The course has really opened my eyes to the complexities associated with online course creation. I truly feel that my instructional design skills have transformed in a valuable way. When designing online courses, it is essential that every piece of the lesson is thoroughly planned out. Every aspect of the course needs to be clear and concise as students are essentially navigating through the course on their own. In a traditional classroom, if something is unclear or doesn’t necessarily jive, I am able to modify the lesson on the spot. However, this is not the case in an online learning environment. I have already noticed that this experience has helped with my lesson planning in the regular classroom. When designing my lessons, I have started to think ahead and predict ambiguities that may arise and fix them before I teach. Although my instructional design skills have improved and transformed, there is still room for further improvement and practice. I can into the course thinking that the creation of an online Challenge Centre Program would be a fairly simple task. However, after being immersed in activities in the course, I have realized that my goal of starting this project next school year might not necessarily be attainable. In order to create a well-developed course for Global Citizenship, I will need to adjust the time needed for creating the course content.
When we were initially asked to choose an LMS to evaluate, I chose to examine Moodle. I chose Moodle because I had heard quite a bit about the software but had not had a chance to check it out. I also liked the fact the program was of no cost. In my initial exploration, I thought the platform was super user friendly. Although it was not the most visually, compared to other learning management systems, I liked the way that the course could be laid out in a linear fashion. As the students engaging in the course would be experiencing an online course for the first time, I really wanted to use a platform that was simple and easy to use. My initial thoughts about the program were confirmed after using Moodle to create the course shell, introductory module and content module. There was a bit of a learning curve but after using the program for a while, it almost became second nature.
To be honest, I feel that this has been one of the most valuable learning experiences I have had this far in the MET program. I really liked the fact that the entire course worked toward our final product of learning. It was especially helpful that weekly activities could be applied to our final product. My favorite unit was when we had to create some sort of visual or learning tool for our course. I appreciated the list of possible tools provided and enjoyed looking through peer projects to see what they had created. I am always looking for new and innovative tools to show students in the classroom. This was an extremely beneficial activity. All readings, resources and activities helped to create a well-rounded learning environment as the different modules required the learner to grapple with big ideas and issues present in e-learning course design. The course was super organized, structured and had a natural flow that led up to an amazing product of learning.