Reflection

Introduction

   

    Learning is often considered only within the role of experience, but the act of reflection has proven to increase self-efficacy (Salmon, 2015).  When looking back at the coursework, collaboration, reading and activities that have contributed to my learning, it is evident that my knowledge base isn't the only part of me that has been changed through this masters program.  When sitting in a meeting, with stakeholders offering me an opportunity to enhance a learning opportunity using technology three years ago, my thought process may have led me to create a website, organize an email chain or design a webinar.  A reflection into my core instincts and initial reactions in a very recent similar meeting shows that my thinking has evolved.  

 

Content Knowledge

    

    Over the course of the last two years, the coursework in this program has opened my eyes to an overwhelming number of tools, websites and technological capabilities that have assisted me in the creation of learning opportunities and environments.  More importantly, the work has built a research-based understanding of how people learn in various environments.  Through consuming research in the "Learning in a Digital World" course, I was able to convince NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) leadership to morph a completely face-2-face week-long workshop into a year-long blended learning institute.  During this meeting, organizers of the workshop were brainstorming ways to improve the effort. I requested time on the agenda to present and my presentation of Osguthorpe and Graham's (2003) findings persuaded our lead for Educator Professional Development that blended learning increased access to information, social interaction, cost effectiveness and sense of community amongst workshop participants.  Through the maintenance and meticulous tracking of online registrations and activity, the result has been a thriving program featuring over 200 teachers from Pennsylvania who are actively engaged in NASA web seminars and asynchronous interactive activities through our learning management system (LMS) for seven months of the year, with a face-to-face (F2F) one week workshop at GSFC each summer.  Every year, feedback and learning assessment data drive the tweaking of planning, content delivery and activity implementation in an effort to constandly improve the learning environment for teachers, while giving us strong evidence that our online component has increased the use of NASA materials in the classroom and assisted teachers in defining professional goals for their participation in the project.  These professional goals are not only used to identify teacher's desired outcomes, but also to identify trends that assist in planning content delivery.  My knowledge base, increased ten-fold through all of my courses, has contributed to the dramatic enhancement of the Multiregional Science and Math Partnership over the past year and a half and has been my toolbox as Lead for Distance Learning at GSFC.

 

Content Pedagogy

    

    While designing an online train-the-trainer platform for the international GLOBE program, I was in charge of creating the environment and the Master Trainer was to enter the content.  As part of the online community design protocol I created, I conducted a review of the layout.  I instantly became concerned about the protocol content areas.  We'd used the Blackboard CourseSites LMS and the Master Trainer had entered the extensive protocol content on the Trainer Candidate Path menu tab.  Once I saw the layout he had initially chosen, I recalled reading about depth vs. breadth in the "Facilitating Online Learning" course and realized that the amount of scrolling was overwhelming on one menu item while other menu items had very little content.  I knew that breadth was favored over depth (Larson & Czerwinski, 1998), so I worked with the Master Trainer to chunk information in more meaningful ways for learners, limiting scrolling and adding a few more menu tabs to help spread out the glut of information. 

 

Learning Environments and Professional Knowledge and Skills

   

    The Intern Communication Environment is a great example of a learning environment that has been created, maintained and used to enhance the learning process of an internship at NASA GSFC.  Just two years ago, every intern walked onto GSFC's campus in early June, attended one orientation session, then set off to work with their mentor for the summer, rarely seeing another intern at work and almost never having a chance to interact.  In the Spring of 2014, I proposed the Intern Communication Environment (ICE) as a pilot to offer interns a place to interact, reflect on their experience and have access to resources including an events calendar for GSFC, links to local transportation info and a discussion forum where interns could arrange roommates and housing options for the summer.  Although ICE was very successful and widely useful for interns, after assessing the level of participation and hundreds of feedback comments, we planned to improve ICE for the Summer of 2015.  Fortune would have it that I would be enrolled in "Introduction to Instructional Design" for the Spring of 2015.  While I utilized the GLOBE online train-the-trainer pilot for my Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement and Evaluate (ADDIE) project, the learning in this course shifted ICE towards a far more effective tool. By Analyzing my learners, I realized that interns at GISS in New York City, Wallops in Chincoteague, VA and IV&V in West VA, were receiving messages meant only for GSFC interns at our main campus here in Greenbelt, MD.  I then designed and developed a group structure, where each campus has its own messaging system and calendar.  I recruited points of contact at each of our aforementioned satellite campuses and trained them on how to utilize the group structure.  I provided survey questions to interns and received 4.9 out of 5 on effectiveness of ICE as a communication and collaboration tool with 4's coming only in the area of late changes to events, administrative issues that ICE was merely the messenger of.  Through the feedback and evaluations interns complete at the conclusion of the 2015 summer intern tenure, I plan to further inprove ICE moving forward to meet learners needs in 2016.  The ADDIE process worked wonders for making ICE a far more useful tool. 

 

Research

    

    While the Research and Methodology course was incredibly rigorous, the work expectations forced me to internalize a thorough understanding of how to conduct, and more importantly for my position, consume research.  While educational technology is a field that is rapidly changing, there are many studies that I've consumed that change the way I've gone about my day to day work.  Kao & Tsai's (2009) study proved to me the importance of interactive activities in Educator Professional Development (EPD).  I've voiced this at several planning meetings where EPD planning was set to include only scientist lectures.  Because of my colleagues and my insistence that the content should be coupled with classroom application, we now follow a model of content with scientists in the morning, hands-on application in the afternoon with educators.  Research studies give us evidence on what works for learners and learning environments.  The plethora of research I've done through this coursework, coupled with the strategies to consuming valid and reliable research learned through REMS 5013, give me the skills to continuously stay on the cutting edge of a rapidly changing field. 

 

Summary 

    

    In his textbook, Schunk (2016, p. 3) defines learning as "an enduring change in behavior, or in the capacity to behave in a given fashion, which results from practice or other forms of experience." Basically, learning is demonstrated through a change in bahavior.  Through the coursework in this Masters in Educational Technology program at Oklahoma State University, I have learned.  I know this because when I'm brought into initializing meetings for education programs, and I hear the learning outcomes desired, I no longer see a skateboard and a dirt path, I see an atlas of freeways.  As I instantly delve into a list of questions to further understand the audience of learners and desired overarching goals, the destination and best mode of transportation become clear.  Our NASA GSFC Office of Education distance learning team is truly adding value to our educational resources and opportunities, and it's because we're learning.

 

1. Kao, C., & Tsai, C. (2009). Teachers’ attitudes toward web-based professional development, with relation to Internet self-efficacy and beliefs about web-based learning. Computers & Education, 53(1), 66-73. 

2. Larson, K., & Czerwinski, M. (1998, January). Web page design: Implications of memory, structure and scent for information retrieval. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 25-32). ACM

3. Osguthorpe, R.T., & Graham, C.R. (2003). Blended learning environments: Definitions and directions. Quarterly Review of Distance Education , 4(3), 227-33.

4. Salmon, A.K. (2015). Learning by thinking during play: The power of reflection to aid performance. Early Child Development and Care, (ahead-of-print), 1-17.

5. Schunk, D. H. (2016). Learning theories: An educational perspective. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. - Seventh education.