The ETEC 565 course material and activities provided many opportunities to create, analyze and reflect on various aspects of instructional design. Up until participating in this course, most of my design skills had been influenced by theory and case-study based research and activities.  Developing education technology and online learning pedagogy was typically compartmentalized and relied on activities that focused on specific components or skills.  ETEC 565 was much more holistic in a sense that it allowed the exploration of course design beginning at its foundations. The course allowed me to build skills that I could directly relate to my professional educational setting.   My instructional design skills have been further developed by the course activities, and to some degree, they have been transformed, largely because the course allowed me to bring many separate pieces together.  My initial goals were aimed at gaining the technological skills to design a course prototype using the Blackboard platform.  I refocused my goals on the Moodle LMS part way through the course, and then again, once I found that the platform was very user friendly and that technological skills would not be the limiting factor when developing my course prototype.  I also included the goal of exploring numerous external digital tools that could supplement the LMS.  The vast number of these tools led me to acknowledge that finding and learning a variety of them is a not a simple task.  Searching for collaborative and creative tools led me to a number of recommendation lists which were most often published by education blogs. Many contained dead links and sponsored apps with marketing biases.  I found greater success searching for tools using social bookmarking apps like Diigo but this still required a lot of leg work.  The goal of finding useful supplemental applications for my Moodle course was also challenging because of the public, secondary aged, intended audience.  Very few applications met the level of privacy, accessibility, and affordability that I feel is appropriate for my educational setting.  My goal of creating course content and activities which reflected my teaching pedagogy remained a significant challenge throughout the course.  I feel that applying theory and classroom experience to the online or blended delivery environment will require continuous assessment and reflection once I begin facilitating courses using an LMS.  The requirements and views of the educational organization I teach for are different enough from my own pedagogical views that in order to achieve my goals I will need to be creative and as well as realistic when designing.  

Through the course activities and discussions, I was able to spend a considerable amount of time analyzing a few different platforms.  Primarily Eliademy, Blackboard, and Moodle, but also some online MOOCs including edX.  I feel that my experiences with each of them allowed me to achieve a useful amount of analysis by participating, designing, and comparing.  I found that they all had affordances and limitations that would impact the learners and facilitators experiences, but all contained an adequate amount of key features and tools to be effective.  Because I feel that being simple to use, free to access, and adequately secure, are the most important components of an LMS, Moodle will be the basis of my future comparisons.

The reading materials, discussion topics, activities, and tools used in this course were all highly valuable components of my learning experience. Because this course is my ninth MET course, I feel that I have done a considerable amount of reading through course materials, and I have put a significant amount of thought towards education technology pedagogy and instructional design.  Therefore, I typically found the activities and discussions more valuable than the readings, however I did find articles related to web design, authorship, and copyright to be valuable.  The courses assignment and activity design was excellent. I find that when a course discussion directly involves sharing progress on assignments, and communicating with others about their ideas for their own assignments, better products result. In many MET courses I have found that discussions often focus on topics which relate to the assignments and projects but they rarely involved direct peer analysis of assignments or their components.  I find this type of collaboration, which was featured throughout the course, to be the most valuable.  That being said however, I feel that the Blackboard platform discussion tools limit the learners ability to collaborate in few key ways. I find that the system of using a long list of discussion topics, which each link to lists of topic comments to be too linear and chronological.  Discussion tools which use spatial elements to allow users to see more connections between topics with less scrolling and page flipping may be more effective for collaboration with many contributors.  Blackboard is fine for sharing large amounts of content but I think the platform would benefit with some more flexibility.  

Finally, my only criticism in terms of organization of the course relates to using groups for assignments. I like that the use of groups was optional for some assignments and required for others, but I found that assignment two was challenging in a group of five.  For an assignment with with a few focused objectives and tasks, I think limiting the number to three, or even pairs would have made collaboration easier; this would have created a greater knowledge base of platforms analyzed.  ETEC 565 has been the most practical course I have participated in and these minor criticisms do not affect the great value of my overall learning experience.