CIFS Student Orientation 2020

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 My personal journey in designing an online course started in July 2020 with the need to prepare an online Orientation programme for the September 2020 intake of new students. Roughly 1,000 new students to join the University's Level 3 Foundation course. To understand the scope of the challenge you would have to have an understanding of the environment and my background. 

On the positive side, I am a Gen Xer. I am one of the members of faculty keen to use innovative tools in the classroom to enhance the learning experience and engagement of students. Regular participant of the T&L Symposium with the primary aim of gaining insights into the latest advancements and discoveries of my colleagues and sharing my own. Kahoot!, Padlet, Moodle - yes of course! I am keen to learn and am comfortable with a lot of the online learning tools. Have I used the LMS to its fullest? Yes. As much as Intranet, our in-house developed LMS, could offer. Zoom? Yes. Have I run a fully online course? No. It was always an extra something for students' convenience and engagement.

Now regarding my audience. The students are graduates of secondary educational institutions (schools, lyceums, colleges), with very varied ICT skills levels. Some are advanced to as much as programming their own games, some can hardly use email and require external assistance in filling in the University's online enrollment form. 

The broader environment. The University runs its own learning management platform, Intranet. Its capabilities are being enhanced in the summer of 2020, but it is all a rushed process to accommodate online learning from September 2020. At the time, it is more of a repository of learning materials. 

I have a team of young Academic Support officers, who are more like Gen Y, and are also keen to develop their online teaching capacity and are ready to support me in the design of the online course. 

The learning objectives are ready, they source from the earlier orientation programmes run in the previous years. It is to get the students familiarized with:

- the campus and the location of all the various things on it;

- the course programme;

- the regulations and the specificities of studying in a British university;

- the teambuilding and cultural adjustment. 

The outline of the programme needs to be considered in view of the changed modality. Skills based, team-building and social engagement sessions may need to be reconsidered significantly. The tour of the University given a special thought. Knowledge based sessions relating to the Foundation Course programme and the regulations and specificities of studying at WIUT is what we decide to start with. We will be designing the user-friendly input materials in the format of videos ourselves. Pacing and interactivity will be provided through a video-conferencing tool called "Big Blue Button". Comprehension and performance checked using online quizzes integrated into Intranet. 

So myself and my colleague Shahzaib Ahmed Khan- we started designing the videos in a free online video-maker. 

I wrote out the scenarios. Shakhzaib did basically all the voice-overs, with may be just one exception. We spent hours on designing the actual videos. It was indeed a lot of effort. 


Here is the very first video we produced together:

The very first video we produced for CIFS Student Orientation 2
020 (click to open in youtube).

The launch of an online Orientation Course in the year 2020 was very rushed. All that we managed to prepare was video materials and quizzes. A very primitive form of teaching - provide information and check comprehension by means of a multiple choice test. At the same time, years of teaching practice and everything I've learned on the pedagogy through ongoing research, reading and formal professional development in teaching and learning - everything repels against this sort of very ineffective, surface learning. But was there a choice? 

In 2021, we relaxed. The university returned to the normal routine of face to face classes, quarantine measures were lifted and the Orientation was administered in its traditional format - through all the engaging activities involving teaching staff, administrative staff, higher level students to facilitate and mentor the new ones. Does that mean that the online Orientation should be abandoned altogether? 

I am a great believer in Universal Design for Learning and the principle of "multiple means representation" introduced by Anne Meyer, David Rose, and their colleagues at CAST in the early 1990s. Learning is most effective and addresses the widest diversity of student needs if the teaching and learning material is presented by multiple means. The blended format, if designed appropriately, is what will make teaching and learning most effective. So the Orientation programme should be present online, but the curriculum design required re-thinking. 



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References:

Rose, D.H. (2016). Universal design for learning - theory and practice. Cast Professional

Publishing.

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