THE LEARNING LIBRARY

I tell you this because I think it says a lot about my personality.  I'm not, by nature, someone who takes risks.  I tend more towards careful comteplation and planning for contingencies.  Being audacious is not in my comfort zone.  So when I started designing a blended learning course, something no one in my district has done before, I was decidedly uncomfortable.  It just wasn't natural for me.

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Setting a big hairy audacious goal (BHAG) for the course, and designing learning goals to support it sounded intimidating.  What I learned as I started the process, however, is that rather than being overwhelming, creating the goals actually made me more comfortable.  Creating a BHAG gave me an end result to focus on, rather than staring at the amorphorous "digital citizenship" class.   As I zeroed in on the learning environment and the situational factors that would impact the class, I started to see more clearly what I needed to account for in my planning.  As I began to formulate goals for the class, I was able to narrow the scope of what I really wanted the class to accomplish. 

As I created the learning goals, the blob that was a digital citizenship class begain to gain form; to truly start to look like a real class.  I was suddenly able to see where I had material that was extraneous, and where I needed more emphasis to enable students to reach the BHAG.  I started looking for examples of videos and readings that could support learning activities, and began to think about how I could develop online modules that would provide rich learning experiences.  Obviously a lot of those activities will change as I get further into development of the course, but I found the learning goals to be a wonderful way to start to coalesce my thoughts and planning.

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What I'm learning through all of this is that being audacious, and thinking big, isn't as uncomfortable as I thought it might be.  Even someone as cautious as I am can take risks, provided there's a lot of planning ahead of time.  I might not be able to plan for all contingencies, but after creating the learning goals and learning and assessment activities, I at least feel like I've got a good stash of emergency supplies packed and ready to go.