What a great week to jump back into Potcert!  I laughed when I read, “…design and development of online activities requires real fore-thought and investment of time…”* I added a note to my eText “does it ever!!“  Adapting a course for online delivery is just what I’ve attempted to do in my spare time (procrastinating) for the last year.
*Ko, Susan; Rossen, Steve (2010-03-03). Teaching Online: A Practical Guide, Third Edition (p. 60). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

Early in 2010 I took “Course Planning” (delivered online) as part of my Certificate in Adult Education.   At that same time, a native speaker and I were facilitating a small weekly evening class for teachers wanting to learn the T???cho? (Aboriginal) Language of our community.  We also had a U of Winnipeg grad student join us on Skype.  It was the perfect symbiosis; my experience facilitating the evening class fed into designing a language acquisition course for my “Course Planning” assignment, while my studies in course planning helped improve the design of my evening class.  As I viewed Lisa’s  Where Do I Start I kept thinking that I had followed very similar steps in “Course Planning” only with a F2F setting in view.

Jim Groom opened ds106 to the world in late December 2010, and totally sold me on his “domain-of-your-own” doctrine.  In 1985, Philadelphia taught the world that if you have a bomb, you will find a use for it.  In 2011 I learned that if your hosting service offers “one click” Moodle you just ache to load it with content.   My “Speak T???cho? ” course seemed the perfect candidate to populate my shiny new Moodle installation on Bluehost.  At first I thought it would just be a matter of importing instructions from my Word documents.  My course was  laid out around experiences and encounters outside the classroom and did not contain vocabulary lessons.  Although I found the presentations below later on, the principles resonated with my views on language acquisition.

Patrick Dunn and Cathy Moore emphasize “Experience, not Content” as the approach to instructional design.  At 7:30 in this video Patrick says “we learn nothing from content.”

And Cathy Moore speaks of designing “a series of experiences” with
information “so on-the-fringes that maybe it won’t even be in the course.” (3:50)

Designing learning experiences is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote the course in the first place.  The classroom is the place to practice language-learning activities the learner will use outside of class.  Out in the community is the place to actually learn to speak by interacting with people. Out on the land with them is even better.  Content, or vocabulary depends on the learner’s role in the community.  The classroom can provide some content to help a beginner get moving, but mainly it’s a place for problem solving, discussing experiences, and generating new ideas for learning.  It’s also a place to learn how to use technology – audio, video, writing – to aid learning.  At least that’s the way I envisioned it.

I kept thinking that putting this on Moodle should be easier.  I’ve already planned the experiences, so I just need to put the instructions online.  When I started building the introductory block for Moodle, I found myself writing out more and more details, and I began wondering who would ever have the patience to read it.  We offered the evening class again last winter with my Moodle site barely begun.  I used Skype or Blackboard Collaborate to include online learners from other communities.  We did have problem-solving discussions and demonstrated activities to try in the community, but most participants expected to be taught vocabulary in class.  No one seemed to have the time between classes to try the activities (install Audacity, watch a video, note unfamiliar consonants) I’d posted online.   We recorded lots of neat video and audio content in the class, so I began using my Moodle site as a content repository, pushing the structured lesson down to a seldom-viewed area of the page.  I posted links to the videos on FB and got encouraging feedback on that. I had no time to keep filling more lesson blocks that nobody was using.

Did my online course get side-tracked, or did it adapt?  Did I cave to pressure or respond to need?  There seems to be a growing interest and demand for more classes, so someone liked what they experienced.  I’m torn between just going with what seems to have worked, and holding to my ideal of a neatly organized learning plan posted online to help learners build learning relationships within the community that will endure beyond the course.

Right now I’m waffling between spending more time adapting for Moodle or just concentrating on live sessions.  I’m not ready to give up on my ideal of having a super-organized online language learning site.  I envision it as a supplement to classes as well as an alternative for those who cannot attend live sessions.  I also see that there is a discrepancy between my ideal and the reality of low-priority attendance and dependence on learning in class.  I’ve got a few ideas that might make online activities and interactions more appealing once (if) I resume building the site.  I’ve already changed my course rationale from a PDF to a Google Doc open for editing and commenting.  I’d like to try something similar for crowdsourcing assignments.  I’m investigating Voicethread or Voxopop or possibly NanoGong as an alternative to Audacity so learners can share their attempts and experiences more easily.  Guess I’m waiting for something to convince me that the effort is worthwhile.  If I build it, will they come?