Blog 6

One recurring theme in both the Manning and Gouge articles for this week was the idea of keeping things simple. Both women stressed the importance of refraining from utilizing every bell and whistle that online classes offer. According to them when designing an online course professors are better off maintaining everything accessible and easy to follow. Online classes will undoubtedly provide students with an opportunity to learn and apply new technological aspects that are learned in the class, still a successful online course will not be the one that is extremely demanding and complicated, a successful online course will be one in which most students learn and retain new knowledge. This will occur if students are not overwhelmed by the material presented. Throughout her article Gouge refers to this as "low tech/ high usability". It is therefore clearly important that a professor creates a course with tasks and assignments that most of the students will be able to tackle and complete with some degree of success.

In her article Gouge also explained the importance of offering a technology survey to the class at the beginning of the semester in order to modify, change and arrange certain aspect of the course all in an effort to serve and reach a majority of the class. She states that, "Choosing a set of technological tools that will maximize learning involves first finding out who the target audience for the course is then investigating what their experience with available technological tools are." This will process will inevitably lead to more participation and productivity from the entire class. If professors design courses keeping their specific student populations and their needs in mind more of the learning objectives and goals will be met.

After reading these articles I am convinced that the idea that "less is more" works well in all types of classrooms. In my own classroom this is something that I constantly practice with my own students, instructions are kept brief and assignments are direct and concise. Perhaps the only are in which I can work to improve is in collecting input from the students at the beginning of the semester. However unlike Gouge and Manning it is much more difficult for me to survey my students about their current performance levels. The district for which I work for has instituted mandatory "instructional guides" and with these come "periodic assessments" that must be administered and submitted by specific dates. This approach was created on the belief that all students are at the same performance levels and have the same instructional needs, this leads to the false idea that "one size fits all" as far as learning is concerned. What Gouge and Manning describe in their article can easily be achieved at the college level, unfortunately this is not possible for me because I don't have the flexibility to meddle with the "syllabus".

It would be wonderful to figure out different ways in which teachers like me who work at the high school level can create a curriculum for our own classrooms that is designed with the specific students needs in mind. Personally I think that it is appalling to teach a class of students with the belief that all are performing at the same level. College professors have a great advantage of designing a curriculum such as the one described by Gouge that was informed with the students and their level of performance in mind. What are some ways in which I can implement what Gouge and Manning described when I feel trapped by the district mandated curriculum?