Two Principles: Designing High-Quality Instruction

Principle 1.3.3: Instructional and learning activities should encourage frequent and meaningful interactions among learners and between learners and instructors.

A. Develop strategies and techniques for establishing and maintaining "learning communities" among distance learners through the use of instructional technologies. This will help to overcome the isolation that students could experience when taking an online course.

I feel that communication and interaction are variables that can make or break an online course. Frequent communication within a learning community will add value and depth to the content. Instructors can provide immediate feedback, but students can also get feedback and ideas from each other through forums. Email is an effective way to deliver very specific feedback to individual students. Instructors can comment on work or ask guiding questions to encourage deeper thought. However, the word “meaningful” should be heavily emphasized. Simply emailing a grade does not really help a student to develop and grow. Here is another example. An instructor might ask students to contribute to a listserv ten times in the semester. However, if there is no common focus (i.e. a specific topic for discussion, an article, a Web site to critique, whatever) the contributions will be all across the board. In my experience, most students offered links to helpful websites, but we never had to discuss why they were helpful or how they could be used, so what was the point? This approach made the “interaction” portion of the course feel incoherent, when it could have been used to create valid learning opportunities. I am excited to learn more about developing collaborative projects. My students enjoy working together in the classroom, and I am curious about the best ways to implement this strategy in an online format.

Principle 1.4.2: Methods and procedures for evaluating student learning must be well articulated and directly linked to the stated learner objective.

A. Design formative and summative evaluation methods that are congruent with the instructional activities and that will ultimately support student achievement of the stated learning goals.

B. Use varied and frequent self-evaluation methods or low-stakes testing to guide the learner and provide quantitative feedback. Such activities should lead to an increased understanding of the course materials.

This principle truly resonated with me, because it used Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in the example and that directly relates to my project. The course I am working on is designed to help teachers improve their own performance in the classroom by strengthening their understanding and application of various learning theories. Teachers taking my course might work with Bloom’s Taxonomy to develop more effective lessons for their own students. You may be wondering why teachers need to know about Bloom’s theories. Well, if the content of your course or lesson never rises above the “knowledge” level, you have seriously underestimated the abilities of your students and have failed to validate them as individuals, each with a unique set of experiences. Of course you want students to achieve certain learning goals, but you must understand that students come to you with a wealth of prior knowledge and skills that should not be ignored. Bloom’s Taxonomy can and should be used to asses learning, but should also be used to design and facilitate learning along the way. As you incorporate higher levels of cognition into your course, you increase the chances that a student will internalize the learning and truly make it his/her own. Do you want your students to simply recall or explain what they have learned? Or do you want your students to be able to problem solve and apply what they have learned in various contexts outside of the classroom? Wouldn’t you want the students to synthesize information, to the point where they are able to create new information and ideas based on what they have learned? And most importantly, shouldn’t your students be able to evaluate their own learning? Isn’t it important that they make judgments about the learning experience and tell you what they did well or what they would have done differently? When it comes down to it, it’s all about the quality of the learning experience. As an instructor, is it your goal to transmit knowledge to passive recipients, or will you motivate and engage students so that they will learn to think for themselves?