Pondering on a course I teach

Course: Fundamentals of inquiry. For stage one students occupational therapy students , first semester.
Reason for review: Feedback on survey form was less than 80% in some areas. In reviewing students assignments, lecturers felt that the students understanding was at a superficial level. Plus it was boring to teach!
Development ideas:Core reading with study questions of cloze question handouts to help structure students ability to filter out the information required.
Hands on mini research task that helped highlight the difference between qualitative and quantitative research and assist with understanding concepts around, rigor, ethics, validity, reliability etc
Move APA referencing tasks and library searching tasks to the end of the semester.
Re-structure the assessments from 100% to 75 % end assignment 20% moodle quizzes, 5% workbook tasks.
Re-do exe packages taking out any repeated information. Re structure the learning to mirror new order of content.
Record your developing ideas about the practicalities of your proposed design of your course:
Need to find readings that either fit within one book and make it a require text for students to buy. Unable to complete this task in time for this information to be forwarded onto the supplier for the schools text books. Alternative is to use a series of chapters out of differing books to make sure that copyright is not breeched. Reading level needs to be a straight forward as possible. This course is more about understanding the research process that really doing research so this needs to be kept in mind when looking for readings. This is only a 50 hour paper so the time it is going to take students to read these chapters needs to be considered. In the past limited research text book readings have been provided. Readings need to be sourced, and pdf and ready for students to download by start of semester.
One of the elements of this course is about being able to gain information from popular and research literature. It assumes that the students are mindful readers with sound reading strategies. Since it is the first semester in their first year I feel that it is an fair assumption that not all students will have these skills. Therefore the task will also provide secondary knowledge about how to be a skillful reader. These skills will be explicated stated and embedded into the tasks. This will include such statements as. “ Get an overview of this article, reading all the bolded headings first “. List these heading down on a page. These headings will provide the base for you study notes” etc.

A handout to accompany the readings will be provided. These handouts will have the secondary skills set out on them as well as cloze statements to help guide the reader into filtering what information is important to obtain for this course. These handouts will turn into a, portfolio of evidence of the work done, which will be checked off each week. 5 % of the total marks will be given towards the successful completion of the handout/ work book tasks. These would need to be marked in class to save marking time for the lecturer. This will need to be built into the design of the course. Completing a mini research task will be recorded on the handouts as well.
Handouts/ work book of evidence need to be written and available for students at the start of the semester. These could be posted each week for the students to access, however this would however affect the students printing costs. If lecturers provided the copies this would affect schools printing costs.
APA- this could be assessed both through online quizzes as well as workbook task.
Library tours and databases, this is usually done with support for library staff need to make sure that changing the time frame to later on in the semester is possible for library staff.
Moodle quizzes could help retest the information taken from the readings, workbook tasks and exe packages. Moodle quizzes take time to set up, also quite limited to true/ false, multichoice and matching type tasks. These will be quite a different format than the workbook cloze type tasks. Quizzes will need to be set up at a specific time to enable students across both campuses to access them at the same time.
Exe packages need to be redone. Using the references sourced as the core readings, and to follow content order . As there is a face to face class each week. Possible exe packages will be decreased, and replaced by the workbook and core reading tasks. If exe packages are going to be redone, time to redevelop them is required. Need to add to the students learning, not be repetitive, but assists those who need this more interactive type of learning task. Thinking that instead of exe packages may use moodle lessons instead.

New assignment guidleines will need to be written to reflect the three assessment methods.
How am I going to provide an appropriate balance of face to face learning / flexible learning / assessment.
The flexible learning aspect of this course will be the core readings and workbook/handout task. Face to face tasks will still be one class of 1.30 minutes each week. In these times small group work and connecting with others and the teacher will be an important aspect.
This course is going to have three assessments. Moodel quizzes will be marked directly , so will take no time from the lecturer once set up, work book tasks marked in class time, so no added time load. End of the semester assignment will need to be simplified, as many of the tasks would have already been assessed at a superficial level so the assignment will need to have an applied nature to it, but be smaller than in previous years due to the weighting of %75.
Existing learning activities reviewed.
Current exe packages require better referencing. And need to be stream lined and match the new layout of the content of the course and learning tasks provided. These will probably need to be totally redone. There is currently quite a lot of repetition but this clutters the learner. The voice overs are good, and will possibly keep some of these.
The library modules and the APA modules are still useful. Want to keep active modeling on referencing during class and include a referencing task each week on the quiz and workbook tasks so that the students get lots of repetition, on intext referencing and end text referencing.
Last year used a lot of the students reviewing paper journals, this was useful for them to actually thumb a real journal, and choose a article of interest to them. Want to keep this part. But formalize the task onto the work book handout. For example if they have learnt about rigour this week, then they would read and article and list the ways rigour was demonstrated in the article.
The overall end of semester assignment is still a valuable learning and assessment task. The assignment will need to be made smaller, re written but general intent the same.
The in class tutorials are all out of date, and will need to be totally re written to reflect the core readings and the new layout of the content. This will need to be done in plenty of time for the co-lecturer to have input. They need to be more interactive and less being talked at, small group work built in. There needs to a review of the core readings information, a hands on taks eg the jelly bean task, and then the students designing an element of their own research. Then there workbook reviewed. This will provided a clearer structure to the class.

Proposed learning objects, media and activities are describes and explained how they will be used.
In addition to the core readings, the work book tasks, the moodle lesson and the online quizzes, the students will be taken through a small research study around the experience of eating jelly beans. As a class they will be part of research about eating jelly beans in class. This will be modeled by the lecturer. Then the class will break into pairs and then create there own very simple research task as well. This will be recorded on their work book and will help move the learning from facts to experience.
Reflection on resourcing , including any new technologies, staffing and training.
Other learning media will be internet access during class, hence computer suite time will need to be booked, especially for learning data base searching and web page creditability tasks.
All these ideas will take time to put in place so work will need to occur over the school holidays. A plan of the content, assignment guidleines approved, quizzes created and moderate, reading sources, and pdf, and workbook produced. Five weeks of online resources created, and five weeks of tutorial plans in place at the start of the year. The rest will have to be created while teaching for example, week six is create during week ones teaching.
My skills at moodle lesson plans, voice over’s for exe packages will also need to be improved.