1-2 paragraph précis of your flight path

ETEC 565 provided me with endless learning opportunities to learn new technical skills and further refine my existing skills which I have acquired during the previous courses in MET program. My specific goals for taking ETEC 565A at the beginning were…

• Create a sophisticated, highly interactive, and easy to navigate online course through Moodle, also to have the necessary knowledge of their site maintenance and hopefully to become a moodle specialist.
• Learn some techniques of website design. For instance, html page, splash page, interface design, Dreamweaver, CSS, Cgi Script, and Java Coding.
• Learn how to embed websites into the moodle site, where the learner will access the content area through a multimedia website and participate with the class in the Moodle site.
• Learn some theories and frameworks to help me select the technology for my online course design in the near future.

Reflection on your eLearning toolkit experience overall

I did not use much of the eLearning toolkit at the beginning as I have been introduced to some of these web 2.0 and social media sites before in the previous MET courses. However, later on when I started building my Moodle site and got struck with how to create the html pages, the eLearning toolkit becomes very beneficial. I explored the Web design and HTML authoring tools in great detail. I discovered the open source web design software “NVU” and used it to create html pages for my course sites. I would like to try Dreamweaver, but as I had heard that there was a steep learning curve for this software and I don’t think I have time for that yet. I also had the opportunity to try out Audacity to make audio recordings for my quiz assignment, Elluminate Live for our rubric group’s meeting, and Wimba for the introduction activity and for Live Classroom.

Reflection on your overall ETEC565 experience

Overall, I found my ETEC565 experience to be an invaluable and practical learning opportunity. I found that not only becoming familiarized in the theoretical framework helped level my learning, it also complemented the practical experiences I gained by trying out new tools and acquiring new skills. Goal-setting from the beginning of ETEC 565 through the use of our flight path was helpful in helping me realize what I wanted to set out to accomplish this term. Reflecting back to my goals, although I am not completely satisfied with my course site building yet, because it is not as highly interactive and easy to navigate as I expected, I have learned a great deal in other areas that I didn’t expect. I have learned for example how to build a Moodle site through using external webpages and download the files to Moodle.

During the course, we discussed theories and frameworks which were very useful to have as a guideline when selecting technology for teaching. We discussed the SECTIONS framework of Bate and Poole (2003) in detail and I had a chance to use them in our group project when we developed an evaluation rubric for selecting an online delivery platform. I also used this framework to evaluate Moodle for my proposal assignment. Therefore now, at the end of this course I have a firm understanding of this framework. Chickering and Ehrmann (1996) also provide a valuable framework for us to keep in mind when applying technology in teaching and learning. They focus on teaching and learning practices, and how technology can be put to good use to support interactions that make a difference in the quality of learning for students, not just to use technology for technology’s sake.

Weekly discussion forums and our collective ETEC 565 learning community offered a great deal of insight, support and inspiration throughout my learning journey. As this course comes to a close, I know that I’ve developed a sense of trust with a network of colleagues with whom I can continue to connect, even after this course ends. A couple of course mates and I have chosen to contact each other via email instead of on the discussion forum, to discuss how we approach the technical difficulties when building a Moodle site. The course is very well organized and the interval of each assignment is timed right, I don’t feel that the amount of work is unbearable. Also, most assignments are hands on and fun and give a perfect balance for me as the other course I am concurrently taking is heavy in text based assignments and projects.

Describe next steps for you, in terms of your practice in educational technology, which could include what technologies you hope to explore moving forward, or how you plan on engaging as a lifelong learner in terms of educational technology?

My future goal is to become an online instructor, and my immediate goal in this course is to learn as much as I can about LMS. Now, I am confident that I can design an online course that uses Moodle as a delivery platform. However, to make it more sophisticated I would like to further refine my abilities in website design and html authoring by learning how to use Dreamweaver and NVU more effectively. I also plan to explore more digital story tools such as the ones my classmates use like Glogster and BUBBLr.
Moving forward, I plan to continue to engage in lifelong learning by attending webinars, conferences and workshops, keeping current through the use of RSS feeds, and staying connected with a vast network of colleagues and alumni through MET network. If, in the future UBC offers an online PhD.in Educational Technology or E learning, I would be excited to join the program.