blog reflection 2

This week I began to think about and visualize my online class and potential students much more as I listened to and read about online activities and younger learners. These ideas and “people” are starting to become more real to me the more I plan my course and learn about how different online classes are taught.

I have seen how online learning is much more social than I originally thought, even in an asynchronous course. Since my students are mainly high schoolers, that’s very important to keep in mind. Teens see the classroom as a place to socialize as much as they see it as a place to learn (or even more so…). This has made me think about how I can incorporate that into my class. I wasn’t originally going to include a group activity, but now I think I might find a way to encourage more collaboration online. Skype or one of the many online drawing/whiteboard tools could work for that.

Before this class, I knew a lot about online synchronous education for adults, because I’ve taken 6 classes in Elluminate. I really enjoyed those and got a lot out of our lectures and discussions…just as much as I would in a face-to-face class. I did not know very much about asynchronous online classes, though, or how they could work for younger students. After this week, and especially after reading Johnson and Manning’s chapter 16, I see how there are many similar concepts, but that some things will have to change for my asynchronous high school class. For example, I will need to address the fact that 9th graders aren’t as independently motivated as adults, and will require more parent involvement and supervision (though much less than 2nd graders would). I will address parents and expectations for their support in my class syllabus.

Something that I will not forget tomorrow is something that was mentioned in the COFA video for this week: that online classes have to have a solid pedagogical foundation, and that technology should not be used just for the sake of technology. Now I see why we were asked to spell out our educational philosophy before we did much work on our online classes.

P.S. Sorry I had to change my bloglink-- my new blog for this class was not showing up on my dashboard at all... I'll try to merge the new and the old soon.