How can you tell if an online learning entity is doing it right? Here are a few questions that will help you get at the truth.
■ Does the school’s goals or mission incorporate student focus?
■ Does the school’s strategic plan include personalized learning?
■ Does the school hold relationships with quality organizations such as the International Association for K–12 Online Learning or Quality Matters?
■ Is the school accredited? If so, what type of accreditation does it have, and how does that compare to other regional schools?
■ What do employee comments on sites like Glassdoor (www.glassdoor.com) say about working conditions and administrative focus on students?
In addition to answering these questions, check to see if the instructors are full time or working in a largely adjunct capacity. For the most part we believe entities that commit full-time instructors to this work are more comprehensively engaged in supporting an appropriate model.
Also, try to determine the teacher salary range at that school. In some cases, less-than-admirable digital learning entities try to get away with paying faculty members a fraction of their potential salary in an equivalent face-to-face environment, attempting to trade convenience and flexible working conditions for salary. We, again, don’t see this as a reasonable transaction. Working in your pajamas is a wonderful benefit, but it shouldn’t be the driving force for saving money on high-quality instructors.
These are, unfortunatley, not the only issues you must consider when conducting your course online. Social media also has a big role to play.
Some Thoughts on Social Media
Despite its many benefits, social media has contributed to a great deal of bullying, unattributed ranting, predators, and countless scams and distractions. In some cases, it has probably contributed to the degradation of writing skills and critical thinking. Conversely, some of the most thoughtful educators we know utilize social media to enhance their instruction and as a mechanism for building resources and connecting with other innovative educators. We believe that social media will continue to evolve and will be a significant component in developing highly competitive digital environments. Tiffany Hallier, founder of OhSoSocial (https://ohso.social), is our social media specialist. She has given us insights into the evolving role social media plays with our work, including developing the following four guidelines for using social media to enhance education.
1. All social spaces are not the same: For example, with Twitter becoming perhaps the most preferred social tool for emerging news, if you are teaching a class that relies on current events, the inclusion of certain Twitter feeds might make your learning space more robust. Instagram, on the other hand, might be a less-than-ideal fit for this kind of class.
2. All learning spaces are becoming social: From how campaigns strategize for political elections to how corporate America markets its products, social media has an impact on everything in our culture. The same is true with learner management systems and almost any type of learning experience. If an educator in a digital environment or otherwise tries to make his or her learning antisocial, he or she is unlikely to be successful.
3. Social spaces aren’t forever: Although our culture tends to enjoy the idea of permanence, social media connections don’t have to go on forever. You can join a group on Facebook and then move on once the usefulness of that group expires. Having the ability to move on and look for other in-the-moment connections keeps social media interesting and allows for the greater prevalence of innovation.
4. Schools need a strategy: It is beyond the scope of this book to delve into too many details concerning social media, but we believe that social media is a very powerful tool if it is utilized strategically. Schools need to have a plan for their social presence. To make social media work, content needs to be consistently provided and thoughtfully scheduled for release. We believe this is true for large corporate and nonprofit entities, and it’s also true for teachers who use social media with their students.
Use these guidelines as you consider how you might integrate social media platforms and tools into your own curriculum.
Conclusion
The introduction and this first chapter provide you with a much-needed philosophical backdrop for putting in context the strategies we will explore throughout the rest of this book. DEL doesn’t represent a new direction or destiny in K–12 education. If executed appropriately, it instead represents an efficient, cost effective, and comparable, if not superior, learning opportunity for the students you serve.
Finally, in Zen practice, it’s not uncommon to deliberately confront either the unfamiliar or irrational as an opportunity to extend the limits of one’s intellect or understanding. Satirist Jon Stewart used to close his popular hit The Daily Show with a funny, obscure, or otherwise jarring image in relationship to the political thought of the day. Think of Mr. Hill, who had his moment of Zen when his well-schooled charge returned and gently confronted him with the jarring reality that his assumptions about technology and learning were wrong. In fact, his students could grow more with asynchronous elements dynamically providing all of the students the opportunity to think things through and respond. In a moment of Zen, Mr. Hill learned to embrace the opportunities provided. Mr. Hill never became a technophile, but that moment gave him the courage to inspire thoughtful consideration of the tools he had come to suddenly understand and even respect.
CHAPTER 2
Planning Curriculum, Assessment, and Preinstruction
Because many of you are in very different places in terms of curriculum expectations, we approach instructional planning in this chapter from a broad perspective that you can apply to your classroom’s needs. As you conceptualize your curriculum, we attempt to clarify the methods of online teaching you can prepare as a precursor to launching your course. Here are some common questions that individuals ask when embarking on an online teaching endeavor.
KEY QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS CHAPTER
• When choosing a curriculum program to plan and develop, what are its advantages and disadvantages?
• What are the implications of attention to appropriate instructional pacing?
• What are the implications of supporting learning content and skill proficiency?
• How do teacher teams inform the process of planning and developing online learning?
• What types of instructional activities work well online?
• What types of learning assessments work well online?
As you reflect on these questions, it’s important to consider the degree of flexibility you have in constructing your online course’s curriculum. Why is your flexibility as a facilitator a factor in implementing your online course? Consider the following conundrum that Dana faced