I've spent the last couple of weeks working with Tyrone Ridgway on the next phase of the Biology 12 project. He returned from a rather exciting month or so back in Australia conducting classes from a boat where he took students snorkeling and scuba diving to pick up specimens, bring them on the boat and then conduct various activities that included using the scientific method to analyze what they had found. I'm not sure a class gets any cooler than that from a design and delivery perspective!
While we won't be scheduling any boat runs for the new Biology 12 course, we will be building upon our successful Biology 12 work from this spring when we redesigned one of the labs and delivered it as an e-learning module to students via the Blogs at Penn State web publishing platform. I am very excited about this project because we are taking the design model we used and really trying to expand it. There are three main strategies for the new Biology 12 redesign and they include:
- A total re-creation of the course content based on more focused and related learning objectives
- Re-use of technologies and processes from the first project
- Utilization of new tools and technologies to utilize in the online learning modules.
Each of these three areas are described below:
All New Content
All current labs and exercises in the Biology 12 course are being thrown out. Most importantly, students will no longer be in the overcrowded labs to perform series' of mostly unrelated lab exercises. In it's place will be an online set of 'labs' that carry a more comprehensive curriculum that build toward a student's ability to perform and appreciate the scientific method. As we did for the Flowering Plant Reproduction lab, Tyrone will develop content that is within a relevant context for today's students. For example, he used the declining bee population issue to teach how flowers reproduce and therefore the impacts of fewer bees on the planet to assist with this part of nature. Look for more of that approach in the new course
What we will Re-use (and hopefully expand)
Blogs at Penn State: Again, we plan to use the Blogs at Penn State's web publishing platform as the content delivery mechanism. In addition to the reasons we used it in the past, we have also begun to think about how this course will 'live' beyond this initial development for future faculty that are responsible for it. The Blogs platform is again a great choice because everyone at Penn State has access to and can (and should) be utilizing. So, for example, in two years when Tyrone is gone and I've moved on to another project, the Biology department will have access to the content and the ability to make changes to it themselves. They won't need to outsource it or re-engineer it to another platform.
ANGEL: We plan to employ the same strategy as before where students will sign-in to ANGEL to access the learning content and assorted other materials.
Custom Content Development: We will, when appropriate, develop custom Flash animations and interactions (exercises) for students, just as we did the for the Flowering Plant Reproduction lab.
Google Docs: We used Google Docs to capture QA/QC feedback for the previous effort and we plan to use it again. However, we may look to use more capabilities of Google Docs as well. For example, Tyrone would like students to see the effect of changing data on graphical representations in order to make assumptions. We may look into creating interactive Google Doc spreadsheets to do this (Note: anyone reading this who has some expertise on this, please step forward!)
New Stuff we are Planning to Use
Among the new technologies and tools we plan to develop content with are:
VoiceThread: I'm sure anyone reading my blogs has read enough about VoiceThread already (if not, check out a previous post on this tool). We are planning to create content with VoiceThread and embed it within the content web pages of the course. We will design an exercise early in the course where students will be required to add a comment so that they get a feel for how VoiceThread works. This exercise will establish a foundation for later uses of this technology throughout the semester.
Kaltura Produced Videos: Tyrone attended the Learning Design Summer Camp this year and participated in the pre-conference workshop on Developing Literacies for Student Digital Media. In this workshop, they used Kaltura, a free and open source web-based video editing platform to create compelling videos. Tyrone would like to use this tool to create some content elements of the course. We will attempt to use this platform, as opposed to the more established iMovie, because it can easily be used by future content owners of this course (it's totally web-based and free). For now, we have no plans to give students an assignment where they would use Kaltura to create a video but it is something that we will keep in the back of our minds.
Blogging: Ironically, we did not employ the blogging function of the Blogs at Penn State platform for the project this past spring. We are designing to change that for the new Biology 12 course. We are planning to include assignments where students will need to write blog entries at different points throughout the semester. We expect to use this as another way to get students engaged in the course and to spark conversation.
Looking Forward to This
There is no doubt that this is an exciting project. How can a total content recreation and utilization of some of the leading-edge learning technologies not be? No doubt there will be a number of obstacles we encounter (will students handle log-ins for ANGEL and VoiceThread seamlessly?) but ETS has the brainpower necessary to overcome most anything we will encounter. I look forward to this project and sharing the experience as we progress.
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