The assignment asked for reflections and personal feelings in regards to the assigned readings during the current module. I felt that in particular, Moore and Kearsley’s chapters on course design and information systems design was extremely well organized and this may have been due to my previous exposure to ISD. I have also conducted course development of shorter training courses using the author/editor method, and I can attest that few person outside of the educational or training disciplines have appreciated the amount of time required to develop even a short one day or 4 hour training course utilizing the latter method. In this respect, I found the Moore and Kearsley text to confirm heavily my personal experiences and therefore may have felt their writing to be the most clear and authoritative.

The posting of this information as a blog and the general use of the blog for this assignment has shown that it is indeed a multifaceted tool, capable of so much more in terms of educational use, than is currently being experienced on the web for blogs. The conventional use, in my opinion, for blogs today, are news and the op/ed pieces of various writers in various professional and social settings, as opposed to widespread educational use, however, I can agree after experiencing the numerous features available even in the free hosted blog services, how this medium could be utilized to pass on important information, store it in an accessible manner, and to utilize web based technology to access it. Of particular interest to blogging as an educational tool, I would think would be m-learning. Students involved in any course that requires students to experience real life or immersion aspects of a course, could utilize mobile technology to record their notes, experiences, and feelings regarding the experience to a blog in real time, contemporaneous with the experience.

The use of a blog to complete this assignment not only exposes the future instructors to the use and potential of the technology, but also exposes the student to content via the aspect of this assignment wherein peer review and comment are required. The assignment promotes asynchronous interaction between students and the use of the blog as an educational assignemnt also promotes student teacher interaction and feedback via the submission of the blog contents for a grade.

I have enjoyed, actually, the diversion of this blog assignment from the traditional essay or paper assignement which is the most often used method of assessing student progress in the majority of my previous experiences with distance education.

Being written by an active university faculty member, Caplan doesn’t just speak to structure, media, and pedagogical characteristics of a course, but includes real life factors from an administrator’s standpoint on how to structure the meritocracy of a university to support distance education. This information was unique to the aforementioned chapter in comparison to other readings on the subject.

Caplan presents another thought provoking section in his “Focus on Pedagogy” section of the chapter, which introduces the “American Association of Higher Education’s Seven Principles for good practive in undergraduate education”. In continuing to present a case for emphasis on sound pedagogical methodology in selecting, designing, and delivering distance education technology and media.

Having never been exposed the the “7 principles” it was interesting to me to realize that all other authors seem to stress these principles of good pedagogy without specifically listing or referring to them when specifically discussing the design and delivery of distance education courses.

Anderson attributes the “7 principles” concept to authors Arthur Chickering and Steve Ehrman and lists relevant hyperlink information to access their work directly.

Much of the continuing information presented by Caplan continues to stress the underlying idea that distance education should be designed and delivered with the same pedagogical standards as conventional face to face education courses and that the unique attributes of the web and associated media be used to the advantage of the course designer in order to effectively create an academically sound course. Caplan cautions that f2f courses should simply not be converted to text, but rather that each media should be scrutinized for strengths and weaknesses and utilized according to their individual effectiveness in the learning transaction.

Caplan’s presentation mirrors several of the other module’s readings on the subject of course design, but includes resources and concepts other authors did not present, yet all in order to reinforce the same ideas of distance education course design that I have come to possess from the collective readings in this course module.

Caplan, D (2004). The development of online courses. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Retrieved November 1, 2009 from http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/ch7.html

Moore, M.G. & Kearsley, G. (2005). Distance Education: A systems view. Belmont, CA: Thompson Wadsworth.

The first method described, the “author/editor” approach is outlined and described as a course design method that is less expensive, very time intensive, easy to change, and less well developed and less likely to incorporate Instructional Systems Design than the other stated method, which is the “course/team” model. Moore describes the course/team model as more likely to incorporate ISD, thorough development of topic and material/subject matter, and having a lengthy production time and relatively high cost in comparison to author/editor model, but only depending on the number of students that will be taught with the developed product course.

Moore begins the chapter outlining Instrutional Systems Design, and briefly touches on Poole’s Taxonomy and learning objectvies. I particularly found this section interesting as that is how the Maryland State Police teach thier “Enhanced Instructor Course” which is required training for all certified instructors in Maryland Law Enforcement. The course is a primer in the use of ISD for law enforcement trainers and the majority of all training materials that I have seen come from the state training commission are outlined around ISD with adherence to learning objectives and assessment of such.

I am starting to appreciate the scholarship and presentation of Michael Moore as my knowledge of distance education grows, I feel that his books present distance education in a consistently objective and organized manner that is consistent with my experience of d.e.

Within the text, both models were expounded and included the use of time management (student and teacher workload), resources and cost, and effectiveness of the technology as means to outline each model.

There were also presented two approaches to course design; 1. systems based, and 2. flexible. The systems based approach involved division of labor or specialization to create a course that was more rigid in terms of structure while the flexible approach afforded more learner autonomy in deciding on content and stressed community or collaborative learning processes to deliver knowledge.

The systems approach seemed more applicable to Distance Education, required substantial resources to utilize, and was more teacher oriented.

The flexible approach was presented as requiring less resources, is more flexible/adaptable and requires a high technical skill level from the developer and teacher.

The lone ranger model involves course design by one person. This model may be employed at a University where the course can be monitored by one tenured professor and thus can allow standardization of knowledge delivery when utilizing teaching assistants to teach a large number of students.

The extent and quality of course design is dependent upon the amount of resources and support available to the designer.

The technology based systems approach can reduce costs and may be more applicable for use in dual mode Universities. The systems approach becomes cost effective when considering economies of scale, and once a course is designed, it can be taught to a large number of students by different instructors and still achieve similar outcomes in terms of knowledge and skills obtained by students.

Bates and Poole continue to cover Learning outcomes as elements of course design.

Learning outcomes are defined in the text as – “the intended learning resulting from a teaching process” (Bates & Poole 2003).

The text considers organizing and managing student workload, in respect to the use of technology. The text outlines that student workload organization differs from f2f classes versus distance education courses.

Bates and Poole cover managing teacher workload and state that this is “the most critical issue in the use of technology based teaching”. (Bates and Poole 2003).

I agree with the premises presented in the chapter of Bates and Poole, but found that the text lacked more specific considerations for selecting technology based on the criteria they presented. The text presented far too generalized references to the three aforementioned categories to be used in technology selection: time management, costs/resources, and effectiveness. Bates and Poole also did not offer suggestions on where to find empirical data on any of these ideas they presented and thus the reading seemed to only scratch the surface of what it purported to cover, i.e. the choice of technology in teaching. I do concede that following chapters may contain more specific information on individual technologies and their cost, workload, and effectiveness. Despite this lack of detail, the ideas presented and their use as a framework in considering technology still seem useful when choosing a system for course design, but possibly more applicable to the university administrator or tenured professor overseeing a course rather than the graduate level student.

This reading to me seems to enhance the concepts of the “guided didactic conversation”, specifically in the section on Teacher Student interaction, which is the oldest and most obvious necessary form of interaction in both f2f and distance education.

The advantage of distance education in reference to some of the other forms of interaction, that of student content, seems to be that in DE, there are a number of other content forms used more regularly than in f2f interaction, which are used of necessity, due to the transactional distance of DE. The use of media, programs, and other content not used as often in f2c, however, seems to better mirror the business and communication world of today than f2f education, as we are using the same technologies used to deliver content in DE for interpersonal business and social communication and the lines between social and work based networking are being thinned every day. Content based advertising appears on our web browsers as we conduct either business, communication, shopping, research, or any other online task in our personal and professional everyday lives, and thus, a system of content delivery that matches this social atmosphere may even be more comfortable to some learners than a f2f experience, or so postulates Anderson, and I agree.