My Reflection

Do You See What I See?

Signing up for this course, I felt that it would be a piece of cake since I was already familiar with many of the technologies that we were going to use. I was excited to sign up for an online course where we would actually meet in person for the first meeting. Getting to meet the instructors and classmates for the course was very much worthwhile. It gave me the chance to get to know what the expectations for the course would be and to put names with the faces of my classmates. From my experience, online courses were very impersonal and cold. Feed back that I'd received in the past was only from the instructor and ranged from seeing an 8/10 for an assignment with no explanation to several back and forth email conversations about an assignment.

After getting started with the course I realized that this would be a lot of work! Did I spend too much time? Did I spend too little time? What happens if I'm late with an assignment? I decided that it would be better to complete every assignment even if I could not finish it right on time. This helped since each week built upon the previous weeks' skills and experiences. Some weeks required more intellectual reflection and less hands on activities. Since I am a DIY kind of guy this was challenging.

Pushing your course into the online world is quite an adventure. Knowing what tools and media to use in the right quantities is not an exact recipe, but a way of teaching that considers your course and students in finding the right stuff to enhance the experience. Trial and error will guide the way if I am trying out new ideas and methods along the way.

I really feel that Blackboard needs to step up to the plate and implement many of the innovations we used in this course. I understand that Blackboard needs to be a closed system, but I think that this really stifles the feeling or sense of a course. An online community needs to be developed from each course that is open to the public and alumni. This could be an excellent tool to promote further learning and even encourage more related course development based on the needs of our students.

I like the idea of Ning, but don't see too many really serious Ning sites. I would have liked the use of Ning to have been more serious for this course. The ePortfolio projects would have been an excellent use of Ning with each member of the course developing their final project in their Ning space for our course. This would have tied all of the portfolios together in a manner that would be accessible in the future. Blackboard will no longer be available after the course is closed. A Ning social network could be created  each time this course is offered and another Ning could be used to tie them all together!

Thanks for all of the fun this summer! This class has been the highlight of my sumer vacation!