LTEC 5510 Project Reflection Week 6

This is the close of week 6, and I’m realizing what a monumental project 45 hours of instructional design will be! My project titled “Self-care and self-regulation for metacognitive development in high school students” is officially underway. This week I began uploading my course curriculum for module 1 of 8, and although I’m not as far along as I had planned to have been by this time, I am feeling proud of the work that I have completed thus far. From my initial peer review, Dr. Kaplan-Rakowski recommended the use of an attention grab at the beginning of my course, since it’s targeting a high school audience. I was able to create an opening video utilizing footage of various emotional states that can get in the way of metacognitive development, that I believe does a great job of setting the students into an emotional space where they will find it easier to connect to the curriculum. My biggest challenge so far has been the process of time management. I have not had any problems finding research material to utilize for my course development.On the contrary, I’ve found so much data on this topic that it’s become more time consuming to organize, as I’ve been working through the development of my curriculum for each learning module. I plan on investing a minimum of 2-3 hours per week night, after work, during the coming weeks, in order to meet my deadlines proposed in my design document, for the 1/4 and 1/2 milestones which are quickly approaching. Over the past few weeks, I’ve worked through some of my preliminary questions and been able to solve some for myself. Initially, I felt very unsure about which LMS platform I would use to develop this course, but with some investigation, I found that Canvas is free for teachers, and I’ve been able to move forward fairly seamlessly since then. Although I’ve become familiar with the student facing side of Canvas, I have not been on the design side of this LMS. I have found it to be fairly straightforward, and user friendly so far. I feel certain that there will be some settings that require further investigation, as I prepare to eventually publish my site, but I do feel that this appears to be a robust LMS, with many features available for assessment and class engagement. My first round of peer reviews, based upon my design document, provided me with so much positive feedback! I feel a responsibility to this project, and the need to create a course that lives up to the expectations set in place through my design document. I feel quite excited about this project, and I’m looking forward to developing more modules in the coming weeks.