Thread:Feedback from the University of Wollongong - sent via email by Sandra Wills (1)

Feedback posted by Sandra Wills from colleagues at the University of Wollongong. Posted here as a place holder and will transfer to the main page --Wayne Mackintosh 23:59, 11 June 2012 (UTC)"


 * 1) Like the idea of a generic structure Course Guide, headings/inclusions are good.
 * 2) Am reading through the sample on one “Critical Reasoning” and find the content good but the presentation overwhelming – for me all that text in Wiki educator really not exciting or motivating. The overview and first activity would be good, with progressive release of latter activities so as to not overwhelm. On the whole, not keen on Wiki educator as a publishing platform – not attractive. Might be handy if you actually need a wiki…. But can’t say that a using it to publish a course guide is great.
 * 3) *Re course activities there is an interesting use of twitter/micro blogging and I like the way they scaffold the writing for that format. But then they also want 100 introductory words about yourself up in the first exercise – which would be way over the Twitter character limit. So some confusion about twitter/blog/journal – needs clarifying.
 * 4) Have also read the Course Guide for the AST100 course.
 * 5) * Similar feeling re the cluttered/text dense presentation as noted above.
 * 6) * Would prefer marking rubrics as neat PDFs linked to the webpage with a common graphic icon. (NOTE – content of the rubrics is great though).
 * 7) * Like the Youtube welcome video
 * 8) * Main thing that struck me re this sample course structure is the text/essay nature of the course. No use of synchronous comms such as skype to allow for online tutorial activities. The interaction between students is continuous text-based feedback on their postings via twitter – I would be concerned that with no scheduled virtual events in real-time – as a learner you’d lose your way, lose your motivation, get bogged down in the minutae. Well perhaps I would - I guess on a personal level, this course would not be one I’d be keen to do. I would prefer a course that had some online synchronous opportunities, as well as asynchronous feedback to individual students/peer feedback.
 * 9) I like the ‘inverted curriculum’ or ‘flipped classroom’ course model and think we could do well to use this for our courses:  reversed teaching model that delivers instruction/lectures/content at home through interactive, teacher-created videos - and moves “homework” to the classroom or class/lecture time, eg synchronous learning groups to work through actual problems, cases, activities (http://info.lecturetools.com/blog/bid/53261/The-Flipped-Classroom-Teaching-and-Learning-in-the-21st-Century)
 * 10) The column layout I have moved to with much of my own work that is online delivery so that is fine, but I use a lot more visual material/video. It is not quite as simple as providing references and essay topics. There is a lot more nitty gritty with the maths/stats.
 * 11) Although I found the "construction"/instructions a bit overwhelming, particularly when I got to copyright etc.