My Learning Experience in EDUC251

When I signed up for this course I was quite nervous because I had no appreciable technology skills and I was registered simultaneously for EDUC250, the introductory course to eLearning.  It was almost like performing medical surgery before I had even learned the names of the surgical instruments or anything about the body system I would perform surgery upon!  However. . . here I am, 12 weeks down the road at the end of the quarter and I have become a real "surgeon"!

Essentials of eLearning has become a highlight in my educational career because everything I learned was 100% new!  Not only were the technology tools new, but the instruction delivery method was new.  It felt strange at first to interact with my classmates through the frame of my computer monitor instead of looking into their eyes, but as time went on and we began conversing and sharing opinions, thoughts, and ideas in DIIGO, that changed.  Classmates began establishing their "presence" through their individualized writing styles in blogs and comment boxes in DIIGO as well as through the questions they posed or addressed.  Associating a picture and bits of personal information with each student also helped to establish my classmates' presence.  It was like having a number of very interesting "pen-pals" with whom I would exchange information but rarely, if ever, would this exchange be face to face.

This course would not have been as academically thrilling to me without the expertise of Jennifer, our instructor.  She honed a very strong online learning community by setting excellent guidelines and expectations from the beginning as well as establishing herself as a fellow-learner.  When a teacher can say, "I don't know, but let's find out together", he/she has my utmost admiration.  Encouragement to step out and discover for oneself is a very "constructivist" approach--one that Jennifer surely embodies!  She knew just when to loosen, then remove the "training wheels" so that we could each speed down the road toward our own destination!  For that, I truly admire HER!

There are three distinct pieces of our Essentials of eLearning class that are superior stand-outs for me.  They are all of equal importance in my toolkit:  1) the technology tools we learned about and used 2) the expert modeling of what an online instructor should be 3) the development of our strong online community.

As a final note, there is only one thing I would make more liberal use of if I were designing this course: pictures!  They say "a picture is worth a thousand words"--in some ways this is true.  I would have loved to see personal videos or picture galleries of each of my classmates and instructor from the get-go because these would have personalized the course for me much sooner.  However, not all people need to "see" those they go to class with so perhaps this is a frivolous suggestion.