Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

31 – Looking Forward: Stories of Practice
While other videos included cups of tea in snowy
backyards, a Starbucks in Hong Kong, a kitchen in Toronto,
and a cross-country ski trip in Banff, James broke
the ice on many levels. Students watched videos and
then engaged in conversation within the discussion forum,
asking questions about the subjects of the film and sharing
technical tips or tricks, details about locations, and
other details. The short films also provided a first
glimpse of the students—we actually saw each other and
got a taste for one another’s lifestyles—something often
missing in online learning.
Prior to sharing the videos, students were given some
background on studio-based learning, a rubric for
evaluating the films, and suggestions for how to participate
in a critique of the work. Blackboard was used to
organize the course, breaking the lecture content into
weekly modules (course document section). The discussion
board organized the 13 weeks of the course into
discussion topics and hosted the film festivals for the
students’ work. This allowed students to annotate to
their QuickTime video links as well as organize the
“crit” sessions around individual videos. Additional
discussion areas were created for sharing technical tips,
innovations and updates in hardware and software, and
solutions to common problems. By designing the course
around tasks and inviting students to solve problems
collaboratively, a very strong community of practice
(Wenger, n.d.) formed. Hosting a video course online
presented numerous problems with file size, etc., but the
studio aspect allowed students to customize assignments,
experience things at their own pace and skill level
and engage in rich conversations concerning tasks,
problems, work, and social environment. Without a
doubt, video, in a studio design environment, pushes the
technology of the university server, as well as that of the
instructor and the students, but the design creates the
type of rich online social interaction and knowledge
construction rarely found in the actual practice of many
online courses.
Verbalizing the continuum
The video course described above is an example of designing
from the perspective of a particular instructional
strategy with the intention of supporting a specific
learning experience. Attempting to build an online environment
to support studio-based instruction was a risk
for the instructor, and a leap of faith for the students,
but it worked. It was a clear departure from the typical
online course design of reading content and posting
comments for discussion. It clearly changed the roles for
the students and the instructor, forcing both to negotiate
tasks, engage in problem-solving, and participate in
critiques. While studio-based design is certainly at one
end of the continuum that we will discuss later in this
chapter, it shares the three constants inherent in all
teaching and learning interactions—the intersections of
teachers, students, and content.
TEACHER
CONTENT
Figure 31.1. Three Constants in Teaching and Learning
STUDENT
We became aware of the importance of those intersections
in our recent work in a Canadian International
Development Agency (CIDA) project, Strengthening
Capacity for Basic Education in Western China
(SCBEWC). There we were called upon to introduce
instructional design and develop a distance education
system to train teachers in rural, remote regions. However,
it wasn’t until one of us was invited to lecture
graduate students at Beijing Normal University on the
importance of instructional design in the West that we
were forced to consider the issue ourselves and share it
with others in a way that ensured the key essence was
not lost in translation.
The graduate students at Beijing Normal University
were persistent in their demands to understand why the
design rather than simply the content of the instruction
is important. Figure 31.1 helped scaffold their understanding
and provoked an interesting discussion concerning
the overlap among the three circles. The
importance of social interaction that can be generated
when the teachers and learners come together to explore,
solve problems, and negotiate the content was
also discussed. A plate was added for the three circles to
sit on, and it was labelled instructional strategy, levels of
learning, and types of media. This diagram helped the
students understand that it is the role of the instructional
designer to select the strategy that best suits the
needs and goals (Vygotsky, 1986) of the three variables
(teacher, student, and content).
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