EDTECH 522 : Reflection

Reflection: EDTECH 522

I pursued EDTECH 522- Online Teaching for Adult Learners as an elective to satisfy the requirement of the M.E.T. degree program offered by BSU. During the semester, I learned about the andragogy that surrounds adult learning in distance education.

I can safely say that I learned almost everything this course has to offer that will equip me to deliver future online instruction. I intend to share some of the assignments I did with you, since I do not have any favorite one.

I learned how to plan and execute effective online lessons in Moodle LMS, this was a very challenging and time consuming activity, but it was worth the effort. It was fun to create the assignment in the Moodle course shell and customized it.

I also learned to record and upload tutorial in Adobe Captivate on Dropbox- a tool that can help adult learners collaborate on a ducument. I will definitely purchase this tool for capturing and recording screencast for future online classes that I intend to teach.

I will definitely try to incooperate all of these new ideas, techniques, and tools learned in the EDTECH 522 class into my classroom to actively engage learners in the lessons presented by stimulating their interests in order to improve their learning performance. I will create more tutorials and other interactive lessons as well as share some of these ideas with my peers to help enhance their professional development. Some of my peers have already downloaded Dropbox and started to use it for disseminating information and also to collaborate on research assignments.

The EDTECH 522 class taught me to create blogs on blogger.com and share them on BSU Facebook. Collectively, at my institution we started to use some of these Web 2.0 tools such as blogging as a way of reaching students and collaborating with them virtually.

I started a collection of Web 2.0 tools that I learned, and I plan to start using them in the creation of my future lessons.

EDTECH 522 class also taught me several things and impacted my online teaching skills tremendously. I am in a position to evaluate my school and make significant contributions to future courses the institution will offer. I can advise them about offering a straight online course or a blended version called hybrid. This is partly due to extensive research done online in this area and an interview I conducted with a student who is currently pursuing a hybrid course in the USA.

I used Photostory to create my final project for this course then I uploaded it to YouTube. This video presentation demonstrates my understanding of the theory and practice of online teaching and learning with adults.

Finally, when I just started the EDTECH 522 course at the beginning of Fall 2011 semester, I was at the receiving side of instruction, but I am happy to say that after completing this class, I am closer to the delivery (facilitating) side of instruction. Thanks to my instructor and peers for their thoughtful feedback and comments during the semester.