Module design reflection and plannning

                                Planning and Reflection for Module Design

         When I knew that we were going to design a module for our own online writing course, I got extremely nervous. Before I took ENG 704, I knew nothing about online teaching or studying tools, let alone thinking about designing an online course, even just a module. Since it was an important assignment for the course, I had to face it bravely. From planning, working on, finishing the module design, and reflecting on it, it took me about one month. Looking back the past month of designing the module, I have gained much. Planning is a necessary start for module design, but we also need to make correspondent changes in the process in order to cooperate our course’s needs.

         Planning for module design was not hard for me, and the instructions from The Sample Online Writing Course Module Assignment and Online Writing Course: Reflection and Planning in a Blog Entry by Dr. Cadle helped me a lot. I already had the sample assignment and the sample writing, so I just needed to decide on the interface, the interaction and the discussion, which functioned as a general structure about what my module would look like.

 On the other hand, the module design is not as easy as the calculation of“one plus one”, there are many details as mentioned in Dr. Cadle’s instructions that I should think about as well. I planned to use this course for online English writing students, who are intermediate writers. I named it as English Composition Online Course, and the class number of it was ENG 210, which was numbered by me randomly. There are many factors that can influence what the course will be like. For example, the number of students can influence whether I can be responsible for each of them, and my ideal number is no more than 20 students. How I present myself will matter the development of this course as well. I planned to be a teacher who had enough interactions with my students, but I would not be too talkative to take away students’ opportunities of expressing themselves as well.

As for the interface of my course, I used to try WordPress which was suggested by a tutor in writing center. Later, some of my classmates suggested that Weebly would be a good choice. I tried both of them, and decided on Weebly, which was easier to access and format. I didn’t plan to have password for the module design assignment in ENG 704 because I wished to get feedback from my teacher and classmates, but my future course would be password protected because I believed my students’ privacy and the intellectual property should be protected, where students would need an account to log in.

I planned to design the module in an online course, which was simple and clear. There was no need for fabulous images or creative little buttons for I was afraid that my students would be distracted by them. Categorizing the sections of the course was necessary, which would be home page, modules, discussion, contact information and so on. Also, I didn’t want my students get frustrated in finding materials in my course, so I would create a link for the reading as long as I mentioned it. Building community is a primary goal in online writing course, so I would provide at least three ways that students could use to get interacted with each other and me, which would include discussion board, email, Skype. Moreover, I would let my students choose and suggest the way of interaction that they prefer.

However, when I begun my module design, I realized that there was distance between actual operation and my planning. The first thing I made improvement was my writing sample, and I got some helpful feedback from Dr. Cadle. I didn’t have a citation screen in my video even though I listed it as a requirement in my assignment instruction. Luckily, Dr.Cadle reminded me that I needed to add that in my video because I was modeling how to use sources to my students there. What I learnt from this point was that I should put my students into consideration when I designed my online course, rather than ignore them. Only when our students feel comfortable with the online course, they can make progress in writing.

 I kept revising my module design for many times. For example, in case that my students couldn’t find the assignment document, I attached the link of it everywhere. The first time I only placed it in the Assignment section, and I placed it at the Module section later. I created it as an announcement in Announcement page for the third time revision. In order to make sure that the reading was appropriate for the designed module, I read and edited all of them over and over again, thinking students could benefit from which aspect in their video composition.

I attached importance to students’ interaction in my class. When designing the Discussion page, I thought students might not be positive in creating threads at the beginning of the course, so I started some threads for them. Students will begin to know each other even though they just reply to me in my threads. Students can also contact their classmates and me in many other ways, such as email, skype, which is listed in Contact page.

The only part that I am still confused is whether my online should be more relaxing or more formal. To be honest, I do want to have some background music, interesting images or video on the website. However, I didn’t do that because I was afraid my students would be distracted by them, and I might try it someday when I gain much teaching experience.

Planning can act as a general guideline before we start designing our modules, but we should make some changes as well in actual operation when needed. There is one principle that we should always keep in mind from beginning to the end, which is that students are our focus in teaching and we are always there for them in helping them with writing. The design of online writing course is not rigid, and we should keep improving it according to students’ needs, our teaching experience and technical progress.