Creating a Transformative Digital Vision Canvas Course Reflection

The Canvas course which I created for CECS 5510 Technology-Based Learning Environments is finally complete. I adjusted the design of my course, so I could meet the course completion timeline. There are many more resources that I could have included in this course; however, I had to prioritize and decide which components were best for a 40 hour course. I also find it hard to announce that the course is complete as I think that improvements can always be made. Each time I review a module, I find myself changing the sentences and linking a new resource that is better than the previous one.

The technology challenges that I have battled are mostly cosmetic ones. Canvas is somewhat limiting on how appealing you can make the course content. I think the more appealing an instructional designer can make the course, the easier it is for participants to navigate within the course. For example, I made buttons to each module on the splash page. I spent entirely too long working on them to display correctly in various browsers. I think it looks much more professional this way, but was too cumbersome when completing. Perhaps in the future, Canvas will add more of these features as a drag and drop option. In addition, I am a firm believer in the use of rubrics. I included thirteen different rubrics in my course. Creating the rubrics were much more difficult than they should have been. For example, each rubric had to be created from scratch. Hopefully, there will be a way to copy a rubric, rename it, and modify it in the future, so you don’t have to continue to recreate the entire rubric each time you want to add a criterion to an existing rubric.

Having three people in a peer review group made peer review more difficult than just having a peer review partner. It is difficult to communicate with everyone and schedule the reviews. For instance, there were a couple of times in which we had to review two courses because it was a little confusing about who was reviewing each other’s work. Also, when you change reviewers, you must go back and review the entire course to understand the navigation and key concepts being built upon throughout the course instead of just reviewing the last 1/4^th of the course. However, on the flip side, having multiple peer reviewers helps ensure that the student is receiving accurate information from multiple resources and may eliminate student assessment error (Bostock, 2000).

I’ve also learned that when designing an online course with a timeline, you must plan and set completion goals, so you are not trying to complete your project at the last minute. I used my project timeline for completing my course and met the deadlines accordingly. Everyone in my peer review group did a great job of meeting the deadlines.

I didn’t know my strengths in this process until I saw everyone’s project presentation. I think that having a background in education and previously being an ELA teacher helps tremendously. It is very natural to me on how to set up the modules and activities, but others struggled with this. I am very happy with my course and look forward to using it myself in the future with other administrators.

Reference

Bostock, S. (2000). Student peer assessment. Learning Technology.