Diversity and Diet

This week I was looking at faculty development ideas with some colleagues. One subject that came up was whether to include learning styles in a basic course about teaching online. I was reminded of this while reading Ko & Rossen (p. 102). Learning style theory includes a number of approaches and a plethora of matrices. It hardly seems like an ideal subject to try to cover in a basic methods course. I prefer Ko & Rossen’s strategy: use variety, and that will likely address most learning styles. I’m reminded of my mother’s advice about meal planning. Even though she taught college level nutrition, she said that serving a variety of food types and colors will satisfy most nutritional needs.

So how does one introduce variety? Ko & Rossen itemize a number of activities. Here’s how I implemented a couple in a lesson I created about online discussion.

Web as Resource: One part of the lesson linked to several online discussion boards to illustrate various structures and techniques. I chose only sites I was familiar with that had something applicable to online discussions.

Summaries: Another task required reading a scholarly article and describing points in it that could be used in online teaching or that related to a past experience. Connecting points of the article to existing knowledge draws on cognitive and constructivist learning theory to help students make meaning of new material.

In addition, I augmented my description of grading criteria for discussion posts with a simple rubric (Ko & Rossen, pp. 129-130). Though my first stab at creating a rubric was rough at best, it still did a better job of defining expectations. It also forced me to clarify for myself what should be in the grading criteria.