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Talk:Christopher Cheung: Fostering Collaborative Learning with Technologies

From KNILT

-- Adeutsch (talk) 11:15, 22 November 2014 (EST)

Hi Christopher –

I think you’re off to a great start! Your mini-course is teaching much needed skills and helping instructors utilize technology to foster collaboration. Your introduction is well organized – beginning with an explanation of why this topic is important and moving on to give an overview of what to expect. It’s nice that you’ve incorporated an element of student control as you open up sequencing of units 2-5. I like the heading of your bottom navigation panel – what’s next – and that this section reinforces the concept that participants can choose their own path of learning. Have you considered incorporating some of your language from your statement of purpose from your portfolio? I think that your writing there is very compelling and might add more of a “hook” in your introduction.


Unit one is sequenced well – with the first lesson focusing on theory and the second lesson focusing on tools. I think that you’re smart to begin with laying a conceptual foundation so that participants understand the link between collaborative projects and learning. This will motivate participants to engage in the mini-course. You also include useful definitions of key concepts in both lessons. Your activities encourage students to reflect and connect the materials to their own experience and practice. The article you selected has interesting information about the use of collaborative tools and increased student performance. Have you considered incorporating activities into your lessons to improve flow? For instance the article and first discussion would be incorporated into lesson one and the video and journal would be incorporated into lesson two as activities. It might be helpful to have an article or video that presents evidence about the connection between collaboration and learning. It might also be helpful to add some guidance to your participants for watching the video as they may or may not directly connect that content to your course content.

I’m looking forward to seeing this course develop and to learning more about collaborative learning!

Anne

Response

Hi Anne,

I made some changes based on your feedback! Thank you for taking the time to help me improve my course! It's a big project and being able to get some feedback is very helpful!

-Chris

Hi Christopher,

WOW!You have started a great course here! It is well organized and very user friendly. Your directions are clear and easy to follow. I think that users know what to do, where to click, and what to do next. I think that help keep the course easy to navigate which allows for less frustration. I like how you offer students both the reading and a video to watch during the lesson. This allows students to really get more out of the course. Looking forward to seeing your course develop! Catherine

Hi again Chris -

Wow - you've done a LOT of work and your course looks great!! I like the replacement video you chose for unit one - I think it's much more relevant to your course (you have two links to the same video - was this intentional?). Also - while I suggested incorporating activities into your lessons in my original comments now that I've had a chance to review the entire course I understand your structure and think that it works well. On that note - the use of consistent structure throughout your lessons will help students navigate and understand the course content. The breakdown of lessons and activities is helpful - with opportunities for both learning and application. I like the separation of lessons into what is this tool and how do you use it & exploring potential uses of the tool. You provide context and then useful examples of effective use. While I understood after the first two units that the application or DO sections are not shared - you might want to make this explicit for your participants. Your articles and videos are relevant and useful as are your references - I'm sure that collecting all of these resources took a lot of time but I think it pays off. Have you considered keeping unit 5 more consistent with units 2-4? You allow students freedom in how they sequence units 2-5 but the unit 5 discussion takes an overview approach to the units. Also - it looks like you have the same objectives in unit 5 and unit 6 - I think you probably copied the unit and didn't add in the unit's objectives. Overall you did an amazing job!

Anne

instructor comment on your mini-course -- Jianwei Zhang (talk) 22:10, 29 November 2014 (EST)

Hi Chris,

Your mini-course is professionally designed and created, addressing your course objectives through well-organized lessons that include rich learning activities and supporting materials. Bravo!

If you have time to do further refinement, here are a few issues that can be refined.

1) Your unit 1 identifies the following types of collaborative technology. I can guess how your units 2-5 map on to these types, but you could make this explicit in your unit 1.

  • Synchronous document collaboration
  • Synchronous communication via multimedia
  • Asynchronous discussion via multimedia
  • Asynchronous discussion via text

2) Your last unit asked the learner to design lessons using collaborative technologies. But I don't feel that the learner has well-prepared for making appropriate choices and integration of the tools to best support collaborative, deep learning. You could add a summary/highlight in the beginning of your last unit about how make appropriate choices and integration of the tools to best support collaborative, deep learning before the lesson design assignment.

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