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For this final EDTECH 522 Module, we were to respond to the following:
Please post a reflection about a significant learning experience during this course. Include a discussion on your plan to incorporate new knowledge learned from this course into online courses you will teach or are currently teaching.
To begin, I learned a great deal from this course. In general, I am interested in designing and developing online experiences for adult learners and, for this reason, I think the process for completing the fifth module was very useful. The practice of creating a course requires multiple stages of analysis, planning, design, development, implementation and evaluation, and prior to the module I lacked extensive practical experience creating eLearning material for adult learners.
Although I have a background in K-12 curriculum development, my experiences are limited almost exclusively to creating learning materials for younger learners based on pedagogical practices. This assignment/process allowed me to use what I’ve learned in the course about effective andragogical methods of instruction, as well as best practices in online instruction. For example, when creating a course on image creation using Adobe Photoshop for adult learners, my approach was slightly different than how I would approach the same task for younger learners. Drawing on Knowles critical assumptions about adult learners (Smith, 2002), I thought about the notion of “self-direct learning” - or actions exhibited by learners that take ownership of the entire learning process from finding materials to final self-assessment - and how this level of motivation may affect how I would design the course.
To elaborate, while creating materials for middle school aged (12-15) students, I often needed to account for a the lack of intrinsic motivation and weave into the precursory material a great deal of information that could spark an interest or desire to know more. Often the course was required for my students, and while motivations certainly varied, many students simply wanted to pass the class and “get it over with.” With many adult learners, and especially for the course I created for Module 5, one can make a reasonable assumption that the student identified a need for the information and, in many cases, volunteered to take the course. This will affect how they approach the course and, in turn, how I design it. Fortunately, this means far less time will be spent in the course on the various reasons why they should learn the skills (though still important to cover) and more time on how the learning program (or component) will satisfy an already-identified need.
I’m grateful for a chance to implement so much of what we have learned about online instruction and adult learning theory into a fully-functional online course. Beyond the design of the learning, I loved “getting my hands dirty” playing in the Moodle Sandbox and the thrill of watching my Captivate project function correctly in the LMS. Although many of the features of various LMSs are shared across platforms, such as the ability to upload course materials and track student progress via a gradebook, it was interesting to see how Moodle offered these features to course instructors versus other LMSs like Blackboad and Desire2Learn (which I have some experience with). I found the process very intuitive and the design user-friendly, so I would be happy to use Moodle again in the future as an instructor or designer.
The feedback I received from my peers helped me catch a number of weak points that I may not have caught as quickly, so I am also ever grateful for their help. Overall, this course has provided myriad opportunities for professional development, and as an “adult learner” myself, I’m happy to say I found the structure of the course to be a fantastic model of good online instructional practices that I aim to model in the future as a course designer.
Resources
Smith, M. (2002). Malcolm knowles, informal adult education, self-direction and andragogy. Retrieved from http://infed.org/mobi/malcolm-knowles-informal-adult-education-self-direction-and-andragogy/
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