students will be using technology (and sometimes Web 2.0) in the following ways:

• Writing, storyboarding, filming and editing an interview with a migrant worker.
• Selecting efl/esl apps to help migrant workers improve specific areas of their English language skills.
• Creating a multi-media piece of the student’s choice to reflect on the project.
• Writing a series of five fictional blog entries from the point of view/ in the voice/ on topics of interest for a migrant worker.
• Researching government statistics, to be used in a research paper.
• Using annotated Google Maps to give a tour of a Singaporean monument or landmark of interest to a migrant.

Internet 2.0 is simply the internet today, and the internet is as much a part of our lives as supermarkets, automobiles, libraries, or the weather: it is unavoidable, and will either be used as a resource, or ignored. I have decided to use it as a resource because it is expected by students, and because it helps develop their ability to use it in the future; part of the role of education, after all, is to help students use the resources at their disposal.

Integrating technology into my project came easily and naturally to me, possibly because the project itself, being a humanities/ English project, lends itself particularly well to this, but mainly because the Singapore national syllabus places on emphasis on students’ ability to understand and express themselves using a variety of “text types.” These text types include multi-media and web-based forms of expression. Not using these resources, given the Singaporean context, would have been a disservice to students’ academic success.

This Week’s PBL Reflection

This past week I did something that I haven’t done in many years: I switched project ideas after investing time and effort into my first project, and initially being very happy with it.

From having students work on comparing and contrasting the visual written design of customer service in several government agencies, I have moved to having students interact with local migrants and working on making their stay in Singapore easier, from a linguistic, social, cultural, and administrative perspective. My initial idea had its merits: it would have had students analyze and produce various different text types, which corresponds to Singapore’s syllabus requirements and represents a challenge for many Singaporean teachers. There would have been a field work and a multimedia component, and students would have had latitude to decide for themselves what exactly it was they were going to study, and how they were going to present their products.

What the project lacked above all, however, was authenticity. I couldn’t honestly see why a student would get excited, or even particularly interested in this project, unless he or she was a design nerd. It played to Singaporeans’ pride in their public service, but that pride is well-placed: students would have had little to gain from comparing public service in government agencies because it is all, generally speaking, exceedingly good.

The new project’s main strength is, in the meanwhile, authenticity. Migrants are everywhere in Singapore (estimates run as high as 20 percent of the population), but they do not figure very much in the public debate. Working class migrants (as opposed to highly trained expats) are practically invisible to the public eye, and so students really have a lot to gain from interacting with, and learning about migrants. It allows them to see a side of Singapore they don’t usually see, and gives them an opportunity to teach others about Singapore’s history and language that is truly authentic, because it is based on a real need. The availability of associations that try to support migrants makes it relatively easy to organize a powerful entry event.

My lesson this week, therefore, has been one in authenticity, although here I’m not speaking of the project’s authenticity, but my own. I tried for quite some time to fit my initial project into the PBL box, and I resisted the evidence that it was wrong because I didn’t want to be wrong myself. In the end, I had to face facts: sometimes the best way to save a project is to ditch it, and start all over again. Which is what I did.

Evaluation and differentiation in PBL

Two of the areas that I had initially assumed to be the weaker components of PBL are evaluation and differentiation. Two articles that deals each of those topics, both of which I found on Edutopia, are discussed below. As will become evident, one of them allayed some of my worries, while the other didn’t entirely wipe away my earlier suspicions.

Differentiation

In Six Strategies for Differentiated Instruction in Project-Based Learning (found 2/2/2016), Andrew Miller outlines some strategies for differentiation that I had not previously considered. I had previously thought that differentiation could be a problem in a PBL classroom because I had misunderstood the balance between student choice and voice, on the one hand, and the importance of answering the driving project question, on the other. I had initially imagined that the teacher’s main role was to help students to formulate the driving question, and then support them in answering it, and had anticipated differentiation problems arising when students of various levels of ability were faced with the same challenge, i.e., to answer that driving question.

One of the things that Miller underscored in his article, and which I had not taken into consideration, is that there are various ways for students to answer that driving question, and those various ways presented effective paths toward differentiation in the classroom. This is where “choice and voice” come into the picture: students can differentiate the level of instruction for themselves, such that they are sufficiently challenged by the project, without the direct intervention of the teacher.

I would consider the most useful of the five other strategies to be differentiation through grouping, and the use of work stations and mini-lessons. In the former, he suggests grouping students of similar ability levels, so that each group can set itself an aim that corresponds to its ambitions and abilities, and in the latter he suggests setting up work stations where weaker students can find extra support.

Assessment

All of these strategies run into what I consider to be PBL’s main obstacle, which is assessment. In Practical PBL: The Ongoing Challenge of Assessment (found 2/2/2016), Christie Piper sets out some interesting suggestions for how to make PBL assessment fair, and appear fair, to students, beginning with reassuring students that some elements of traditional assessment will remain. She also does well to clearly outline the problem with assessment in PBL: the fair assessment of teamwork. She indicates that first and foremost, the teacher should build individual accountability in student teams, while simultaneously building trust in their team. She then goes on to list some innovative ways of doing so, including role-based assessment (students cycle through tasks, playing either the leading or the supporting role, and are graded according to different criteria depending on which role they are playing), individual skill areas (students select, with supporting self- and peer-assessments, which elements of the project they were most responsible for, based on six skill areas), and weighted scoring (peer- and self-assessments, are translated into scores that reflect what each student put into the project.

These are all good solutions, and I think they would build accountability into team work. However, I don’t think they succeed in building trust in the team. This might be due to my own conception of what it means to be a part of a team: a group of individuals who rely on each other’s strengths, and help to minimize each other’s weaknesses, banded together in order to achieve their goals. As such, in order to ensure cohesion and mutual support, grades shouldn’t be individualized, but collectivized, based on the project result. I admit that this is perhaps a tad overly idealistic a perspective, and ultimately might be unfair to many students. However, there is another argument for collective grades: they can distract students from their overriding objective, which is to answer the project’s driving question, and push them to focus on activities and actions that they believe will land them the best grade. Rather than improving motivation, individual grades can actually sap the type of motivation that PBL typically should excel in: fulfilling a rewarding task to the best of your abilities.

I don’t have a solution to the grades dilemma, and it would be naive to suggest that traditional grading, or grading in a traditional classroom setting is not, also, without its flaws. However, it would also be naive to presume that PBL is not also haunted by this dilemma.

PBL: First ideas

Singapore is well known for many things, including the efficiency and smoothness of its public service. My only direct experience of this was my visit to the Home Office (or interior ministry/INS) to apply for, and then collect my Worker’s Pass. As opposed to most such places I’ve seen in other countries, the welcome people receive there is almost obscenely pleasant. You are made aware of your wait time immediately upon entering, there are wonderful views of the rest of the city, there is a play area for children, and there are free newspapers to read while you wait.

My idea is to design a project that has students visit, observe, analyse and contrast various government agencies that deal directly with the public. Below is a draft of the project as I see it now.

Driving question: How can we improve public service in Signaporean government agencies?

Project aims: By the end of the project, students will have

1. improved their understanding of the importance of customer service in Singaporean government agencies;
2.  learned about the factors that impact upon the quality of customer service;
3. learned how to design a rubric;
4. analyzed and evaluated several text-types related to customer service, including physical space, web sites, and telephone contact;
5. negotiated meaning, quality and relevance of features of public service and customer service in a group setting as they pertain to various different text types with the goal of ranking Singaporean government agencies for the quality of their customer service;
6. presented research findings as a group, using a Powerpoint presentation;
7. presented their findings individually using another format of their choice;
8. written and submitted recommendations for the improvement of customer service in several different government agencies.

The chronological breakdown of the project is as follows:

• As the introductory event, the class receives a request from the Singapore Public Service Division to survey various public services in Singapore, evaluate them, and write recommendations for their improvement. They also request that we set up a web site that rates Singapore’s government agencies. In a country like Singapore (small, efficient, prizing citizenship and public service highly), such an endeavor could be possible.
• A weighted rubric will be designed by the students, with a point system, to evaluate customer service at the various agencies. Designing the rubric will necessitate research on what a rubric is, how one is written, and how it is used. It will also, of course, require students to think about what makes for a good customer experience when interacting with a government agency, and what the priorities are for customers in these cases. Students might want to interview parents or other people they know who go to these agencies, in order to have the perspective of someone with first-hand experience. Writing a rubric as a whole class will generate buy-in from the students, but may be difficult to organize in very large classes.
• Then will begin the analysis of the agency itself, through which students will work in groups. They will first select two agencies to visit and compare, if there is enough time for this in the school calendar. This would be preferable, as it would allow for revision of the rubric between the two visits. Students will select the agencies based on personal interest.
• The analysis will begin with the collection of information, and will include the following steps:
  • Visiting the agency’s web-site and rating its efficiency and usability.
  • Telephoning the agency and doing the same.
  • Writing a letter to the agency and doing the same.
  • Visiting the agency, and talking to/interviewing both customers and workers in the agency. Audio or video recording the interviews would be an option.
  • Students will also rate the interior design of the agency, and any other elements determined during the writing of the rubric.
• In order to differentiate assessment, each member of the group would be responsible, as project leader, for one or two of the above contact methods.
• The rubric will now be rewritten as a whole class, based on the experiences of the students with this first agency.
• Students will now visit another agency. Another option would be for students to visit an agency that has already been visited by another group (thereby necessitating an even number of groups in the class). This will allow students to compare notes, negotiate impressions, and reflect objectively based on clear criteria.
• The groups will present their findings to the rest of the class in the form of a Powerpoint presentation, and points will be assigned as a class based on the groups’ findings and recommendations.
• In addition to scoring the agencies based on the rubric, students will express their views more subjectively, using a variety of different formats/text types. The format they choose will depend on the students’ personal preferences; if there is enough time, and two groups can visit two different agencies, they would work on compiling the results as a combined team.
• At this stage, students write recommendations for how to improve the public services they visited.
• Each student in each group will be responsible for producing one subjective review of the agency, using different text types. Examples of text types can include video and audio podcasts, narrative journals, newspaper articles, poems, a photo-journal, a painting, etc.
• These would be exposed on the web-site, or in a part of the school.

I am very open to criticism and advice regarding the above plan. I am particularly concerned about the project being too “closed,” and not allowing for enough student choice, as per BIE’s Gold Standard of PBL.

PBL Project Roots (the Singaporean context)

I am currently working for the British Council (BC) in Singapore. The British Council is the United Kingdom’s cultural branch, a kind of a ministry of culture under another name. In most of the countries in which they operate, their main order of business is to teach English as a foreign language, as well as to promote cooperation between Britain’s cultural institutions and those of the host country.

In Singapore, because the language of instruction in public and most private schools is English, the British Council’s remit is to support the national curriculum in English in an ESL context. Tuition is paid here for young learners in order to give them extra support in acquiring standard English (as opposed to the local patois, referred to affectionately as Singlish), but also to help them succeed in their final exams. Singaporean parents are, to put it quite mildly, very highly focused on getting good grades.

Five years ago, the government adopted a “new” English curriculum that focused on critical thinking, innovation, and authentic texts, while introducing and  stressing the importance of visual literacy. These “new” skills were billed 21st century skills, and threw many Singaporeans for one heck of a loop.

I will be working in coordination with the head middle and high school education for the BC, to design a project that is suitable to this Singaporean context, i.e., to students who need support in succeeding in this new curriculum that, theoretically, is refractory to rote learning, and seems to lend itself so well to project-based learning.

The goal, therefore, is to design a project that includes does the following:

• Helps students improve literacy with regards to a variety of different text types, e.g., brochures, articles, architectural and interior design, 2-d visuals from a variety of sources, etc.
• Helps students improve their ability to write about, speak about, and represent the above text types.
• Includes field work in order for students to experience those text types in authentic circumstances.
• Allows students to revisit, review and revise their final presentations numerous times, and from several different perspectives, in order to reinforce newly acquired language skills.
• Be directly and strongly connected to Singapore’s social and historical context.