Part 1

This course thus far has been a combination of reiteration of what I know about online learning from former classes and challenging to complete the things I am less familiar with. To finish this course, I will need to focus on addressing these challenges in a timely manner and through the use of the course tools. 

So far, I have communicated with other students, whom I've already learned so much from, through group activities, discussion posts and email. Unfortunately the chat tool did not work for me.  I always worked hard to adhere to the appropriate etiquette standards of interaction while doing so.

My current understanding of online teaching and learning is that teachers find various ways to communicate ideas and values to students through the use of theories and the understanding of student's learning styles. My expectation is that as a teacher, I will be implementing this throughout the rest of the course and identifying which theories/teaching styles will best be applied for student learning.

Here's what I've learned so far:

High Tech High Touch is a concept many teachers are discussing on how to transfer as much teaching techniques from face to face classrooms to online communities to enhance the learning. Pretty much everything outside of eye contact can be done. I can be available through email and hold "office hours" and I can even video chat with my students or be extra warm and engaged. There are some teachers that prefer to integrate an online component to their course the amount of interaction through the web is defined as (web enhanced, hybrid, blended) and then there are other classes that are fully-online. For example, using an online poll to evaluate the teacher. With this in mind, I understand that there are many strengths and weaknesses to online teaching. It can be easy for students to become disconnected if they are not engaged and as a teacher it is my responsibility to use theory and what I know of various learning styles to keep students engaged. Constructive perspective style teaching is a good way to keep students engaged. A teacher acts more so as a facilitator of a discussion rather than spoon feeding information to students.

Throughout the process of learning different ways of learning, I discovered my own learning style while working in a group. This project was difficult to get started, but once we started rolling, the communication became easier. We established the best form of communication was through the discussion board and distributed work evenly. I was assigned the learning style visual/nonverbal, which I learned was my style of learning in many situations. I do well with watching videos and so that tends to be how I teach others.

Overall, I believe that I am getting a lot from the class and I am excited to see what will come in the upcoming weeks.

Reflecting on Online Teaching and Learning, Where Expectations Can Lead Me

Much of my time is spent online, either on social networks (Twitter and Facebook), or clicking through blogs to learn new information about topics of my interest. This probably comes to mind when you think of someone in my generation. This self taught knowledge is what I would describe as my introduction to online learning and online (self) teaching. Beyond this, my experience with online learning comes from classes I have taken in graduate school (ecology) and most recently a class I took last semester, Introduction to Online Learning. This class refreshed my memory on a lot of technical aspects of the internet and usage of the web for research.  I participated in class discussion through threads, did a group project where we found information in a scavenger hunt, and attempted to chat with the Wimba software, to no avail.  This class was challenging when it came to discipline.  I had to log in several times a week to view classmates comments and teacher announcements just to make sure I didn't miss anything.  Keeping up with the reading assignments was something I also had a hard time doing in the first few weeks because I enrolled in the class 2 weeks late, but over time all of the assignments and tasks became a routine part of my life.  I found this class to be useful because it taught me about different ways to use search engines for scholarly research and the many other ways I can communicate to people without being in person.

I am interested in online teaching to do online presentations on student leadership and diversity.  As a Student Affairs professional, I know this information will progress the learning in our field and increase the number of times to possibly communicate with my students as well as students on other campuses.  It is my belief that the knowledge I gain from both the Online Learning and Online Teaching courses combined will give me a solid background to foster learning on the internet.  In the Online Teaching class I expect to be prepared to identify different teaching styles that may be best for online learning and build upon what I already know about aggregated environments from ecology in Student Affairs.