While reading over the description for this assignment, my initial thought for this reflection was that I couldn’t believe how quickly the past three months has flown by; it seems like only yesterday that I was having troubles with figuring out how to post my flight path to a blog. At the same time, I can’t believe how much of a difference three months has made.

My Flight Path

My goals for this course were to improve my abilities in the areas of selection, design and application of educational technologies; more specifically, I wanted to learn how to correctly evaluate potential technologies for use in instructional design, design classes and courses using these technologies, and incorporate the use of these technologies in different learning environments. I was also interested in learning about new educational technologies and ways to increase the amount of formative assessment in classes through electronic means.

My E-Learning Toolkit Experience

Although I initially had trouble accessing the e-learning toolkit (for some reason, the Blackboard link had compatibility issues with Google Chrome for Mac OS), I feel that the toolkit is an excellent resource for not only students of this course, but potentially for students of other MET courses as well. As such, I would recommend that the link for the toolkit be posted somewhere like the MET Ning page (http://metprogram.ning.com/), as I believe that I would have been able to produce better projects if I had known about this resource in my previous semester. While I did not post my experiences with the toolkit to my blog due to time constraints (I have been taking two ETEC courses while working full-time), I did engage with the following sections:

• Learning Management Systems – the activity on the LMS wiki page, the link to the EduTools course management systems evaluation site (http://wcet.wiche.edu/learn/edutools), and the downloadable matrix from the EduTools website were a great help when working on and collaborating with my fellow group members on the LMS evaluation rubric project. Even though I had completed the SECTIONS (Bates & Poole, 2003) readings before engaging in this project, the EduTools matrix provided a more specific, concrete example of how to apply a specific framework to LMS evaluation.

• Moodle – the activities, tutorials and links on this page were invaluable (along with the Blackboard live demo) in the initial creation of my Moodle online course and introductory module. Prior to this course, I had literally no experience with either Moodle or the creation of course modules in a LMS environment, so without the toolkit I likely would have had trouble even finding the MET Moodle server.

• Web Design and HTML Authoring – of all the pages/activities on the e-learning toolkit, I found this one to be the most influential resource that I have used this semester. Before this course, I had no knowledge of web publication or HTML coding; however, due to this section of the toolkit, courses that I have taken through CodeAcademy (http://www.codecademy.com/), and the portion of the Blackboard Live demo on how to publish with Amaya (http://www.w3.org/Amaya/), I was able to overcome this lack of knowledge. This is illustrated by the fact that by the end of creating my Moodle online course, I was hand-coding some of my material in Moodle rather than using either Amaya or the Moodle WYSIWYG editor. Other portions of this page that I found to be helpful were the ‘Design Questions/Issues’ section, which helped me to apply a better design framework to my course materials (especially points 3 and 6), and the web design checklists, such as ‘Web Pages That Suck’ (http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/). Unfortunately, I was unable to master CSS or Dreamweaver; however, this is one main area for improvement that I would like to cover in the future.

• Wikis – I found Jon-Beasley Murray’s ‘Murder, Madness and Mayhem’ project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Murder_Madness_and_Mayhem) to be both inspiring and enlightening, and it has made me consider increasing the use of wikis in courses that I teach. As an example of this, my Moodle course module included two group wiki projects that leveraged the collaborative writing features of wikis to improve the ability of learners to edit and write different forms of persuasive letters.

• Audio – on this page of the e-learning toolkit, my experiences include downloading Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) and going through the tutorials on the wiki page. Overall, I found Audacity to be quite user-friendly; however, I don’t think I will incorporate its use much in the future as video and screen-capture tools are becoming far more ubiquitous.

My ETEC 565A Experience

Overall, ETEC 565A has been an excellent, enlightening, and sometimes frustrating experience, which has reflected several of Chickering & Gamson’s (1987) principles of good practice in education: discussions were designed as case studies to encourage reciprocity and communication rather than endless summarizing; the instructor was constantly engaged in order to guide the discussion; the activities were designed to promote active learning; feedback on projects was given promptly; and the work standards for the course set a high level of expectation. I also feel that my ability to model the NETS standards (http://iste.org) in my course design has significantly improved. In regards to the specific modules, I have detailed my experiences below:

• Selecting and Using Learning Technologies
After completing this module, I now find myself applying Bates & Poole’s (2003) SECTIONS model constantly when given a choice of tools to use when creating a project; examples of when I have applied this framework include the design of the LMS evaluation rubric, the choice of medium for my digital storytelling project, and the design of activities for my Moodle course site.

• Learning Management Systems
Through the e-learning toolkit, the discussions for module 2, ‘cool links’ provided by other students, and my work on my Moodle online course, I was able to not only learn how to design courses in a LMS environment, but also to realize the affordances of the different synchronous and asynchronous activities that can be incorporated in them. The second module was also important in helping me to realize that course activities should be designed based on the educational affordances they provide, rather than how new or novel they are.

• Interaction and Assessment Tools
I had already completed the Anderson (2008) readings prior to this course; however, I found the Gibbs & Simpson (2005) article to be extremely relevant and interesting as it clarified and extended some of the ideas I already had regarding formative assessment. Since I currently teach in a higher education environment, I have seen that due to a multitude of factors (time constraints, normative assessment), the only way to get students to constantly engage with the course material is to (as the authors state) ‘assess everything’ (p. 8, para. 2). While creating the assessment activity for my Moodle course, I incorporated Gibbs & Simpson’s conditions under which formative assessment supports learning (as stated on my earlier blog page) to encourage not only learning, but also student motivation.

• Social Media and Learning
Most of the issues in this module (such as privacy and access) I had already covered in previous MET courses; however, the digital storytelling project was probably the most difficult and engaging project that I have undertaken this semester. Levine’s (2014) ’50 Web Ways to Tell a Story’ was an invaluable resource when working on the project, as it clearly illustrated not only the various free tools that can be used to tell a digital story, but also the process behind story creation. Still, this project not only included skills in digital storytelling tool use, but also web publication, graphic design, effective pedagogy, copyright issues and narrative elements, to the point where my final story, “The Story of Bill” (https://readtapestry.com/s/99gHD6JS0/) took over 30 hours from project initiation to completion.

• Features and Benefits of Multimedia
While the readings for this course were beneficial, the most influential article I read this semester in regards to the use of multimedia was actually in ETEC 510, Marc Prensky’s ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’ (2001). That being said, the Moodle course design project allowed me to incorporate some of the ideas that Prensky touched on in the reading to enhance engagement of Web 2.0/3.0 learners, such as providing multimodal elements such as sound, digital images or video before text (or replacing it altogether).

My Next Steps

While I feel that I have come a long way over the past three months, I still feel that I have a long journey ahead of me. This course has not only taught me a lot, it has also showed me specific areas in which I need to improve. Some of these areas include:
o the creation and use of specific, focused rubrics to evaluate LMSs and other learning technologies
o the use of CSS and Dreamweaver
o graphic design (Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.)
o the technical side of LMS management (eg. Server set-up and hosting, administration)
o the use of screen capture software and multimedia tools to create effective and engaging material, lessons and courses
o video and multimedia production
o the use of mobile technologies to enhance and create learning environments
o the incorporation of social media to enhance learning.

In the meantime, I still have six more MET courses to go and I will continue to teach at my university in the meantime; however, I would eventually like to move into instructional and e-learning design. To prepare for this, I look forward to increasing the use of technologies and the creation of online materials while I am still completing my degree so that I will (hopefully) transition smoothly into this field upon graduation.

References

Bates A. W., & Poole, G. (2003). A framework for selecting and using technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective teaching with technology in higher education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4

Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39(7), 3-7. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm

Chickering, A. W., & Ehrmann, S., C. (1996). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3-6. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples.htm

Flanders Enterprises. (2014) Web pages that suck. Retrieved from http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved fromhttp://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

Levine, A. (2014). 50 web ways to tell a story. In Wikispaces.com. Retrieved from 50ways.wikispaces.com/

Murray, J. B. (2008). Madness. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray/Madness

National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers. Retrieved from 
http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_for_Teachers_2008.htm

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On The Horizon, 9 (5), 1-6.

WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies. EduTools. Retrieved from http://wcet.wiche.edu/learn/edutools