Design for online and blended learning

Tracing from the three topics covered, topic four is now calling upon another attention focusing on designing an online and blended learning course. Focusing on key approaches for designing that course, one of the important components to consider is how an online and blended learning approach will address emotional determinants for learning. Emotions under this context comprise hope, pride, anger, shame, boredom and hopelessness. All these are significantly related to academic achievement, student motivation, learning strategies, self regulations and value appraisal (Pekrun et al., 2010).

This was one of a very interesting session during the discussion in our group because everyone was asked to share his/her emotions relating to our online course.  Personally during the beginning of the course I was very frighten if I could effectively manage to attend this course. On the way I found myself having joyful course with a very interesting network with group members across the world sharing their brilliant experience. This is the point when I turned the gear and concentrated much with a lot of hopes and self determination to the course.

Emotional engagement in the online learning   

Emotional engagement is a student’s involvement in and enthusiasm for online learning. When students are emotionally engaged, they want to participate in school, and they enjoy that participation more. There are strategies that can be used for increasing students’ engagement in online contexts such as increasing positive emotions and decreasing negative emotions of students; increasing intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and self-regulation; improving cognition; and increasing higher order thinking.

Pentaraki and Burkholder, (2018) pointed out the following emotional strategies and techniques to employ for online and blended learning.

• The use of anticipated or self-referential feedback 
• The effect of culture on emotions
• Creating courses with high task value 
• Cognitive strategies 
• Behavioral strategies 
• Collecting and analyzing students’ engagement data

Instructional Design Standards for Better E-learning

In designing blended and online course we need to consider for major components namely; course purpose, objectives, course content, methods to be employed and learner who is a main stake holder of that particular course. Therefore, Chatia, B.,(2018) pointed out the following standards which are essentials for an effective blended and online course:

Instructional design standards (Chatia,2018)

• Identifying  the purpose of the course
• Framing Instructional objectives
• Aligning content with objectives
• Deciding on strategies to facilitate learning
• Providing practice with feedback
• Engaging interactivity
• Learning assessment

This topic being supplemented with three other topics covered earlier paved my way towards the designing and effective implementation of an online course for my students which I think will significantly add me with potential pedagogical approaches.  

References

Chetia, B. (2018) Instructional Design Standards for Better E-learning. Available at: https://blog.commlabindia.com/ (Accessed: 22 May 2019).

Pentaraki, A. and Burkholder, G. J. (2018) ‘Emerging Evidence Regarding the Roles of Emotional, Behavioural, and Cognitive Aspects of Student Engagement in the Online Classroom’, European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, pp. 1–21.