As a career changer coming into the field of education, this course was an eye-opener for me.  I have made lesson plans when I used to tutor but I have never created a course of this magnitude before.  Starting at ground zero, my your instructional design skills have definitely been developed as a result of working with the course material and designing my course projects.  I thought the process would be quite linear and follow the ADDIE model.  But in reality, I found myself using the Agile model more as I continuously revisited and iterated in a helical path as I moved forward.  This would be very frustrating sometimes as I looped back to revisit something, but in the end, I believe that out of the iterations, I derived a better course or even just better artifacts.

My initial goal was to familiarize myself with Moodle, and while I still have a lot to learn, I believe that I have certainly familiarized myself to this popular LMS.  The journey was full of trials and tribulations but I developed a respect for the capabilities provided by an LMS such as Moodle (even, and perhaps especially, after trying the other tools and resources during this course).  The appeal of a system that incorporates so many teaching and learning functionality was still the greatest.  I had previously assumed that LMS were similar to websites, just created for educational purposes.  Using Moodle has made me realized how different a general website is from an LMS that is designed for learning purposes.  I continued to be amazed by the assessment, closed forum discussions, and grading and reporting capabilities offered by Moodle.  On the other hand, the limited aesthetic Moodle made me appreciate user experience (UX) design of apps and websites that I often take for granted.   I strongly believe, and have read studies that support the fact, that many of us a strong visual learners.  An improved ability to make Moodle more aesthetically appealing would create an even better learning experience.

Using Moodle has broaden my horizons, and I would be curious to discover other LMSes and what they offer.  One LMS that I have heard a lot of great things about is Sakai and I would like to explore that next.  I would also be interested to visit other digital tools and see how far I can push them to be used for educational purposes.  This is a concept I had coming into the course, but grew stronger upon reviewing some of the resources we explored in this course.  There are a good number of competing products and it would be interesting to see in a few years which ones thrived and why.  Trying out the different resources allowed me to appreciate the pros and cons of each.  However, I often found myself wishing it was part of a bigger system that offered more, the convenience of a one-stop shop, like an LMS.  At the end of the day, each product or tool has its own strengths and limitations.

I found some of the reading to be very useful, but for others, I sometimes found that I had a hard time connecting the readings to the topic of discussion.  The discussion themes and questions supported the goal to design a course.  I appreciated being introduced to various tools and resources and have certainly found some interesting new ones to add to my tool kit.  In regards to the course work and activities, the work itself was a strong learning experience.  In particular, I found that building  the two modules of a course forced me to do a lot of self-learning as I navigated and maneuvered my way around new systems and tried my hand at course design for the first time.  Overall, I believe that this course provided a foundation to course design.  From this experience and what I’ve learnt, I believe and hope that I will vastly improve in my next attempt.