Cooking up a course - topic 4

I remember when I started to teach university courses about 12 years ago: I was basically thrown into full responsibility for several university courses, that included a huge amount of online activites.
There was no teaching training. The senior teachers were busy themselves with other courses and tight deadlines. I was helped more by administrators with the formal requisites included in carrying out a university course. Other than that I was basically left to figure out how to do it on my own.
- Dont get me wrong, it *was* challening but in a fun way: experimenting with ways to encourage the students to engage and learn for life and for real, not just memorize facts for assesment.

Studying the Addie model I recognize many of the different stages and steps in planning courses, with all the various considerations and including the characteristics of the subject matter as well as the knowledge of the students. (jclarkgardner: 2011)

After a couple of years and a number of courses, I got the opportunity to attend my first course on university education.
There I met the theories of Biggs and Tang, and was introduced to the idea of student focus, (presented by Biggs and Tang as an alternative perspective to the opposing and common "blame-the-students"-approach or cases where all the limelight is directed on the teacher as the main performer... (Biggs and Tang: 2011)
This changed my teaching altogether and I got to plan much more focused, and felt really helped by the model, concepts and theories of constructive alignment. It made assessment methods a natural part of the complete learning process in the courses. At the same time it naturally increased the students engagement and motivation as they found the creative assessment methods fun and relevant for their future careers.
It also worked equally well regardless of instructional methods, whether the course was completely online, blended or entirely IRL, as the focus was directed towards students generating knowledge by doing, as suitable tools are chosen after learning objectives are clearly formulated.


In analysing the design of the ONL course I begin to see many aspects of the 5 stage model by Salmon, with the different steps, with supporting and present facilitators that are natural parts of the discussions, and gradual establishing of social strucures that encourage socialisation and building of relationsships, which in its turn enabled more deeper learning processes to take place (Salmon: 2013)
I think they are both useful, and could without problems be used as structuring help alongside the theories of constructive alignment and student centered perspective as explained by Biggs and Tang (Biggs and Tang: 2011)

I also think, that the more blending is going on in education, the more models and theories like the above mentioned are worthwhile to use and get help by, as more platforms and learning environments increase the need for good structure and planning, to avoind confusing courses where students just get lost in tools and technique.

References

Bates, T (2016). The 10 Fundamentals of Teaching Online for Faculty and Instructors.

Biggs, J. B. (2011). Teaching for quality learning at university: What the student does. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).

jclarkgardner (2011, June 11) ADDIE Model Instructional Strategies [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20E84CD77B301A20

Salmon, G (2013) The Five Stage Model. Retrieved 2016 November 8 from http://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html