Written Reaction to Week 5
At Broward College, we have adopted Quality Matters (QM) as the gold standard for our online courses. I don't believe that blended courses can be reviewed and approved by QM at this point. This program uses a rigorous reviewing process, a review committee, and a rubric. I find that working with blended courses as an Instructional Technologist is very difficult because there are components that are handled by the departments themselves and interactions that occur in the classroom that are not accessible to us in Instructional Technology. Similarly, it would be difficult to assess the quality of a blended course for the same reasons. There is also a distributed responsibility for blended courses between the departments and Instructional Technology that can be frustrating and result in a decrease in productivity. I would fall into both the neophyte and neonate portion of blended instructors/designers/technologists, but as a population can have a disproportionately large number of infants as compared to the elderly, the population structure can indicate something about the population itself. There are many of us being born. As an interesting phenomenon and singularity, responsibility of ensuring the delivery and effectiveness of blended courses ultimately falls on the instructor and the departments.

Written Reaction to Week 4 Reading
Learning activities are perhaps the area where the most potential for a course is and also the potential for a course to fall flat, especially when it is a blended course. Routine forms of content, assessments, and assignments are good for establishing consistency in the course, but the learning activities can and should be varied to encourage student engagement. Presenting content in written form can be a guideline for the course, but the way in which student engage with the material should foster interest and utilize different learning modalities. Students can explore different online materials on their own and then bring that to the face-to-face interactions in class. Technology increases the ways in which students can engage with one another and the material other that reading content and being tested on it. The reading provides a great list summarizing some of the specific tools and activities students may use (e.g. presentation software, games, video conferencing, etc.).
The activities then become the heart of the course and this is what I am personally concerned about in designing online and blended courses. My greatest fear would be that the course falls flat in these respects and that the activities are not engaging the students (I suppose that this is all teachers' fear). The reading describes the different ways in which online and face-to-face components can be utilized and integrated to provide an even more engaging learning environment than a face-to-face course can offer alone.

DIY 3 Assignment Instructions
Heidi Keller
Title: Scientific Journal Assignment
Learning Objectives:
1.2 Evaluate the validity of information from a variety of information from a variety of sources, including but not limited to such sources as electronic, print sources, and databases.
1.4 Demonstrate the ability to use the appropriate technology to carry out course requirements.
Due: 5/20 @ 11:59 PM.
Submission: Upload as a .doc or .docx file to the assignment dropbox.
Scoring Criteria/Rubric:
Excellent Average Poor
Participated in initial F2F meeting 3 2 1
Located scientific article 3 2 1
Participation in F2F idea-sharing 3 2 1
Proper use of spelling and grammar in written reaction 3 2 1
Connections made between own article and groups' articles present in written reaction 3 2 1

Participation: There will be an initial group meeting F2F to decide on a scientific topic. Students will then work at home to locate and summarize a scientific article from a peer-reviewed journal. In a second f2f group meeting, the group will share its ideas among its members. Students will then write individual written reactions that will be submitted to the assignment dropbox in D2L.
Specifications: The written reaction must be in 12-point Times New Roman font with line spacing set to 1.5 and at least one page long.
Supporting Resources: Each student must locate and provide a scientific article from a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

I found Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiment a great reminder that the classroom/online instruction is ideally not a teacher-centered place. The students have their own minds and relationships with each other and the material that continue whether you are "dumping content" on them or not. Being sensitive to this fact allows the instructor being an effective facilitator - not hands-off - but sometimes less is more.

Interested in learning about constructive interaction between online and f2f components instead of a simple "replacing" of f2f portions.