this is the end of the beginning…
Well, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by these courses and by my ability to work on them. Like many, I’ve always found self-directed, required activities challenging to get myself to work on but I’ve actually done this one early! Yay Me!!!! When I look over all the writings and thoughts I’ve had during all three of these courses I can really see that I’ve explored many ideas that will help me to work with students in the online environment as well as in my face-to-face classes.
I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to cultivate an open approach to learning new things and to exploring ideas that I may initially feel uncomfortable with in my life so I think I have been able to really examine my assumptions towards online learning and whether or not I believe that it’s possible to make real connections with students and build a learning community in continuous entry courses. [Hmmmm that was a really long sentence…] While I’m not entirely convinced yet, I am more open to the possibility that it’s possible to get students to engage with each other when not required by the course for marks.
I enjoyed learning the critical inquiry process and have already started to try to create work in my face-to-face classes that take the phases into consideration. As a natural explorer I already know that I need to be careful not to stick in one phase too much and to encourage myself and students to go further through the phases. I’ve also enjoyed the reflective activities in all three of these courses and am interested in incorporating them into my face-to-face courses and when working with students. Super Teacher’s advice regarding giving feedback that is process oriented will also help with enabling students to move forward in their critical inquiry processes. When I mark student assignments moving forward I plan to keep all the lessons from this chapter in mind in particular to monitor where I think students are. I know that I primarily teach survey courses but I do believe that it’s important to be able to bring topics and exercises together conceptually through engagement with students and integration of materials.
Using WordPress for these three courses has been interesting and I appreciate the ability to categorize and group together posts. Of course, I’m a child of the early computer age who learned directories and folders so I already think that way. 😉 Playing in WordPress to understand how others create and use blogs as well as the possibilities for future use by me has been useful. I’m not convinced that it facilitated my learning in these courses but learning something new is always interesting for me.
I enjoyed creating exercises some of which were based on my existing face-to-face activities and others that I created specifically for these courses. I will be using them in my upcoming face-to-face online courses and excited to try them. I also appreciate that I have a record of them in this blog format so they will be easy for me to find when I get started on course development. There were some posts that I wrote that started me thinking about a topic or idea and I enjoyed revisiting those posts when requested by the course to reconsider my initial thoughts and ideas. As a result I was able to see how my thinking had changed and understand how the materials I was reading and engaging in were influencing my learning and perspectives. I think I may also include this in my courses moving forward.
As far is implementing new ideas and ways of doing things in my continuous entry courses goes, I think I’m going to start with an FAQ page. I’ve already started receiving questions that I can post answers to for students to check before they email me. I’m also excited to create a video to introduce myself to students; I hope this will enable them to connect with me a little more. I may also start a forum where students can post questions for each other if they want to. Perhaps this will be the start of connections that will help the students as they progress through the course. These things are all easy to do and just take time. As far as implementing them goes, I feel confident in my Moodle knowledge and tools I’ve learned though these courses and believe that I just need to get started to make them happen!
