When I had done my initial research (Which was woefully insufficient) I thought the MET program would be a journey in exploring new technologies that would aid student learning. You can imagine my surprise when I landed in a course (ETEC 540) where the text book was written by an incredibly verbose Jesuit priest by the name of Walter J. Ong. I could see zero application in his words, and to be honest I was looking up maybe 10 words a page because I didn’t understand their meaning (or use in context). This lead me to write, this artifact from the course entitled Am I just dumb? I was feeling woefully out of my element, and when I read my fellow students posts (which were academic in nature, so included many references) it frustrated me further and I again posted a “bargaining” post about my inadequacies entitled Does being academic limit creativity?
My shock was not limited to this course, but applied to the foundations of educational technology and ETEC 520 (Planning and managing technology in higher education). The foundations course, which I found to be overly essay based, was not a pleasurable learning experience. ETEC 520 was just a very stale course, I was told in passing that the course included a module on implementing canvas at the University level, unfortunately this was not true and I suffered through a highly theoretical course with little application to my daily practice.
Now the beauty of these courses, were they allowed me to recognize when I was part of a good course and showed what poor instructional design looks like. Ironically enough, the ETEC 540 course had such flexibility in assessments and an excellent professor that allowed wiggle room for students like myself, that I actually produced some excellent artifacts as a result of taking it.
Course List
Bargaining