My original flight path was geared towards discovery and exposure to new or unused tools that I hadn’t had an opportunity to work with before. I was really interested in using Blackboard connect since I only had experience using Moodle. Social media tools for education were also something that I was interested in learning more about. I am not a big social media user so the idea of using those communication tools seems very foreign to me. Although my flight path was a little light on details, I was really open to hearing and learning about all the new ways in which we are going to be learning in the future. Mobile and online learning seem like such a huge world that hasn’t quite been taken advantage of in the realm of education and I think we have a long way to go to utilize the capacity of those tools to their fullest extent. Not having a clear agenda going into the course left me with a somewhat weak flight path but it wasn’t due to a lack of interest or motivation for learning, mainly that I didn’t have a clear expectation on what I wanted to learn. Since I am more excited by the use of technology for education than pedagogy, I really wasn’t sure what to expect for this course or for the MET program itself. It has been a good experience so far though.
My experience with the course has been very positive and I actually had quite a few assignments and readings that connected with me. I really enjoyed getting a chance to work in Blackboard. I have been around it for quite a while but everything I had ever set up had been Moodle based, so it was neat to force myself to get to know that system a little bit. Although after having spent more time in Blackboard, I can now see why Spiro (2014) wrote an article on the death of the LMS. Both Blackboard and Moodle seem like systems that are a response to a transition in learning as opposed to a revolutionary platform for expanding the learning potential. It was nice to read a little bit about MOOCs as well from Bates (2014) since I am a firm supporter of that online model of education. However, I’m not sure that the MOOC format is going to stay the same over the next 5-10 years. It seems that there is room for growth and maturity there that will serve future learners.
Overall, the course has been a great experience for me. I came into the course with expectations to learn more about LMSs and I met those expectations but I also was pleasantly surprised by a few other areas within the course; mainly the readings of Ciampa (2013) on student motivation, the analysis of asynchonous/synchronous communication tools, and the information on how assessments support student learning by Gibbs & Simpson (2005). All three sections of the course made me think about new and interesting ways to connect with students within the online learning environment. I am all about online learning since I feel that being untethered from the classroom is important for future education and these topics really addressed issues that I hadn’t quite thought about and definitely make online learning much more complicated than just putting information on the internet. I think this is going to allow me to be much more accepting of contrary views of online learning and how we can eventually build online platforms that will really facilitate learning as much as possible without sacrificing availability over quality.
The only area of the course I was a little disappointed on was the topic of social media and education. I had hoped that we would dive a little deeper into the world of social media learning but it was much more of a surface exposure. I think this is due to the fact that I am still very hesitant as to the validity of using these communication tools for learning. It would have been nice to have become a convert for social media for education but unfortunately I am still on the fence. It doesn’t mean that I won’t eventually make that transition but within this course I just missed that connection.
I felt that all of the assignments were really well designed and helped expand my knowledge of how to implement an LMS and online learning environments. My experience as an educational technologist has always been evaluating technology for usability, effectiveness, and cost savings although I had never been able to quantify how exactly I came to my decisions. Both the evaluation rubric and the pros & cons of communication methods really made me focus on the research methods involved in evaluating a technology. I also had the same experience with reading Siemens’ (2003) article about media evaluation. Having a masters in multimedia, I have just gotten comfortable knowing which media is the right and wrong thing to use at certain times but I realized through those two assignments that there are times when you need to be able to break down decisions into quantifiable pieces.
Both the introduction module and the content module were really fun projects to work on since I had never built out an online course before. I have helped others get parts of their courses into an online form through Moodle but I never had an opportunity to develop something from scratch. Since I am someone who loves to build structure to things, it was enjoyable to start with a generalized idea of a fictional course and plan out how that course would work over the course of 12-13 weeks. I think Andersons’ (2008) article on the theory of online learning helped put me into the mental context to design a course that takes advantage of the capabilities of online learning. It is definitely a different experience than classroom instruction and I hadn’t quite realized how much so until I needed to build a course of my own. Tying in the ideas from Spiro and Gibbs & Simpson really challenged me to create something that wasn’t just a plain old real life course that exists online but something that takes full advantage of the features of the online medium. I think I was far from making something ground breaking but at least I have those ideas in my head now going forward and I hope to eventually try and push the boundaries of what online learning can do in the future.
Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University.
Bates, T. (2014). MOOCs. In Teaching in digital age.
Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation.Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96.
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31.
Siemens, G. (2003). Evaluating media characteristics: Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Elearnspace.
Spiro, K. (2014). 5 elearning trends leading to the end of the Learning Management Systems.