In discussing how to create sustainable change within an organization Anthony Greenfield (Chartered Management Institute, 2009) outlines 5 Forces of Change:
These can also be looked at key motivators for behaviour. Each of these forces can be undermined when major change is introduced, leading people to resist the change in order to maintain their feelings of certainty, having purpose, being in control, being connected to others and the work that they are doing, and being successful in what they are doing (Chartered Management Institute, 2009). Greenfield poses that in order to create sustainable change within an organization we need to understand these psychological factors affecting response to change and developing capacity among members of the organization to respond to change positively and constructively (Greenfield, 2010). This concept of the “two complimentary interlinking capabilities” that need to be in place for sustainable change to be possible, both the “leaders at all levels who engage other positively with change and employees who have the skills and will to engage constructively with change” (Greenfield, 2010, p. 35) makes sense. Understanding what our motivations are, how change impacts our motivations, and developing skills and strategies for mitigating the negative emotions that can accompany change also makes sense. Making sense does not mean that this would be easy to implement though. In reading and viewing some of Greenfield’s work I am reminded of Peter Senge’s idea of the need to build a learning organization. This idea makes me visualize an organization as a living, breathing entity. It is not an inanimate thing, but rather a complex grouping of people, and as such, understanding people is essential to understanding an organization. Like developing the capacity for systems thinking, understanding and applying the forces of change requires a shift of mind and developing the ability to see interrelationships (Senge, 1990). In this case it is the interrelationships between the change, the emotional responses to change, the resulting behaviours, and the effects of these behaviours. Perhaps leveraging the forces of change can be imbedded as part of systems thinking, as a change of this nature could lead to a significant and potentially long lasting improvement to the system overall. In The Fifth Discipline, Senge states that, “Organizations learn only through individuals who learn. Individual learning does not guarantee organizational learning. But without it no organization learning occurs.” (Senge, 1990, p. 139). Again, this brings us back to the idea that it is the people themselves who are essential to the change, growth and development of an organization. For the application of Greenfield’s 5 forces of change to really work in supporting sustainable change the leaders need to support this process, but it is the other members of the organization, the individual “employees” who need to learn and implement the skills to manage the change. This is where I think some of the greatest challenges can lie. It’s not that I don't think this is possible, but I do think that there are many considerations here such as principles of trust and relationships. In Blended, Horn and Staker (2015) state that “culture is a critical part of the success of any blended-learning program” (p. 249). I would say this could be stretched to read that culture is a critical part of the success of any organization. Leaders and other individuals in an organization developing the skills to actively engage with change and constructively manage the forces of change would be a key element of a positive, collaborative, learning and growth focused culture. The next step in my learning will be to continue to investigate further elements needed to support this type of culture and how this can be supported through and by leadership. References: Chartered Management Institute. (2009, May 7). The 5 forces of change - Anthony Greenfiled talks to the CMI. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uwxzhbtBVw&feature=youtu.be Greenfield, A. (2010, December). Sustainable change. Training Journal. Horn, M. & Staker, H. (2015). Blended : Using disruptive innovation to improve schools. San Francisco, CA :Jossey-Bass. Senge, P.M. (1990). The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. New York:Doubleday/Currency.
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Being concise is not my strong suit. During verbal conversations I often prefer to sit back and take it all in. I am the listener. I like to have time to hear and consider the different ideas and perspectives, and I need time to process and synthesize the information before forming my own opinion. I also need time to sort through the details and narrow down my point. If I don’t sit back and take this time, I tend to be the rambler as I process on the fly. I prefer writing. I find the process of writing allows me to think, rethink and reflect. This is why I have chosen a series of blog posts to reflect on my learning throughout OLTD 503. In order to present my final revised philosophy of online facilitation though I have chosen a mind map as the medium in an effort to be as concise as possible. The Community of Inquiry (COI) framework, which presents three elements that interact with one another to support and enhance learning: teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence (Garrison, Anderson and Archer, 2000); fits well within my own philosophy of learning as a social constructivist process that becomes more meaningful and effective when approached from an inquiry-based perspective. This framework strongly influenced my learning throughout this course. I found that once I read about this model, each new concept that we discussed throughout the seminar weeks seemed to fit into at least one of the elements of the framework. I can see the many benefits of applying this model to my own practice when creating, revising and teaching online courses, so I chose to use this framework as the foundation for my philosophy of online facilitation. After investigating supporting online learners by promoting the development of self-regulation skills during Seminar 5, I realized that there was an additional element that also plays a role in the development of a community of inquiry, learner presence (Shea & Bidjerano, 2010). This addition of a learner presence element takes into consideration the “metacognitive, motivational, and behavioural traits and activities that are under the control of successful online learners” (Shea & Bidjerano, 2010, p.1723), all of which fall under the realm of self-regulation skills (Moore, 1990; Bradley, Browne & Kelley, 2017; Lehman, Conceição, & Conceio, 2013). Figure 1. Revised community of inquiry model including “learner presence”. (Shea & Bidjerano, 2010) Each week I have focused on what I believed to be the key messages and strategies for successful online facilitation that emerged from our readings, group conversations, debates and additional learning activities, and organized them within the four elements of this revised COI model. I anticipate that the branches of this mind map will continue to grow throughout the remainder of my OLTD journey, and I believe the final product will be an invaluable resource to have on hand, informing my pedagogy each time that I approach new online course development and teaching opportunities. Please download the PDF below to access the links shared in the mind map diagram, or visit Coggle to view the original diagram.
References: Bradley, R.L., Browne, B.L., & Kelley, H.M. (2017). Examining the influence of self-efficacy and self-regulation in online learning. College Student Journal, 51(4), 518-530. Garrison, D.R., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2000). Critical Inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Lehman, R. M., Conceição, S. C. O., & Conceio, S. C. O. (2013). Motivating and retaining online students: research-based strategies that work. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Michael Moore (1990) Recent contributions to the theory of distance education, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 5:3, 10-15, DOI: 10.1080/0268051900050303 Pacansky-Brock, M. Humanizing. Retrieved February 17, 2019 from https://brocansky.com/humanizing Schwier, R.A. (2009). Pursuing the elusive metaphor of community in virtual learning environments. In G. Siemens & C. Fulford (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2009 (pp. 3072-3082). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Shea, P. & Bidjerano, T. (2010). Learning presence: Towards a theory of self-efficacy, self-regulation, and the development of a communities of inquiry in online and blended learning environments. Computers and Education, 55, 1721-1731. In an interesting twist this week, the seminar facilitators opted to use a more traditional style learning management system to present their course materials and activities, and intentionally set the seminar up in a way to make the learners feel a greater sense of isolation during two of the three activities. I thought this was quite a clever design as is showed each of us what is feels like to be on the end of course design that does not take into consideration so many of the positive online communication strategies and community building elements that we have been learning about and experiencing over the previous weeks. The effects of this were quickly visible as only about half of the cohort members participated in the initial Zoom session used to discuss our own experiences with being supported by others as a stepping off point for our week’s investigations. I definitely felt the impact of this isolating design, as I shared with the seminar facilitators in their feedback thread.
“Over the past 6 months our cohort has worked hard (and our instructors have worked hard) to develop a strong sense of community, and I have found this to be a valuable aspect of my own learning in the program so far. I found it interesting this week to see how little time it can take for that sense of community to drop off when it's not being carefully nurtured. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that this is week 6, and there have been snow days, and the long weekend is ahead, but this week I have found myself wanting to simply check items off the to-do list.” I did however find that without the draw to interact with my fellow cohort members, I became more fully immersed in the research on my academic write topic of supporting online learners through attending to strategies to develop learners’ self-regulation skills. This again brought the idea of the need for balance to the forefront of my mind, as collaboration and community building are clearly valuable to online learners, and so too is the affordance of time discover, contemplate and synthesize their learning. One of the primary challenges that I think may arise when putting the community building strategies into practice, will be finding that sense of balance where learners are given the independent processing time that they need, while still ensuring that they are on track and maintaining a connection to the greater learning community, especially given the variables of course and learner needs that exist and change over time.
The seminar facilitation week was an awesome learning experience, both for the opportunity to really dig in to two models of online learning: Salmon's Five Stage Model (Salmon, 2003), and Garrison, Anderson and Archer's Community of Inquiry (COI) Model, and for the facilitation experiences itself, where my teammates and I were able to put some of the theory we had been learning about into practice. Learning about both of these models during our preparation for our facilitation week provided me with the “aha” moment that I had been hoping for as they provide concrete, yet flexible, frameworks to reference when planning for and teaching online courses. My group wanted to apply some of what we had learned about the COI model within our own facilitation process, as well some strategies that we hoped would help to reduce cognitive overload, as this had been to focus of the previous week. We chose to present our seminar content about building virtual communities using a Weebly site, something that we felt was familiar to the cohort members and would be easy to navigate. We also chose to use other technology tools that had already introduced, such as a Coggle mind map and a discussion thread, as well as providing our learners with the option to select tools that they had already experimented with. Starting our seminar week with a synchronous Zoom session made sense given the focus on building social presence within a community of learners as we felt that the ability to actually see and interact with one another couldn’t be as well replicated asynchronously or without video and audio. I was lucky enough to have two amazing teammates for this facilitation process, and I think Wendy’s ability to connect with each one of the learners who attended the meeting really set us up for a successful week in which our cohort members felt comfortable contacting us for support as needed. My main role during the week was to create some instructional content around the COI model to share with our cohort, and creation and facilitation of the icebreakers collaborative mind map and G+ conversations activity as well as the philosophy for building online community activity. Throughout the week I really enjoyed viewing the ideas and work shared by members of the learning cohort, and interacting with the learners through written means as well as video and audio recordings. Maintaining an ongoing presence throughout the week did take a significant amount of time, and I found myself wondering what was enough teacher presence versus what may be too much teacher presence. There were three people working together to facilitate this week, and Thai took on the role on facilitating the debate threads as a whole. I can definitely see how it would be a challenge to manage more posts and activities independently. I think this is where the social presence aspect can begin to take on a life of its own and greatly support the instructor as the students themselves take on a portion of the teaching presence role, providing feedback and support to one another. Overall I really enjoyed this experience and look forward to implementing some more of the strategies practiced within my current teaching role.
References: Garrison, D.R., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2000). Critical Inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Salmon,G.(2003). The Five Stage Model. Retrieved from https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html There was an interesting discussion in my class today that had me thinking about the pros and cons of online communication and the potential impacts of increasingly digital social interactions.
Lately I have tried to incorporate some learnings from OLTD 503 into my current teaching practice. I have been created some mini modules in our Canvas learning management system that make use of video explanations, both in an effort to humanize the course (Pacansky-Brock), and to support learners who are in different stages in their literacy development. I have also included discussion boards to encourage peer to peer interactions outside of class (eventually). Today we continued working on a shared novel study. I read a chapter aloud, we reviewed summarizing which we had talked about and practiced last class using a discussion board to post, then provide feedback to others on their summaries, then a couple of students volunteered to help me write a summary for today’s section. Afterwards, we looked at a new piece of our reader’s response - analyzing. I explained and shared examples as well as a few possible sentence starters before passing out paper and having the students write instead of type their responses. The majority did it, and in looking over their shoulders I could see they were on the right track. Then, I asked for some people to share. Crickets. I even called on a few specific students, but they said they’d rather not. So, I asked if they’d prefer to post on the discussion board and have others respond to them that way. They said yes. Interesting. We are a small group, already in a room together, we’ve known each other for over five months, and verbal sharing and responses would only have taken a few minutes; yet the students would prefer to take more time to set up the computers and type (in this case also having to rewrite) their responses. “Why?”, I asked. Several responses were the same, “because then people don’t have to stare at me while I’m talking.” I thought this was interesting. I wasn’t expecting that response. The students can be a chatty group otherwise, yet the informal conversation level of comfort does not seem to transfer over to academic discussions. Perhaps they feel like there is a greater expectation, or a little more on the line? I let the students get out computers and within ten minutes several posts had been made and peer responses were starting to come in. For me this really made me think about the importance of balance and connected well to the ongoing conversations that we have been having in OLTD 503 about the merits of using social media in our classrooms. Using online communication tools can absolutely support student learning, and some tools such as discussion boards can help to build community online. Should these be able to take the place of face to face communication and an in-person sense of community? I don’t think so. I haven’t figured out the answers yet to how best to design a blended learning program, or when it may be best to take a step back from technology rather than leaning in to it, but this experience has brought these questions to the forefront of my mind. Based on what I’ve learned so far, I think the trick really is to figure out the balance and support students in learning the skills to navigate both the online and physical world. Discovering the perfect balance will have to be a continuing goal. Reference: Pacansky-Brock, M. How to humanize your online classes. Retrieved from https://brocansky.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Humanize-Infog-Letter-Size-for-Printing.pdf
It's easy to get completely overwhelmed and overloaded with resources as a teacher. There are just so many options available, but it's difficult to narrow it down and determine what really fits the bill. Looking online to find a resource, then finding yourself down the rabbit hole with dozens of tabs open and at least a few items in your Teachers Pay Teachers cart is not an unusual event. In my current role as a teacher in a blended learning program for students in grades 4 to 7, I find that not only am I spending large amounts of time searching for resources for myself to use in my face to face classes as well as when building and updating my online courses, I am also spending a lot of time curating resources for parents who are working as the home facilitators of learning. This week the topic of our OLTD 503 seminar is Too Much Information! I am sure that this is the exact response that many home facilitators want to give me when they are first starting up in our program. Hopefully I can apply some of what I have been learning this week to ease my own cognitive overload as well as that of the parents I work with. The seminar team this week shared a great blog post/podcast from The Cult of Pedagogy, Are You a Curator or a Dumper? (Gonzalez, 2018). While I don't think I am a dumper, I have not exactly been a good curator either. In this blog, Jennifer Gonzalaz shared 6 curation guidelines: keep the best, lose the rest; chunk it; add your own introductions; use images as anchors; polish your hyperlinks; and always build in white space. While I may have been on track with keeping the best and losing the rest, I sure have not been as attentive towards the remaining five more design orientated considerations. The recommended elink curation tool makes attending to to these principles so easy that it would actually take me longer to present the recommended resources in a less visually pleasing way like I had been before. Being able to create something that looks good makes me want to share it even more too. I am happy to be able to add one more resource to my expanding, yet carefully curated, tool box.
Below is an example of a curated list of web links made using elink.
Reference:
Gonzalez, J. (2018, February 4). Are you a curator or a dumper? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/curator-or-dumper/ The readings, podcasts and videos shared this week made it clear that there are both benefits and challenges inherent to online learning and communication. The flexibility in terms of time, place, and pace seemed to be the primary benefits the were mentioned frequently, while potential social isolation, technology barriers and the self-regulation required by the learners were the most frequently mentioned challenges. In looking at these more closely, it seems as though the flexibility offered by online learning environments is itself both the greatest benefit and the greatest challenge as it is the flexibility itself that requires the learners to be skilled at time management, and self-motivated enough to participate fully in the learning activities and communicate both with the instructor and their fellow learners. What can be a benefit for one person, can be a challenge for the next.
I found the format of this week’s seminar to be a good example of this flexibility paradox and the ways in which the format of a course itself can impact learners in different ways; motivating and supporting some, while being challenging for others. The facilitators set this week up in a way that I would refer to as rigid asynchronous. There were no synchronous activities, but there were specific timelines established for activity participation and completion throughout the week in order to help each learner stay on track to compete all of the activities, and to support learner to learner communication. The timeline for the week that was provided was a strategy clearly aimed to counteract the significant challenge around learner self-regulation. For me, this highly structured format felt too rigid, and in turn made me feel less engaged in the learning, I found I was completing the tasks more for the sake of checking items off the to-do list, and spending less time digging in to the specific pieces that interested me the most. One of my primary motivations for choosing an online program was flexibility of time and pace, and with this format, the pace piece was being determined for me rather than by me. Many other learners in the cohort however expressed an appreciation for the clear timelines and felt that this supported them in engaging with each of the resources and activities throughout the week. This reminded me of a key takeaway from our reading of Teaching in a Digital Age, by Tone Bates, in OLTD 501: “There is no ‘best’ design model for all circumstances” (p. 125). That being said, I do believe that an important element that should be present in any method of course design should be a clear focus on knowing the needs and motivations of the learners. This may change from year to year, meaning that the course design and teaching strategies employed may also need to change, just as they would in a face to face teaching context. References: Bates, A.W. (2015) Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Designing Teaching and Learning Vancouver BC: Tony Bates Associates Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-9952692-0-0. The focus article, Try-A-Tool activity, and G+ posts from the Seminar #1 week helped me to more carefully consider how and why I want to use specific technology tools, including social media, in my own teaching practice. I believe that student motivation is impacted both by the tools themselves and the way in which the tools are used. Jacobi (2018) discusses three basic human needs that come into play when looking at facilitating self-determined learners: autonomy, perceived competence and relatedness. Several of the instructional strategies that can support these factors identified can be achieved using a wide range of tools, including the provision of a meaningful rationale, clear routines and expectations, however the tools used will likely have a greater impact on the implementation of other strategies such as the completion of collaborative activities and developing students’ sense of belonging and connectedness in the class. Tools that do not work smoothly and create significant technological challenges can create a sense of frustration in students that could override the potential motivational benefits of the collaboration and interactions with others. To support motivation, I think it is also important to add some variety in terms of the tools used while being sure to still maintain that sense of routine to support students’ levels of perceived competence by avoiding technological frustrations and cognitive overload (flash forward to Seminar #3: Too Much Information). Completing the Try-A-Tool activity was a great way for me to put myself in the shoes of my learners when they are faced with a new technology tool. I chose to try a Twitter chat, which I found challenging to keep up with the pace of the conversation while also trying to think carefully about the topic, and even quickly look up links and resources that were shared throughout. While I can't rule out the possibility of using this tool again in the future, I know that I need to spend more time practicing with it and researching some of the best strategies for solving my initial problems with the tool. Overall, this was a good reminder of the time required to explore new technologies before bringing them into the classroom, and the need to provide my students with the same time to become comfortable with the tools being used. This understanding of the impacts of the technological tools and the ways in which they are used that I gained during this week is represented in my overall revised philosophy of online communication. Reference: Jacobi, L. (2018). What motivates students in the online communication classroom? An exploration of Self-Determination Theory. Journal of Educators Online, 15(2). Retrieved from: https://www.thejeo.com/archive/2018_15_2/jacobi In our first week of OLTD 503 we began to learn the process of building online community by engaging in some introductory activities aimed at establishing online socialization (Stage 2 of Gilly Salmon’s Five Stage Model of online learning) among our colleagues in this course (Salmon, 2003), while also beginning to formulate ideas about our own philosophy of online communication. Using padlet to post our OLTD selfies and the Flipgrid intro videos were fun and simple ways to learn a little bit more about each other and build our comfort levels before sharing our deeper ideas and questions in the following weeks. I found the image of online communication activity to be a good way to review and process some of my own previous experiences, and I appreciated learning what the experiences of other cohort members had been as they validated some of my own experiences, like the fast pace mentioned by Shannon and the need to re-model and attend to student differences described by Lindsey, while also sparking new ideas. When selecting my own image of online communication to represent my philosophy and experiences with online communication to date, I chose a concept to represent online communication as being a bridge between the individual worlds that the teacher and each student brings to the learning community in order to emphasize the importance of relationships to the learning process. In response to my image, Marieke shared with me the Community of Inquiry framework for online courses (Garrison, Anderson and Archer, 2000). This COI framework has played a key role in revising elements of my philosophy of online communication over the following five weeks by expanding my understanding of the teacher and student relationship pieces, but also integrating the content and the meaning construction, or learning itself, as a crucial element. References:
Garrison,D.R., Anderson,T.& Archer, W.(2000).Critical Inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Salmon,G.(2003). The Five Stage Model. Retrieved from https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html Welcome to my blog site. As I continue to explore the world of blended learning during my time as a student in the Online Learning & Teaching graduate Diploma program at Vancouver Island University, I will be posting about my learning, questions, ideas and experiences on this blog site. I hope that you will join me on my journey and share your own ideas and experiences with me along the way.
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