Speaker 1: To continue our discussion on module making, I will be discussing with you the importance of content auditing and module pacing and engagement. We are living in a VUCA world. VUCA stands for Volatile with Unstable Challenges, Uncertain with Unknown Outcomes, Complex with Many Interconnected Parts, and Ambiguous with Lack of Clarity. This is the world that we are living in. Sadly, we are also affected by the coronavirus pandemic. And this adds to the uncertainty, anxiety, and uneasiness of people, including educators. But we know for a fact that we have to continue educating our students. According to UNESCO, reiterating the Sustainable Development Goals of UN, education cannot wait. If learning stops, we will lose human capital. And the reality is that we have to ensure the inclusive and equitable quality of education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, despite the pandemic, despite the kind of world that we are living in. And so, our Department of Education promotes Sulong Edukalidad, which focuses on the quality of education that we have to give even in this time of pandemic. And one of that program is focusing on MELC, or the Most Essential Learning Competencies. So as we teach, we focus on the most essential learning competencies. That is why it is important for us to undergo content auditing in order for us to decongest our curriculum. If we try to think about it, our curriculum is overloaded. One of the ways that we can help and look into decongesting and auditing our content is by looking at what Larry Insworth suggests the Power Standards. The Power Standards focuses on prioritizing our content. There are four things that he has mentioned. First is endurance, that our content be a lasting content beyond one grade level. And these concepts and skills are the ones needed in life. Second is leverage, which cross over application with the content area and other content areas, which will help us to have the interdisciplinary connections. Third is the readiness for the next level, discussing content, the prerequisite and concepts and skills that students need as they enter the new grade level or course of study. And the last one is focus also on the assessment, which the external exams required by the state, national, provincial, college, and career. To try to think about it, I added a final criterion, which is relevance. Because in this day and age, it's good to look into what is relevant to our situation. If we compare that to what DepEd have done with the most essential learning competencies, we can see that DepEd focuses on the essential and the desirable. They also look into the interconnectedness of topics, focusing also on the prerequisite knowledge and skills, giving importance to what should be assessed, and also to contextualize what is happening to our situation today with our students, with our teachers, with everyone that is experiencing this pandemic, and also the VUCA world, and relate those competencies to their context, to where they are. So if we try to think about it, this is the process that they have done. They look into all the competencies, they try to retain if that competencies already meet endurance. Endurance is one of the things that they have been looking into, especially as a focus. If it is something that the students will be able to use in life, not just learn it in one grade level, they retain that. For the other competencies, they try to merge or cluster them. If there are things that should not be taken into because of the situation, because of our limited time, they also remove and drop, or they also rephrase in order for it to fit the needed competencies of students. In their document, in their rationale, it is advantageous for students to learn the concepts and skills in the MELCs through meaningful activities and scenarios relatable to them and within the context of the student's own environment. We have to take into consideration that these MELCs are guides for us to create meaningful activities, relatable activities, relatable scenarios, and within the context of our own students. It would be useless if we teach something that they will not see the relevance of. So as we prepare to look into the most essential learning competencies, there's a move for us to modularity, from lessons to modules. Why? Because if we are doing modules, one, we can have the flexibility of learning for our students. Second, we can group those particular competencies into meaningful chunks. And lastly, it asks us to go and have checkpoints or feedbacks, not only as a summative means to check understanding at the end, but also within the lesson. And in creating modules, we have that flexibility, we have that capability to put into checkpoints and feedback, which are important. So modularity, if I think about it, when we create modules, there are certain things that we have to consider. First is, as discussed a while ago by Sir Jambi, synchronous and asynchronous, which is more focused on the asynchronous activities. Second is the importance of understanding teaching time versus the learning time. And of course, class, group, and individual activities. First, on synchronous and asynchronous activities, we have to consider that in this time and age, in this kind of setup, we have to strike the balance of synchronous and asynchronous. Because at the end of the day, we have to think about the context of our students. Maybe not all of them have the same capacity to have internet, or because of their connection, or also because of if we move towards more synchronous, it will also lead to unhealthy lifestyle for our students and our teachers. But here, I'll try to suggest some synchronous activities that we can look into as well as asynchronous activities. For synchronous activities, these are the activities that can be done with the group, or are done with the group. Example of which are video conferences, discussion forums and threads, collaboration, and online assessments. The thing about it, I also put some materials, some applications that you can utilize in order to have these particular activities. So for video conferences, you can have Google Meet, Zoom, WebEx, FaceTime, Microsoft Teams, and there are many others. The discussion forums, threads, Google Classroom, Padlet, Flipgrid, Seesaw. For collaboration, I focus on the Google Sites, Google Suites, and online assessments, Google Forms, Kahoot, Quizzes, Socrative. These are the activities that you can do together as a class, or even in group works during class time. Synchronous activities, these are the activities that can be done by the individual away from the school group, or away from the contact time with the teacher. Some of them are recorded videos, discussion boards, scheduled quizzes, and even collaboration. For a recorded video, if we record our video, our presentation, through either Google Slides, PowerPoint, Keynote, and other applications, we can post it. If we have a learning management system, we can post it there and let the students watch it on their own time. If, for example, they have lagging internet, they can go back to your discussion in order for them to understand. Discussion boards can also be done outside the class hours. Scheduled quizzes, which can be a way for students to check out their understanding on their own. These are some of the applications, and collaboration. So why, again, to reiterate, why we are focused more on asynchronous activities is because we don't want to have online fatigue for our students as well as our teachers. This is the reality. If we are always online, it will give us that fatigue, that tiredness, compared to a one-to-one or a face-to-face class. Along with that, asynchronous activity helps in the gradual release of responsibility because at the end of the day, we want our students to own their learning. In relation to this, and when we design our modules, we also have to consider teaching time versus learning time. So let's differentiate the two. Teaching time is more of the contact time that the teacher has with his students. Learning time, on the other hand, focuses on the on-task time, but it seems that there's no difference. If we move forward further, contact time can be synchronous or asynchronous. If you have a class period, you can have synchronous and asynchronous activities. But on an on-task time, students can learn even without the teacher, even if they are not online, and even if they are not on screen, meaning that they don't have the capacity to interact with their teachers or they are online using the internet or using the different applications, they can still learn. This particular shift needs to happen when we do distance learning, remote learning, because it shifts the focus from the teacher towards the students. And what we want is that our students will be able to learn on themselves and they learn and own their learning. And the last part of the things that we can consider as we design our module is doing class, group, and individual. Of course, the reality is we will not have always class discussion because we wanted to promote asynchronous activities. But even if that is the case, we have to consider other means like group works and individual work in order for us to make sure that our students will learn. Things to consider when we try to group our activities into class activities, group activities, and individual activities, first, meet them where they are. Look into their context. In this day and age, it is important to know the context of our students. If you want them to really learn, we have to know where they are. Because if we don't, then everything that we design will not be appreciated if the context of our students were not taken into account. For example, if they don't have the means to go online, class activities will not matter. If for example, they have low bandwidth, maybe we can have more individual activities and group activities which will not take too much of their bandwidth when we do class or synchronous activities. So again, it is important for us to look into the context. It is necessary to be flexible in the way we create our module to meet the needs of our students. Second is inclusion or connection. One of the realities that we have experienced is the loss of connection. And many of our students are looking for that. There was even a survey that focuses on what the students would really look forward to connections with their friends. Because this particular setup can make them feel that they are alone. So when we create our modules, our activities, please consider adding connections. And of course, inclusion of the different contexts of our students. And the last one is engagement. So that we can captivate our learners. In this kind of setup where we only meet them virtually or not at all, if we will not be able to engage them, then we will lose them. So as we continue our creating and preparing our modules, let us consider one, audit and decongest our content to meet the needs of our students, to check their context, and to help them endure in life by preparing them for what is ahead. And second, as we create our modules, let us focus more on asynchronous activities. Think of the learning time of the students and consider also the different activities for the students to feel connected with one another and engage with our topic or our lessons. Thank you very much.