ePortfolio Blog Hussain AbdulHussain

I think that our goal as instructors is to take the best aspects of objectivism, constructivism, and connectivism, discussed by Bates in Teaching the Digital Age , and apply those the courses we teach. I discussed some of the positive aspects of lecturing in my previous post, and how those could be brought into an online environment, both asynchronously and synchronously, with tools such as live webcasts, video recordings, and media produced by experts in the respective field (I think of how often I have viewed TED talks in my course work in the DLL program.) I spoke in my literature review about bridging the gap between the LMS and collaborative Web 2.0 tools, and am planning on adding many of the features discussed below to my a course I am developing in Canvas LMS: Figure 7.7 from Teaching the Digital Age by Tony Bates (2015) Adding social networking features to LMS would allow students to collaborate more easily in real time due to social media availability on mobile devic...

There has been a lot of discussion over the place of lecturer in the classroom, especially in the digital age, when there are so many other possible learning activities that are available due to technology. One thing that we need to remember is that not all lectures are the same; lecturing and can vary in how engaging and useful it is to students. Students themselves have been found to strongly correlate lecturing with their own perception of learning: this definitely is a fact that has pluses and minuses. Research has found that students show a high preference for the hybrid environment compared to the online learning environment, and a lot of that is due to a preference for face-to-face interaction with the instructor, lecturing being a large aspect of that. In my practice as an science educator at the high school level, I did use lecturing as a way to convey information, such as at the beginning of unit, to provide detailed instructions for another activity, and modelling activit...

For a five week online course I am developing as a student in an Instructional Design in Online Learning course, I am planning on implementing some of the ideas I discussed in my innovation plan and researched for my literature review "Interactivity and Collaboration in Learning Management Systems: An Analysis to Support an Action Research Plan". My plan was to integrate more collaboration and interactive Web 2.0 tools into the curriculum for a mandatory undergraduate course (EDUC 1300 - Learning Framework). As this course is offered at the college during summer 5 week sessions, I thought it would be a great opportunity to basically build the course as I have imagined it in the innovation plan, using the same Canvas LMS and course outcomes as the institution. While I have not had the opportunity to teach an online course, I have used some flipped classroom activities while teaching, and led some hybrid professional development activities. As is have progressed through my...

Innovation strategies depend not on reinventing the wheel, but on implementing the strategies into existing educational frameworks. I think that as agents of innovation, we as educators are trying to achieve most of the same goals as as the ones laid out by our organizations, but are advocating “new and improved” ways of doing so. The lists of skills developed respectively by Tony Wagner and Ellen Galinsky, are a great reminder of what we seek to cultivate in the students: education and learning not as an end in and of themselves, but as a way to develop student’s abilities for their lives ahead. Wagner and Galinsky have significant overlap in their seven skills, but each of them do have several unique features. I used a graphic organizer to compare each list of seven skills and was able to identify three major areas where they overlapped: - Communication - Wagner emphasizes developing voice, while Galinsky discusses communicating a message that is designed to reach a target audien...