LMS+Reflection

=LMS Reflection=

Orientation to the M.Ed. in Educational Technology
Our group, “The TechSperts,” decided to develop an orientation to the M.Ed. In Educational Technology program at USC. We felt an orientation would be a great addition to the program, because as students ourselves, we have noticed where some extra information would be helpful in order to be successful in the program. This course is designed to be completed by those newly accepted to the EDTECH program in the summer prior to their first official course in five weeks. However, it is designed to be flexible so that anyone can login at anytime and participate in the lessons. Therefore, it can also be beneficial to students throughout the program, or anyone who is new to online learning.

To design this course, our group collaborated by email, Google Docs, Adobe Connect meetings, and a wiki. We brainstormed which lessons to include by discussing our own experiences as students in the EDTECH program, as well as feedback from a survey sent to other students in the program. We created an outline of our lessons and ended up with 10 lessons and designed them to be sequential in a way that would be most beneficial to someone new to online learning.

We designed our course content to be open-ended to incorporate discussion and self-exploration by students. We approached lessons as a “scavenger hunt” for students to use the information presented in lessons as a basis for more self-directed learning. Lessons included external links to websites and video as well as content developed by the instructors specifically for this course.

According the the rubric created by my group earlier in this course, the strengths of the Orientation to the M.Ed. In Educational Technology are it's content, design, and methods of assessment. In hindsight, I think we could improve accessibility by including PDF versions of course content. Also, based on feedback from our students, we could include more information about turning in assignments and viewing grades/feedback from instructors on Blackboard and more information about doing research online through the university library system or ERIC database.

I found Blackboard both a positive and negative in the development of this course. On one hand, I am very familiar with Blackboard LMS as both a student and instructor, but find it somewhat rigid as far as being able to incorporate certain design elements. I would like to be able to integrate more visually appealing content.

Overall, I think our course was well-designed and our team worked extremely well together. I would love for this course to be implemented as a true orientation to the EDTECH program in the future. If it were used in the future, we will take feedback into consideration in making changes. Also, I believe it would be beneficial to move the course to an open source LMS so students do not have to go through a complicated registration process to have access to Blackboard.

Adobe Photoshop/Digital Photography
As a student in this course, I thought the instructors did an excellent job designing the course. There was a wealth of information presented on each topic, and all content was presented in an orderly, uniform fashion. It did not present itself as something that was organized by several people. I liked how the assignments built on each other as far as level of difficulty. I felt this course would be helpful to both the novice and advanced photographer. The instructors used Blackboard well and incorporated graphics, video, external websites, and lots of original content to make a wonderful course. I mentioned to the instructors that I'd love to take this course “for real” at some point in the future.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I thought building our own LMS site went much smoother than expected, in no small part due to my exceptional teammates. I feel this assignment was extremely beneficial and provided an authentic learning experience that I will definitely be able to utilize in the future.

Please see the rubric below for my evaluation of both the LMS site I helped develop and the one I participated in.

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