Online Learning

Making the Online Experience More Meaningful

When thinking about the question: "How can online learning be more meaningful?" the first thing that comes to mind is my current MAET online learning experience. Although I have had experiences with discussion blogs in the past, this is my first true online course. Reflecting on my own progress thus far, I have some ideas of what makes online learning meaningful: 



Feedback:


I agree that our students may struggle to find the online learning experience engaging unless there is constant feedback from peers and instructors. This is a mindset shift from taking a stack of papers home and crunching the numbers to instead logging on to kidblog and commenting on your students' posts. I think this is a radical change for some. But, I am willing to promote such tools as kidblog because it allows for fluid peer feedback and teacher feedback. Without feedback, students can easily feel unheard in their online experience and therefore might become unmotivated. 

Inquiry Based Learning:


I initially struggled with our content connections web page because I was unsure how to incorporate inquiry based learning and wasn't clear on the importance of including inquiry tasks. I feel these struggles were natural because sometimes as teachers we get in the mode of delivering content instead of being coaches of learning. I pushed myself to not create a web page that just gave the information and "checked for understanding". I was proud of my end result: My students would be able to form their own questions about the content and explore ideas as a collaborative group. This assignment, along with the projects we are completing in 811 and 812, have allowed me to see the importance of inquiry in the online process. 


Creativity: 

A great benefit of online learning is that it lets all students, no matter their artist ability, show their creativity. I have enjoyed creating and brainstorming for my multi-genre project  because it has such opportunity to be creative and different. This project alone has made my online experience meaningful. I know that if I provide tools to my students such as Glogster and Animoto that they will flourish in their learning due to the creativity opportunities available. Often times pencil and paper assignments are too limited and don't push our students to think outside the box. Online learning is a perfect solution to this problem.