Project+Statement

Five area school corporations have formed a county cooperative to serve as a dropout prevention program, known as Merit Learning Center (MLC). During the regular school year, MLC serves at-risk high school students helping them to complete their high school education. During the summer, MLC offers credit recovery opportunities. In addition, MLC offers courses for students who cannot fit in specific courses during the regular school year.

The five area superintendents have brought together a group of high school educators in hopes of creating virtual or blended learning courses to be offered through MLC during summer school or to homebound students. The superintendents have hired our group to facilitate this task.

For our project, we will create a workshop for teachers interested in learning how to create effective virtual or blended learning courses. Workshop participants will experience a variety of web 2.0 tools, synchronous and asynchronous communication, and collaborate with other educators to create a problem-based learning project for their course. Workshop participants will also learn how to design lessons that meet Universal Design for Learning guidelines, Mayer’s principles of effective multimedia learning, and instructional theories to assist them in lesson development.

How will you improve learner performance by engaging learners in authentic experiences?

The purpose of the workshop is to provide the participants with an experience that will allow them to create their own online/blended course to be used for the county cooperative. In addition, teachers will be given the opportunity to earn 3 credits hours.

Can the authentic experience the allowance of learners to have a skeleton of a blended course giving them the actual feel for blended course creation?

How will you facilitate learning through constructivist, collaborative learning experiences?

Participants will be engaged in activities that require them to collaborate through online discussions as well as create one problem-based learning project for their own students. Creating their own PBL in our workshop will meet the expectations of Smith and MacGregors’ assumptions for collaborative learning because “In collaborative learning situations, students are not simply taking in new information or ideas. They are creating something new with the information and ideas. These acts of intellectual processing- of constructing meaning or creating something new-are crucial to learning.” The next assumption for collaborative learning is that learning depends on rich contexts. Our workshop would be that rich learning context where participants would become collaborative learners and they would be creating activities that immerse students in challenging tasks or questions. Collaborative learning activities frequently begin with problems, for which students must marshal pertinent facts and ideas. Instead of being distant observers students become immediate practitioners.

The last assumption that Smith and MacGregor propose for collaborative learning is that learning is inherently social. Collaborative learning produces intellectual synergy of many minds coming to bear on a problem, and the social stimulation of mutual engagement in a common endeavor. This mutual exploration, meaning-making, and feedback often leads to better understanding on the part of students, and to the creation of new understandings for all. Our workshop would be a connected environment where all participants would be able to share, create, and connect.

Smith and MacGregor continue on to explain that collaborative learning is a learning theory that incorporates the following goals: involvement, cooperation and teamwork and civic responsibility (1992).

**Involvement:** Involvement in learning, involvement with other students, and involvement with faculty are factors that make an overwhelming difference in student retention and success in college. By its very nature, collaborative learning is both socially and intellectually involving. It invites students to build closer connections to other students, their faculty, their courses and their learning (1992). Our workshop would take this goal one step further and foster involving relationships with other teachers in the field.

**Cooperation and Teamwork:** The cultivation of teamwork, community-building, and leadership skills are legitimate and valuable classroom goals of a collaborative learning. Our workshop would foster cooperation and teamwork through the process of creating the PBL unit for each of the attendees. Attendees could come with partners from their school and/or work with other attendees to create a team environment.

**Civic Responsibility:** Collaborative learning encourages students to acquire an active voice in shaping their ideas and values and a sensitive ear in hearing others. It can also help instill the positive cultural values of what is fair and expected of each individual. At our workshop attendees would be the active voice in creating their own projects and would each have their own individual responsibilities and expectations in creating their PBL units.

How will you create sound instructional materials and learning environments that are based on solid research and learning theory?

Workshop presentation format will model the type of learning and lesson development….

We will use the ADDIE model of instructional design to create our materials? “This approach provides a step-by-step system for the evaluation of students' needs, the design and development of training materials, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the training intervention” (Kruse, n.d., para 1).

Kruse, K. (n.d.) Introduction to instructional design and the ADDIE model. Retrieved from //http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/art2_1.htm

[Here are two additional links – one for ADDIE and one for ASSURE if you all prefer that model. The ADDIE Model http://www.learning-theories.com/addie-model.html The ASSURE Model []

We will create a learning environment based on the research of Rena M. Oaloff and Keith Pratt in Building Online Learning Communities.

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2007). Building online learning communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom (2nd ed.). San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.

How will you facilitate the use of innovations through the diffusion and integration of new technologies and technological experiences for your learners?

Teachers will be given access to a variety of tools to help support their lesson plan development (i.e. Moodle, Apex Learning lessons, student email accounts, Blogs, Wikis and Elluminate.)

How will you most effectively manage this process?

In the creation of our workshop we have decided to incorporate Problem Based Learning through collaborative groups to serve as a support system for each participant. We have found that in situations where students or participants are alone in creating new curriculum they often feel overwhelmed and quickly shut down; limiting their learning and their success. However, when in the same learning and curriculum situation with a team member or teammate there to be a support system for each participant to use as a sounding board, a helper and a processor participants often will succeed much more than they did in the situation where they were by themselves.

We believe that this success occurs because the participants are being supported by cultural elements, and these elements are: trust, sharing, goals, innovation, environment, collaborative chaos, constructive confrontation, communication, community, and value. The more present these elements are in the workshop the more effective the workshop will be.

According to Vicki Davis collaboration within a PBL situation allows for participants to have the ability to learn inside and outside of a physical classroom, as well as have the space and time to think outside of a preset class schedule, and collaboration allows students the ability to learn from each other, and the more these skills are taught and utilized in the classroom environment the more ready participants will become as they use their curriculum in the real world (2009). Problem based learning activities immerse participants in challenging tasks or questions where students must marshal pertinent facts and ideas; instead of being distant observers students become immediate practitioners.

Through the use of Moodle and RCampus is pretty good and very easy to use as opposed to Moodle.

What ethical considerations will you make to ensure sound decisions are made?

Universal Design for Learning []

What processes and resources will you include?

**Resources:** incude Moodle, SAS Curriculum Pathways, Student email

**Moodle:** A free Course Management System (CMS) also known as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for educators to use to create online learning sites. http://moodle.org/

**RCampus:** RCampus is a comprehensive Education Management System and a collaborative learning environment. At RCampus: can do all your school-related work from building personal and group websites to managing your courses, eportfolios, academic communities, and much more. []

**Skype and GoogleDocs:** in addition to blogs for the collaboration of the learners, presentation software such as authorSTREAM for the learners to present their final project, word clouds or webspriation (or the like) for any storyboard creation, ourselves as subject matter experts based upon our knowledge of online courses and online course development, other experts in the field that are found through research, Assessments of instruction at the end of the course, formative and summative assessments including self-reflections, scaffolding at each step to ensure learning?

Describe the learning environment and population that will be engaged in your project:

**Audience:** high school teachers

**Learner characteristics**: grade level, number of students – 10-12 teachers all subjects, college graduates, males and females, ages from 24-45?, multicultural,

**Anticipated entry level skills of audience**: various levels of technological knowledge and experiences, the least experience would have used some older technologies in class such as VCRs, overhead projectors, calculators, computers for grade books

**School environment:** creation of virtual or blended learning courses Is this the environment we will teach in or the environment the learners are used to having? Depending on which question it’s asking, our answers will vary. I think it’s the latter question – the since these are questions about the learner. With that being said, they used to traditional school environments with lectures and textbooks, very little or some technology in being used in the classroom OR they are familiar with blend learning class but have never facilitated or created them …

**Support for project by community, parents, or administrators**: support of area superintendents; teacher volunteers

References:

Davis, V. (2009). Spotlight on Technology: Social Networking and Online Collaboration, Part Two (segment 11). Integrating Technology Across the Content Areas.

Leigh Smith, B, & MacGregor, J (1992). What is Collaborative Learning?. Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Eduaction, 3, Retrieved June 28, 2010, from [].