Happy Anniversary to Us! Our Online Course Development team blog started 1 year ago. Let’s take a quick trip back through the archives to look at what themes we’ve covered so far. If you’re new to our blog and missed anything, or just want to review, remember all these posts are still accessible in the archives.
- November 2007: Who We Are, What We Do, Why We Do It
- December 2007: Visual Design
- January 2008: Net Generation
- February 2008: Online Learning Communities
- March 2008: 21st Century Literacy
- April 2008: TCC Online Conference & Our Presentation
- May 2008: New Courses
- June 2008: Sharing the Wealth: What’s Happening in Online Learning
- July 2008: Subject Matter Experts
- August 2008: Our Stories
- September 2008: Math and Science
- October 2008: Individual Perspectives on the Internet
As we look forward to the next year, what would you like to see on this list? Are there topics you really wish we’d spend a month talking about? We want this blog to be interesting and valuable to you, so tell us what we can do better!
Now that we’ve taken our short look back, let’s take a long look forward. This month we’re going to look into our “crystal balls” and imagine what online education could be like in the future. Specifically, what do we dream might be possible 5, 10, or more years down the road? Below is an optimistic vision, but one based on trends we’re already seeing.
Amino World
It’s November 7, 2018, and Olivia is mentally switching gears from teaching 9th grade physical science all day to teaching her one of her PLS online courses. She’s grateful that today isn’t a day where she commutes into the high school building. Half of her time spent teaching 9th graders is done online, so days like today she only has to switch which applications she uses rather than spending the time on the road.
That gives her some extra time to review messages from her PLS students. The messages come in a variety of forms: some are just text, some are online “voice mail” messages, and two are quick video questions from Carter, a student who really appreciates that extra visual connection. All these messages come into her personal learning environment (PLE), a hub that gathers all her content from PLS courses and elsewhere online into one central location. Olivia uses so many different tools online that she knows she’d never keep it all straight without this launching pad for her work. She returns the voicemail messages first, then switches to a voice-to-text converter to reply to the text messages. Olivia prefers audio and knows that her online personality comes across better this way, so she often “calls” this voice-to-text converter from her computer for personal messages. This way she gets to use the audio she prefers and her students get the text they like best. She double checks the written transcriptions for accuracy before sending mostly out of habit; years ago these programs weren’t nearly as effective as they are now. She flips on her camera to send a video message to Carter answering both of his questions.
Flipping her camera off again, Olivia spends 15 minutes scanning feeds in her PLE, including local and global news, blogs by other facilitators, and student work from various sites. She flags a multimedia presentation one of her students created for a conference to review more closely later.
Comfy Area
Next, Olivia logs into the virtual world where PLS often holds real-time sessions. She’s been looking forward to tonight’s session, a “show and tell” where small groups are presenting virtual objects for learning they’ve created. Olivia is not surprised that Carter is already in the virtual space when she arrives, as this is his favorite part of the course and he always comes early, but is pleased to see that he’s engaged in a deep discussion with another student. Keira has often been quiet in the course, but she’s gradually becoming more comfortable interacting with other participants. Keira is definitely a learner who benefits from the extra sense of community possible with the virtual world. She commented to Olivia last week that she feels like it’s easier to get to know others in the course when she can see their avatars and interact in the 3-D space rather than just the flat text on the screen.
Other students trickle in, chatting with each other and taking advantage of the time for informal conversations in the virtual space before the session officially starts. Olivia has set this room up tonight as a lounge with comfy chairs and even a few games to encourage this kind of community building. At 7PM, she gets everyone settled down and starts the presentations. She’s impressed by the projects:
- For chemistry, Keira’s team built a tool for practicing and analyzing chemical reactions where 3-D models of the chemicals accompany the formulas. This will allow their students to see the chemical structures and how they interact more clearly.
- Another group worked together to create a physics-based game where students use virtual objects to build a machine to get a rolling ball past a series of obstacles. This game has a number of different solutions, but students will have to understand the properties of objects (how they bounce, bend, or fall) and how they interact to reach the goal.
- For Carter’s group’s presentation, everyone teleports from the comfy lounge to an underwater mini-ecosystem they built. Students will be able to change elements of the environment, such as the temperature or salinity of the water, or add pollutants or new predators and observe the effects on existing life.
As they return to the virtual lounge, Olivia congratulates everyone on a job well done creating virtual tools that will really benefit their students. In fact, she thinks that physics-based game would be very helpful with her own 9th graders. She ends the formal class session but reminds the participants that the room will stay open if they want to continue to chat on their own. She smiles to herself about the productive class session as she logs off for the night.
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