After reading Claire Major’s chapter, “Teaching Online: A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice”. I learnt different people using their real life experiences and share their thought about open environment learning. They all adjust their way of teaching slightly in order to fit their requirement an expectation, but results seems very promising.

Lisa Lane is an instructor tried Moodle system to teach Western civilization from 1648 to present.  Instead of publishing boring lectures and tutorials, he engage students to participate presentation and interact with each other. Include bot not limited to giving feedback to other’s research results.  His community is not an articulated goal for the class, and their forum projects literately  motivate students’s interested in interaction. Students can easily feel isolated in class if not many activities involved. Although this may not affect their grade in the end, but it may affect their interest to dig further into the topics. Plus, as an instructor, Claire can also learn a lot from her students.

Patrick showed how he use social media platform to engage his teaching experience.  As we all understand, young people love to spend time on social media platform such as Facebook and Twitter. Although I frequently learn something from other’s posts or feeds on social media platform, but I did not know how to use it correctly and efficiently before I read Patrick’s article.  Users can use hashtag to participate in Twitter chat, or follow famous person on Twitter in order to learn from them. The big advantage of using social media platform is user does not necessary to use their real name. I believe user will be more brave to share their real thought and being more open to criticize other’s thought by being an anonymity.  Personally, I am a big fan of using social media platform to as my learning tool. In addition, people are able to get information and feedbacks from people in different countries.

Cris Crissman taught her ECI 521 as an open online course, which is pretty similar as EDCI 339.  There is no weekly online meetings. Instead, there is plenty of guideline posted by instructor, and a lot of resources for students to learn.  Students are able to check each other’s blogs and giving feedbacks to their works. Surprisedly, there are numerous technologies online to provide online learning environments. And I do believe this is the future of our education.

There are more topics in the articles that talk about teaching online. But the most interesting topic I think is teaching computer science course online. As a computer science student, I personally took a great advantages of learning online. For example, If I spent one hour on coding, 30 minutes of it will be googling. Website such as Stackoverflow, or GeeksforGeeks. I can not imagine my world are going to be if there is no internet access for me during coding.  There are so many resources to check and so many users that I can ask questions for online.

Overall, online learning has become regular and accepted way in higher education. And I believe the students age will be wider in the future. The nature of online learning has given so many possibilities to the world.

Effective elements for optimum online learning modules

 

References

Claire Howell Major. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 88-105)

Jordan, K., & Weller, M. (2017). Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017) Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network.