Author Archives: rrtoronto

Toronto District School Board teacher and University of British Columbia Master of Education Technology student.

My last MET post ever!!!

After more than three years, ten courses, several papers and projects and hundreds of discussion posts, this is my last ever assignment in the Master of Education Technology program at UBC, before I graduate this May!

In my flight path, I talked about wanting to learn how to design an online course, which I have. The word “Moodle” meant about as much to me as “Mars” did before this course. I knew it existed, and vaguely knew what it did, but had never been there. I would now say I am much more familiar with Moodle than with Mars! I had also stressed the importance of my ePortfolio, something I have not worked much, but I intend to work on it over the next week or two for it to present a rounded picture of my MET experience.

In the first week of Module 1 we reviewed the ISTE standards (2008). Of the seven standards, one that has really been crystallizing for me in my latter MET courses was “Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility”, particularly in relation to copyright, which would come up again in Week 10. These issues comprised a big component of ETEC 540, and through that and the making of my Moodle course here in ETEC 565, I have come to realize I have a distinct advantage over many other educators, the fact that I have spent much of the last 20 years creating original works of art, music and photography. Thus, I have a great body of past work I can delve into to inject my assignments with a certain originality without having to worry about royalties, so even if no one else is paying for my art, at least I won’t have to! This was evident in our digital stories, in which most used VideoScribe or PowToons, and royalty-free images and music which leave an indelible aesthetic mark. My personal story was not as marked by outside aesthetic influences because I had created most of the material and made it in iMovie, a video editor that takes less control over the end product that some of these other multimedia platforms.

In week 2, we were introduced to Tony Bates’ (2014) SECTIONS framework, and the Nels, Dyer and Carstens (2010) reading. I got more out of the Bates reading and definitely intend to refer back to it, both in my own practice and that of my teaching colleagues. It serves as a practical guide to choosing technologies. The concrete nature of some of the advice it contained contrasted the abstract nature of much of the reading in MET. For example, in the “Ease of Use” section, Bates recommends taking no more that 20 minutes to learn a piece of software, because time learning the tool is time taken away from learning the content. As I mentioned in my video reflection, I was required to purchase Bates and Sangra’s (2011) Managing technology in Higher Education: Strategies for transforming teaching and learning for my first MET course, so returning to Bates in my last course underlined a unified vision in my MET experience.

So, just when I was getting comfortable with my knowledge of educational technologies thanks to the consistency of Bates, the Porto (2015) article on LMSs threw a curveball and let me know that things change very quickly in this field. In past MET courses, I had spend a great deal of time and effort analysing and evaluating different LMSs. Hearing that even the term LMS might be passé when most of my work colleagues have never even heard it yet came as quite a shock! The article basically argues that LMSs are limiting, that students should be able to use a wide range of tools available on the web for education, including social media. I used to work a school that used an LMS called Schoology, for free initially but later with expensive licensing fees. This year, the entire board has made Google Classroom available, an LMS in it’s own right but which, being Google, allows for freer interaction with the web at large.

In week 4, we began our case studies, so besides helping the hypothetical Lenora with her problem of building a website with little knowledge or web access, I feel like I established a great working relationship with Victoria Olson, whom I had “known” (without ever actually having met face-to-face) from a previous course. I now consider Victoria to be an essential part of my Personal Learning Network, as she helped me immeasurably with my Moodle course.

Week 5 saw the introduction of the controversial topic of BYOD, another theme that keeps coming up in MET but differs from others in that the public at large is very aware of this issue as well. I have written extensively on this in the past, but would just like to add that radiation is still a concern for me. I personally still use an iPhone 4, and I’m reluctant to get a personal electronic device for my children (who are still 5 and 9 years old) and intend to avoid it as long as I can, despite almost being a Master of Educational Technology! I see friends whose children have their own iPads and I see the tantrums when these children are separated from their devices.

The sixth week concentrated on synchronous and asynchronous communication, something I really hadn’t thought about before taking this course but now find myself thinking about daily. I just got an email on my phone. It’s on my phone, so I could respond synchronously, but it’s an email, so the sender thinks of it as asynchronous. Do I need to respond immediately? For the case study I role-played and answered as Trinh, again trying to bring a more outside-the-box approach to discussions.

Week 7 brought the Anderson reading (2008), something I had also encountered earlier in MET, but needed a refresher on. The ideas of community-centred, assessment-centred, knowledge-centred and learner-centred keep coming up through course colleagues, professors and readings and are another important way of categorizing learning to keep in mind when choosing and evaluating different learning technologies.

Week 8 involved assessment. This was about the time I began working on my course in earnest, so the Bates (2014) and Gibbs and Simpson (2005) readings had a strong influence on the assessments I included in my course. For example, Gibbs and Simpson pointed out that multiple choice questions don’t necessarily lead to shallower learning; it depends on how students prepare (p. 15). Because my course is more of a general interest course than an academic one, some multiple choice wouldn’t hurt as students aren’t engaging in the activities to get the best scores, but hopefully just because they are enjoyable in and of themselves.

In the discussion in week 9 I found myself taking a position that I figured might not be popular in MET, namely that education ought to keep its nose out of certain social media because we all need places and spaces where we don’t need to think too hard, don’t need to deeply analyse, revise and question our work before posting, and can just relax and have fun. Not that social media need be kept out of schools entirely, but that thick lines should be drawn, not just for students but for teachers as well. A few of my colleagues seemed to concur that Twitter was more of a professional space while Facebook remained more social.

Week 10 got more into questions of intellectual property, which I mentioned earlier. During week 11, I mostly concentrated on creating my digital story and discussed certain frustrations with getting my subtitled text over the images as I had wanted in iMovie. I realized through participation in the discussions that others had allowed the medium to shape their message, while I stubbornly stuck to the idea of my message and manipulated the medium as much as possible to fit it.

I am wondering why the discussion suddenly shifted from WordPress back to Blackboard in week 11. As mentioned in my video reflection, I found navigating between two different platforms confusing. If I was on one platform, I’d question what I might be missing on the other, until I’d become comfortable in one and stop checking the other, only to find out I had missed something!

I will admit that I didn’t get very in depth into the readings last week, though I am fascinated by MOOCs and, since I will soon be done with MET, should have more time to delve into some. I started taking one from MOMA on teaching art a couple of years ago, and though I didn’t complete the course, I gleaned some useful lesson ideas that I actually used with my class at the time.

Well, it’s been quite a ride, and now to post my last MET post ever! There will be a lot I’ll miss about this program but I look forward to new challenges, and know that I can never really stop working if I hope to remain concurrent with these ever-changing educational technologies.

References

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. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in digital age http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/(Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework)

Bates, T., & Sangra, A. (2011). Managing technology in higher education: Strategies for transforming teaching and learning. John Wiley & Sons.

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

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from: http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers

Nel, C., Dreyer, C., & Carstens, W. A. M. (2010). Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. Tydskrif vir letterkunde, 35(4), 238-258. Retrieved from: http://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/download/53794/42346

Porto, S. (2015). The uncertain future of Learning Management Systems. The Evolllution: Illuminating the Lifelong Learning Movement. Retrieved from: http://www.evolllution.com/opinions/uncertain-future-learning-management-systems/

Digital Story and Moodle course reflection

My course and my personal story aim to harness thoughts and discussion on the elusive, transitory and sometimes esoteric subject of that which is untranslatable between two languages. I had originally aimed to create a French teaching course, because as Levy (2009) and others have noted, email, chat, discussion forums, wikis, video conferencing, other web-based projects, and access to authentic materials in the target language are all rich 2nd language learning tools. However, I chose to shift my focus away from something I could use with my elementary students to something aimed more at French teachers like myself, or others just for general interest. My main reason was practical; I needed to make the course in English for my professor and course colleagues to be able to understand it.

Because the untranslatable is inherently difficult to describe in any language using words alone, for my personal story, image and sound were weaved together with language in a way that may be closer to art than academia to try to communicate these ideas that lie just out of reach of the English language.

Barbara Cassin (2014) and her colleagues, Apter, Lezra and Wood have a rich understanding of this dilemma through their efforts to translate the French Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles to the English Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. While they too were dealing directly with French to English translation, the dictionary contains several other European languages, and as a dictionary, aims to be comprehensive, a far more daunting task than creating a Moodle course around a few examples of English/ French untranslatables. Thus, reading the preface to the English version of their dictionary was helpful and enlightening in analysing my task. They cite Derrida’s Monolingualism of the other (1998) with the following quotation, that, while paradoxical and confusing, speaks to the paradox and confusion inherent in the task of translation:

“In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable; translation is another name for the impossible.” (Cassin, Apter, Lezra & Wood, 2014, p. xl).

Cassin et al. also raised another important idea relating to MET, “concerns about the global hegemony of English” (p. lx), particularly through English being the principal language of the world wide web. We like to think that we can find answers to any questions on the Internet, but despite Google Translate, online dictionaries, and learning apps like Duolingo, translation continues to be an extremely complex affair, and as we have probably seen with websites that were not originally in English, automated translation can be confusing, misleading and sometimes hilarious. This makes a course like mine all the more relevant and poignant, especially as it resides on the same medium, the web.

I chose technology that would accommodate text, voice, music, still images and video to enhance the viewer’s perception of the translation process, to fill the natural gaps between two languages with images and non-linguistic sounds. “The Web is quickly changing from a context defined by text content and interactions to one in which all forms of media are supported” (Anderson, 2008, p. 53). Dor (2015) talks about an infant pointing and saying the name of something as that which “constructs common ground between individuals whose experiential worlds are different” (p. 36). Still images, video and sound followed by discussion can serve a similar function.

The video is the only part of the Moodle course where students can hear my voice. By using a conversational style that Bates (2014) advocates in the “Teaching and Media Selection” part of his SECTIONS model, I accommodate better personalization, thereby deepening the interaction between my students and this particular learning material. Though the photo of my face is blurry and passes quickly in the montage, the story and the way it’s told can provide a personal connection with me even though it’s a web-based course.

While my video speaks directly to the untranslatability of “always” as “toujours”, it hints at a greater, sort of meta-untranslatable: the bilingual listener is acutely aware of the gap between the French audio narration and the English subtitles, while even monolingual (English or French) viewers are left with an unsettling feeling that they haven’t fully understood the story. “What is needed to get a comparative sense of things, is not a firmer or clearer translation of difficult words, but a feeling for how relatively simple words chase each other around in context” (Cassin et al. 2014, p. x). By choosing a video editor like iMovie, I was able to demonstrate this “comparative sense of things” that my course aims to teach.

References

Anderson, T. (2008). The theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton: AU Press.

Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from: https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-media-design-principles/

Cassin, B., Apter, E., Lezra, J., & Wood, M. (Eds.). (2014). Dictionary of untranslatables: a philosophical lexicon. Princeton University Press.

Dor, D. (2015). The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology. Oxford University Press, USA.

Levy, M. (2009). Technologies in use for second language learning. The Modern Language Journal, 93(s1), 769-782.

Late post on New Trends

I was interested in hearing exactly what the difference is between a MOOC and other OER, but Bates said “see Chapter 10”, and at this late juncture I don’t have time to go looking for it. I suppose a MOOC is designed as a complete course whereas and OER can be any little bit of learning applicable to several different course.

I found Bryan Alexander’s article quite interesting and hopeful, though I was expecting him to say that Health Care will become the biggest sector, not due to changes in government policy, but due to the unending pollution of our planet!

Wanted: Simple video editor

For my photo story, I am recounting, in French with English subtitles, a story of an epiphany I had while learning French a long time ago. This story goes well with my course about the French language, that is being taught in English.

I learned how to edit film the old-fashioned way at Ryerson University in 1997. I had filmed a silent B&W 8 MM movie, and used a viewfinder, and would edit by literally cutting out frames I didn’t want and then scotch taping together two clips after one had been taken out. For younger colleagues, you probably can’t even imagine this process, physical pieces of film hanging at the side with the editor at a viewfinder literally cutting and taping.

During the same education program, I learned where editing was going by learning Adobe Premier and Avid. A few years later I would use iMovie on my Mac. Today’s iMovie is nothing like that version that I used, and kept when newer versions came out until something overrode it and I couldn’t keep it any longer in a later OS. Maybe I’m a luddite, but I really miss having a linear timeline, where I could drop in layers of audio, stills, or video files, and be able to trim them in and out by dragging the length of the clip through time. I’ve spent the last couple of days looking for such software based on Yurkiw and Bates’ recommendations of media selection. I just downloaded an open source editor called Natron. At first my Mac wouldn’t let me open it because it’s not official and from the app store. Finally I overrode it, but it isn’t the simple timeline format I was seeking.

Basically, I have all my audio and video files in place. I’ve considered using iMovie and Explain Everything!, but grew frustrated at their limitations. iMovie doesn’t seem to let me build my movie from audio outward, that is, starting with my recording and then adding images. The audio clip gets cut to whatever length of images are there. E.E. won’t let me use pre-recorded audio, as far as I can tell.

It’s a bit crazy to think that, now, about a month from getting a Master’s degree in Education Technology, that I still find computers extremely frustrating at times. When under time pressure, with an idea of an end result but not knowing how to get there, computers can still cause a lot of consternation.

Sex, drugs, rock n’ roll and teaching

If I had my way, everything would be free. In the old days before recording, musicians would constantly play each others songs, maybe changing the order or altering lyrics slightly, and these would be passed on for generations without any clue as to who might have originally come up with certain musical or lyrical phrase. Almost all music today still borrows from this past.

I’m a musician and songwriter (with a SOCAN membership since 1996, incidentally) and though I’ve always been proud of my originality, I wouldn’t mind at all if someone played one of my songs, as long as they weren’t profiting from it. But that’s the non-commercial part of Creative Commons.

And my music is really at odds with being a public school teacher. Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll need to be quietly hidden away from my elementary-aged students and their parents. All the music stuff I’ve put online predates my teaching career, but with my band just starting to play live again after 11 years, it could come up. It’s still a conundrum for me. I’m hoping my MET degree will enable me to continue working in education but in a capacity where a lyric from a song I might have written in 1999 won’t come back to haunt me.

If social media becomes educational, it won’t be social anymore.

I’m going to play Devil’s advocate for a bit here, because while I believe social media offer enormous opportunities for students to learn how to respectfully communicate with teachers, parents, one another, experts in various fields, and the public at large, I also strongly believe that kids and grownups alike need spaces (and simply because of societal shifts, these spaces are increasingly online) where they’re not working, not thinking too hard, and not feeling like they’re being analysed and evaluated. Dean Shareski (@shareski) a Community Manager for Discovery Education Canada, said the same thing in his talk at the TDSB Google Camp I attended a couple of weeks ago, that initially, he used Twitter because it was fun, and when we use social media with kids, it should be for fun as well.

I have very big concerns about using social media in the classroom, mostly because, while I’d say I have about 100 times more self-discipline than my average student (aged 8 to 12), I cannot possibly hope to open Facebook and stay on task. It’s like asking a kid to go to a candy store for some miso soup. Even if you love miso soup, when you see it beside a lot of candy, it won’t seem that appealing. The same can be said for trying to integrate work into social media. If one of you were my Facebook friend and posted a great article about Learning with social media, and it comes up right between Rihanna and Drake’s new video (shot on my street, btw…) and John Oliver making fun of Trump, it won’t have the same drawing power as it does in another context. Niether Bates (2014) nor November (2012) acknowledge the possibility of social media being distracting.

For social media to work in a classroom setting, it must be established and maintained for the classroom setting alone. That means, if a student posts “why did you slide tackle me at recess?” to another student on the class Twitter page, the teacher needs to have a word with the student to maintain professional parameters. So rather than redesign a course around social media, I think the social media needs to redesigned around the particular group of students and the subject matter it’s being used for. And most importantly, educational and non-educational social media need to stay separate, even if some of the fun Shareski advocates can be injected into the educational social media.

Online Assessments not always acceptable

Last year I worked at a grade 7 and 8 school that licensed an LMS called Schoology. The user interface is very much like Facebook, and I and the students found it easy to use. I taught math exclusively, to 3 grade 7 classes and 3 grade 8 classes. While I often did creative assignments that I would mark by hand, I set up some tests on Schoology for automated marking. Yes, it saved me an enormous amount of time, but I tried to ensure that the tests asked rich questions and were valid. Some were multiple choice and some involved filling in the blanks with the right answers but with both of these options they could be marked automatically by the system. Some were multi-step problems where the student would have to fill in the blank at each stage of the problem, thus could still get part marks while being assessed by the answers pre-programmed into Schoology. Because it was a French immersion program, I would sometimes have to override the system if someone put in the English answer 36.5 rather than the French 36,5, and for other issues of misunderstanding I could go back in and give part marks.

Anyway, despite the tests being rich, and flexible, people complained to the principal, and based on his directive, I could use them as “quizzes” for formative assessment but not as “tests” for summative assessment? Why not? I still don’t know. Really, I think it was because it was perceived as me taking a short cut and not doing all the work that my predecessors had to do! Let’s face it, most math teachers since the advent of the school house have marked math assignments by looking at the answer and marking it right or wrong. If it is wrong, we look back at the process and identify where the thinking led to the incorrect answer. Is it really necessary that such a job be done by a human?

Reflection on Moodle Introductory module

So far designing a Moodle course has been a very valuable learning experience. In terms of the subject matter of the course, I went from originally planning a French lesson to the more abstract conceptual learning of differences between English and French. The main reason for this was that a French lesson should be taught in French; by not making it a French lesson per se, it allowed me to change the language of instruction to English, in order to fit the parameters of this course being in English, while maintaining a link to my main teachable subject, French.

I found Moodle difficult at first. I noticed that when I clicked on “Edit Settings” on any given page, I could see the HTML code for a split second before it returned to a WYSIWYG view. There was one point where I looked for ways to stay in HTML because the program wasn’t doing exactly what I wanted and figured I could get it done more easily through code. I never did find a way for it to show me the HTML code, but I did get past my problem.

Last week I asked if any classmates wanted to critique my course and vice-versa, and I’m very glad I did. Just looking at Victoria’s site reminded me of several things I was missing, and she helped me overcome some of the technical issues as well as making great practical suggestions. Hopefully my comments were of use to her as well.

While I originally conceived of the course simply being for the sake of interest, I did eventually give it a practical raison d’être, for French teachers to be able address prior misconceptions of their English speaking students. Bransford, Brown and Cocking (2000) stress the importance of recognizing a student’s prior knowledge, especially where this prior knowledge may lead to erroneous assumptions in what is being learned. For an anglophone student learning French, their prior knowledge stems from their first and often only known language, English, and when they place their semantic or syntactic English frameworks on French, it can lead to serious misconceptions. This course addresses those misconceptions and proposes ways to fix them to solidify the foundation for further French learning.

If the course had simply been for interest’s sake, I might have considered not having any assessment at all. “There may be contexts, such as a community of practice, where learning is informal, and the learners themselves decide what they wish to learn, and whether they are satisfied with what they have learned” (Bates, 2014), however, like the course needing to be in English, the parameters of the assignment took precedence and they called for assessment.

Gibbs and Simpson (2005) highlighted the fallibility of tests, the greater value of projects, and students’ tendency to concentrate more on what is being assessed, so I decided that including a final project would make for better learning for students in the course. Gibbs and Simpson (2005), Bates (2014), Bransford et al. (2000), and countless other scholars also stress the importance of feedback. The discussion pages allow for peer feedback and encourage metacognition through reflecting on the comments of one’s peers. Lastly, the Final Project proposal, due in week 5, allows students in the course to receive feedback directly from the instructor and gives the student an opportunity to use the feedback. Thus the feedback serves as a form of assessment as learning.

References

Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from: http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-8-assessment-of-learning/

Bransford, J., Brown, A. L., Cocking, R. R., & National Research Council (U.S.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C: National Academy Press. Retrieved from: http://nap.edu/9853

Anderson, MET and coming full circle

I’m pretty sure this Anderson reading was the first one I was ever assigned in my MET studies, so it’s nice to go back and read it nine courses later. The reading resonates more strongly this time as well because Bransford, Brown and Cocking’s How People Learn is a central text in ETEC 533, the other course I am currently taking. My pdf of Anderson tells me that on May 18th, 2013, I’d highlighted “Researchers have attempted to quantify students’ proficiency and comfort with online environments through use of survey instruments that measure learners’ Internet efficacy (Kirby & Boak, 1987)” (Anderson, 2008, p.48), wondering how this Kirby and Boak would have studied the Internet 8 years before it existed.

I had taken a Statistics course that was more distance learning (coincidentally, from Anderson’s Athabasca University the same year he wrote this, 2008), and had done my French teaching qualification through the ETFO, the public teacher’s union in Ontario, before I started MET. MET, however, has made such a thorough and indelible impression of online learning that I now remember little of those experiences.

Under the heading “Learner-Centred”, Anderson distinguishes between “catering to the whims and peculiarities of each particular learner” and “awareness of the unique cognitive structures and understandings that learners bring” (p. 47). Being familiar now with Bransford et al., I have a deeper understanding of their idea of bringing a student’s misconception (especially in science and math) and acknowledging it in the process of correcting it to provide a basis for further learning. One MET example was in this course, where I was unfamiliar with blogging though it was assumed we had all blogged before, and my unfamiliarity sent me into a tailspin of confusion in week 2 when we posted incomprehensible code and I thought I was supposed to engage in discussions about it.

Under “Knowledge-Centred”, Anderson asserts that “Each discipline or field of study contains a world view that provides unique ways of understanding and talking about knowledge” (p. 49). To “discipline or field”, I would add medium, because learning on the Internet also provides different ways of understanding and talking about knowledge when compared to a face-to-face classroom situation, as Anderson mentions. For example, though I heard Constructivism mentioned earlier in Teacher’s College, I’ve become very familiar with its tenets here in MET, and I don’t think I can separate these ideas from the Prezis and Powtoons in which I’ve experienced them.

Assessment-centred learning is very big in the Toronto District School Board, where on any given unit in any given subject, we are supposed to post “Learning Goals” and student co-constructed “Success Criteria” on the board. The learning goals come directly from the curriculum. I think it’s more difficult in online learning than in a physical classroom space for a teacher to just point that out to a student and say “remember what we’re learning; whether you are showing that you know this or not is what determines your grade”.

Community-based learning here online is, of course, much different than in a classroom. Who is challenging the teacher and who is ingratiating (not the terminology we would use among our peers in a classroom!) themselves to the teacher is much more obvious in a classroom, and has a larger role in group dynamics. I wrote in one of my early MET posts that the idea of online community is a bit of an illusion to me; I can’t remember the names of my colleagues — even ones with whom I worked and video- conferenced with last term — in an online course, whereas I still remember most of my classmates in Teacher’s College 7 years ago. I went for beer after class with those people, and learned a bit about their personal lives; I heard the tone in their voices and saw the expressions on their faces as they reacted to those things, and without such interaction, I feel interpersonal relations are pretty shallow, though I’ve certainly interacted with some colleagues in MET who I’m sure I could be friends with in real life if the situation ever presented itself. The upside of this lack of real, personal interaction online is that we focus more on our work!

References:

Bransford, J., Brown, A. L., Cocking, R. R., & National Research Council (U.S.). (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C: National Academy Press.

A simulated email from Trinh to her student

Dear Randy,

I’m glad you are enjoying the course so far. As we say in our field, museums are not just for dinosaurs!

Some of the problems you mention are part and parcel of a distance learning experience with class colleagues in distant time zones. That being said, you’re right and I will try to make the course more flexible to meet people’s time constraints by making our guest lectures available asynchronously after they have been held live, along with the text of questions and answers that come up during these lectures. As for meeting with your colleagues in groups, I would encourage New Zealanders to make their own groups, and our South African and Finnish students to work together in another group since they are in the same time zone, unless one’s schedule is such that they would rather work at say, 7 AM than 7 PM (since N.Z. is 11 to 12 hours behind S.A. and Finland), in which case you might want to join a group from the opposite time zone. This should make it easier to meet synchronously with group members.

Lastly, because I’ve had several similar queries from other students, I hope you won’t mind me copying and pasting this response to the Q & A discussion board so others can see it? I would prefer that all such queries be posted there from now on, unless you would rather keep it private, in which case you can email me at trinh@uuu.edu. If you would rather meet in real time, please do email me and we can make an appointment via Skype or Google Hangouts. If you see a question from your peers that you can answer on the Q & A discussion board, please do so.

Thank you for your patience as we work out some of the inconsistencies in the course.

Sincerely,

Trinh