Hilgartner Open Learning

This week I have been working the instructional blender at full tilt. I have been keeping it whirring throwing in different learning activities, quizzes, videos and polite conversations to make some potent, knock-you-out-of-your-socks learning concoctions. Everyone at the course counter, orders their own flavour and kick according to the dryness in their throat and the cravings on their tongue tips. "More math and less poetry with a twist of online, please." As the cocktail mixer per jour, I have been pulling out all stops to make some solid recipes. The hope is that with the right recipe the students will leave happy and come back for more. In my GED Prep evening face-to-face class, I have made the bold move to deliver the course almost entirely on iPads in the classroom. This ingredient has met with alarming success. Students are completing the quizzes in class. As they do, I can come up and provide coaching or assistance as needed. Sitting in assigned pairs, they activ...

With the aim of creating adaptive learning, as an instructional designer, developer and facilitator, you need to create test items and plenty of them. With Moodle as your LMS, you need to find an efficient way to do so, some rapid development best practice, so you can maintain quality and stay alive. In such a scenario, I have been working on General Education Development courses with mathematics, reading and writing content at a grade 10 level creating exercises, quizzes, practice tests, pre-tests, and post-tests using the Moodle Question Bank. I have been taking scanned and OCR (optical character recognition) processed texts, with copyright permissions, and importing them into the Question Bank. With each quiz or test, there is a fair bit of work to be done, but the import still beats re-entering or re-creating these hundreds of items in terms of time and energy. The first step is to open the PDF version of the text and begin copying the text to a Notepad file. To do so in Acro...

Pinterest is the new visual learning tool. As a budding artist, you can search up painters and their works. Then, you can curate them with your own comments of edification. As soon as you've pinned Pablo's Guernica, you see related painting pins from the abstract and cubist master and his contemporaries. You pin some of his self-portraits. You come across some water colors from Miro, and you create a new Watercolour Gone Wrong board to capture these new pins. You see some strikingly coloured flowers by O'Keefe and you LIKE them with the little heart button. In fact, you like them so much, you travel to the board of the original pinned of the flowers to find an extensive O'Keefe collection. You make some pins and you decide to follow the board. Driven by curiousity, you check out the rest of her boards. She curates modern American art, romantic comedies and graphic novels. You don't have the time to check them all out right, but you decide to follow this fellow ...

Certainly, instructors aim to create a better world by fostering learning through instruction: a lofty mission indeed. It is more of a vision than a set of specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals. We have strong ideas and honorable intentions. We just need an actionable plan. We need to make them happen. By making them happen, we need to overcome challenges. We need to manage change. We need to operate in teams to make anything worthwhile. We need to be fit and healthy. We need to find a work and life balance. We need to be caring, thoughtful and creative all at the same time.  The instructional activities we need to complete include design, development, communication, assessment, presentation and advising. Although the extent of these activities vary, as instructors, we are called upon to complete for the ongoing success of our students. As an instructor, over the years, I have come to observe that this 'action' or behaviour can be shape...

Tests remain the cornerstone of summative development in most formal instructional programs. They are accused of not being authentic or comprehensive. The dangers of incorrect interpretation have made some of us learning practitioners cautious if not skeptical. Certainly, no instructional designer would make the claim that tests should stand on their own as the whole solution; however, most know that a valid and reliable exam can tell so much about student performance and instructional effectiveness to serve as firm starting ground for making planning and evaluation decisions. When interpreted correctly, learners, teachers, instructional designers, developers and managers can carry out meaningful conversations with quantifiable evidence from which to plan and improve learning experiences: the curriculum. Even more so, learning practitioners realize the practical nature of exam development. Firstly, multitudes of students and teachers use them extensively gaining strong fam...

Over the past term, I have been working with colleagues in a student support centre called the Lighthouse, where students can come for help, connect with services, or hangout with friends. In short, this room and this time is theirs and they can feel they belong and are safe. In this role, I have had the chance to introduce flash cards as a study skill tool for learning and review. Students and teachers responded positively to the brief introduction. At the end, we handed out blank cards to everyone. Who can resist the colours and the simplicity of index cards? From there, the Lighthouse group has decided to make study skills in general a regular feature of the Lighthouse. Study skills presentations will be made available. A study skills cove is being constructed. With all of this momentum, I have taken time to reflect on my encounters with study skills. Over a decade ago, I was working as instructional assistant in a learning centre in a diploma challenge program I was hired t...