It's been a whirlwind this week as our Practicum course moved from the first half of our time together, focused on PLCs, and into the second half, focused on Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The SIGs are a new approach to designing our course experience by providing more CHOICE and OWNERSHIP to our participants. Organized into 8 topical groups, participants have been engaging in relevant readings as they work to plan a facilitated discussion and create a coaching resource/tool for peers to utilize at their own sites. The tricky part about this process is remembering that it all takes place virtually-- the collaborative planning and the conversation itself. This would be tough enough for a group of my younger, millennial undergraduates. While experienced educators, many of our participants are embarking in the online learning milieu for the first time as they participate in our program. And here we are, asking them to design and lead their own virtual PD of sorts.

I'm really excited to engage in these conversations, explore the tools they create, and celebrate the success of pushing our work forward by taking on this risk. The next few weeks will present a number of challenges, no doubt, but I'm hoping that the final products will be a launching point to continue this work in the future.

The focus of this final post in the series is developing online modules. Wha wha wha.....
In my experience, using 'module' elicits negative connotations related to self-paced, self-contained, modular-based lectures. For any public school teacher, does the blood borne pathogens module come to mind? Push play. Answer emails until the video stops talking. Click some buttons. Answer the self-apparent questions at the end. Move on.

I've developed a number of online modules as an instructional designer but never for a blended course. This posed a number of new questions for the design process.

I recently had the opportunity to engage in extended professional learning around the design of more interactive webinars and wow— did I walk away with a whole new perspective. The training was part of the presenter preparation for the 4T Digital Writing Virtual Conference co-hosted by the University of Michigan and the National Writing Project. While I often serve the “techie” function of moderating webinars for the online courses I teach and facilitate, I’ve never actually designed and presented my own webinar, which may also be one of the reasons why I wasn’t as able to support engaging webinar design. So this was definitely a chance to feel the pressure and perspective from the other side!

Throughout the training, I was struck by the simple yet powerful suggestions that the team presented. Unfortunately, some of these were based on platform features that didn’t necessarily translate to my working context, as our training took place in Blackboard Collaborate while our courses currently use Go To Meeting. The ease of engaging participants on the whiteboard with text, raising their hands, and using polling features were all simple ways to keep them participating throughout. Though I was unable to incorporate these feature-based additions into my future work, there were some more transferable practices I am already putting to use!

• Designing a Lobby Activity: I have found the 15 minutes before a webinar starts to be important to settling tech-nerves for participants and speakers alike. However, we are often left awkwardly sitting around until the time officially begins. Designing a lobby activity as the opening slide provides an opportunity to get participants talking in the chat box, engaging with materials, or reflecting in some form that can carry over into the opening.
• Incorporating Outside Resources: While we have always provided outside resources throughout our webinars, these are usually meant to be referenced at a later date. Alternatively, asking participants to briefly review a resource (reading or video), post questions or feedback to a Google Doc, or engage in another active way during the session helps to move beyond the “lecture” feel of webinars that so many of our presenters dread.
• Taking Time for Application: Transfer to practice is always a major goal of our work, however, we typically just assume it as a natural follow-up to our time together. Instead, it can be more productive to intentionally build in application activities into the structure of the webinar itself. Google Docs or Padlet can provide easy ways for participants to express ideas. During a webinar last week, we set aside time for participants to free write around some prompts and were able to engage with Google Doc commenting even as our participants were still typing. Of course this is not groundbreaking—we do this in the classroom all of the time. However, utilizing this type of activity during a webinar was somehow novel to me in a really meaningful way.​​

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to engage in this training and am excited for the impact it will have on our future webinar planning. I can also say that it already had a powerful impact on my own webinar experience, which went better than I ever could have expected!
I’ve also decided to pilot a platform switch to Blackboard Collaborate during the upcoming semester. Just to capture all of my current thinking, I created the following resource as part of the new preparation materials I will share with presenters to help them design more interactive webinars.