Online Teaching Experiences - Ideas

For this post I have examined the Michigan Merit Curriculum Online Experience Guideline. It outlines the requirements for online learning experiences students in the state of Michigan must complete before graduation. The document ends with a great list of ideas for how educators can design online learning experiences for their students. I selected one that could possible work well in conjunction with a set of learning modules I am currently working on for Michigan State University.  


I would like to use Adobe Connect (Breeze) to conduct an interactive, online discussion among students. Michigan State’s business school provides a series of learning modules called “Doing Business in (COUNTRY)”. I think the experience these modules provide could be augmented by a discussion among students, many of whom are not in the same geographic location when they complete them. This would give students a chance to ask questions about the content, which they likely have only experienced in modules. The modules alone provide some content interaction, but it would be helpful to students to have some personal interaction with the content.


One pedagogical strategy I would implement is to have a list of discussion prompts prepared for students before they enter the discussion. This would give the students a way to prepare and offer the discussion some direction before it begins. I would also like to host a shared document on which students would write their own discussion questions or comments before, during or after the discussion. I would try to guide the discussion to the key elements of the module and suggest some ways for them to further interact with the content through research and related resources.


Many of the suggested technologies could be used in conjunction with my current work. Using an RSS feed would be difficult because it would be hard to have some form of an assessment for students. I think offering some resources could be helpful, but the content is not focused on current events and so incorporation reading of an RSS feed would work more as a supplementary or individual inquiry activity than a formalized, educational one. Having students do online research may also be difficult in that I would have a hard time assessing. An inquiry task could have myriad different responses and it would be nearly impossible to develop an automated assessment function that would be able deliver proper feedback to each student.