OMDE 610 Reflective Journal
Week Four - October 2nd - 8th
Designing for Collaborative Activities and Rubrics
According to the Kirschner article, the major shifts or considerations that need to be taken when designing for collaborative activities as opposed to for individual learners would be a more probabilistic approach to design. From an instructional designer’s point of view, my understanding of this is that the types of lessons that should be presented to students in the collaborative online learning environment would be lessons that allow the students to engage in critical thinking and skill-building activities to resolve issues and/or challenges in real-world like scenarios. An example of this would be the completion of a case study by a study group. Let’s say that the purpose of the case study would be to assist an organization in resolving some of their existing issues in an effort to enhance the overall performance of the organization. This type of learning will require the students to organize their research, and delegate the responsibilities so that all involved in the research will conduct their fair share of the research. Upon completion of the research the students will combine their information retrieved from their research, and then use the information retrieved to work toward developing methods to help the organization improve their performance. This type of project would require the students to interact heavily, exchanging and sharing knowledge and skills to complete the project; and the sharing and exchanging of various knowledge and skills among the students will allow the students the opportunity to gain more skills and knowledge in areas that they may be unfamiliar with. The integration of the various skills from the diverse group of students will possibly allow the students to develop various approaches to a given issue, which will encourage them to approach the issue using different methods, and the different methods may be able to be combined to create a more universal approach to resolving the given issue.
The ROI Rubric or the Quality Matters Rubrics?
While I believe that both the ROI rubric meets the standards for good design, as demonstrated by Kirschner and Sangra, I believe that the Quality Matters rubric is the best pick above the ROI rubric because of how there are various point-of-views through the presentation of this rubric. For instance, the three components of this rubric are: the QM rubric, the Peer Review process, and the QM Professional development. These three components enable the students and/or professionals to reflect on what may be needed for them to be able to demonstrate their skills, not only through the eyes of the other professionals, but also through the eyes of the fellow students. The use of the Quality Matters rubric opens the doors for inadvertent learning opportunities to take place, as the students experiment, as well as the active professionals. The integration of the various backgrounds, knowledge, and skills from the diverse learners enable the online learning environment to be a “world of learning” as opposed to a “world of teaching.” With that, learner-centered guidelines and methods are presented, as opposed to teacher-centered guidelines and methods. As we know, the goal in the online environment is to use facilitated instruction, which provides students with the opportunity to take control of their learning, as opposed to their learning being taken control of. I believe that learning is more effective when students are given the opportunity to make decisions in their own learning. The peer-review process is a good example to use that demonstrates the effectiveness of learning when students are involved in providing feedback to one another. Peer-reviewing is a great method to use for the reinforcement of student learning.
Reference:
Kirschner, P., Strijbos, J-W., & Kreijns, S. (2004). Designing integrated, collaborative e-learning. In W. Jochems, J. van Merrienboer, and R. Koper (Eds.), Integrated e-learning: Implications for pedagogy, technology & organization (pp. 24-38). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
