ETEC 551 – Activity #4 – Group – Afifa Alawi & Van Phan

Online learning and online classes are expanding every year. In order to make online teaching successful, the content of online courses should be organized in ways that students can find all required learning materials conveniently, without any confusion or distraction. In Phylise Banner interview from Penn State regarding “Competencies for Online Teaching Success”, she repeatedly mentioned the word “hierarchy” and how online education should be organized simply in that structure. She indicates that an online course instructor should build an online environment and arrange contents so that students can easily find learning materials.  Like a house with many rooms, each room has its own purpose which means that materials should be organized in folders for each week of instruction. Material for each week of instruction should be found in that week’s particular folder.  The most important question that Banner want online instructors to be aware of is in the term of hierarchy, “how am I going to help students guide themselves”? When a student walks into the house, he/she should know which room to go to for assignments, schedule, help, etc. The house symbolize as a structure so the student can self- guide themselves. For any materials that are not organized in a particular room, like a book in the living room, it’s an opportunity for the student to “explore” the book themselves. We (Afifa and Van) chose this particular video because we believe that when a course is not face to face, it’s highly important that course materials, assignments, schedule, and links are organized and accessible; that’s what makes online education successful. When there is a lot of clicking around, back and forth from one page to another, it’s time consuming and it would raise more questions than answers. Among other videos, we choose this one because it’s important to know where to start in order and where to go before students can learn on what to do and how to do it. 

In our (Afifa, Van) classes where our teachers were organized and course materials were arranged in proper folders, we could easily locate learning materials without any frustration. On the other hand we had online classes where learning materials were not arranged properly. It was so difficult and time consuming to locate online learning materials for that particular class. Since online education is growing rapidly there are numerous sources available for educators to support and manage their online course materials. For example, Follett Software Company (Rivero, 2011)helps schools and educators across country to build user-friendly online environments.

Sources: 

Rivero, V. (2011). Solution providers improving student achievement. Internet@schools, 18(5), 9-11.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7Xgyp7sj_Y&src_vid=S4HrYnbEWJc&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_788377