Reflections of a learner and a teacher:
LTTO is a must for anyone interested in Online Learning.
August 2015
My reflections and some suggestions for anyone who might want to learn about it.
The journey had started six weeks ago. I had decided to take up the course which seemed to challenge me. I am not tech-savvy and I work online because technology is now part of our work, and it is influencing our life as educators and teachers. I have learnt a lot now thanks to Coursera where I did a lot of courses in the past. These courses have given me ideas and prompts about the best ways for implementing my teaching.
This course was " the best one " I have ever done online.
Here are the interviews of the two tutors that can tell you how they have planned and thought about it:
They were great guides for us and planned everything in the best way to enable us to work well online.
I must confess that I got engaged in every activity they had planned so that I would suggest more people take this course when they plan to do it again.
First of all follow this hashtag # LTTO and Twitter so that you can learn about this MOOC. These are the name of the great Professors who worked online and helped us carry out our journey into Online Learning:
Negin Mirriahi
Simon McIntyre
This is the course syllabus:
Module 1 What is online teaching and why is it important? An overview of online ethnographies and technologies and their place in contemporary education.
Module 2 Open and closed technologies: An examination of the pros and cons of the use of open web 2.0 tools vs. institutionally supported systems in educational contexts, and an examination of relevant activities.
Module 3 Planning online learning: Understand how to define your learning outcomes, develop appropriate online activities and assessment strategies, and to choose the right technology to use. These themes are continually revisited throughout the remainder of the course.
Module 4 Online learning activities: Types of online activities and teaching scenarios. An overview and exemplification of a range of fully online, blended and mobile learning scenarios, online resources and activities. Issues concerning accessibility and inclusivity are also explored.
Module 5 Online assessment strategies: An explanation of aligning assessment with learning outcomes and designing assessments for learning. Considerations of using technology to enhance assessments – benefits to the instructor and the students are discussed. Design and purpose of standards-based assessment and rubrics, and issues concerning assessment feedback and practical affordances provided by technologies are also explored.
Module 6 Online resources: What role can online resources play in effectively supporting student learning? Understand how to find and use a range of Open Educational Resources (OER) in your class, and explore options for creating and your own online resources. Issues of Creative Commons and Copyright in online education are also discussed.
Module 7 Engaging and motivating students: How to manage your time online as an instructor. Best practices are discussed and identified for building an online community of learners.
Module 8 Evaluation strategies: What are some evaluation methods for determining whether your course design change has been effective? How can learning analytics from the use of online technologies help you identify that your course design is helping meet your intended aims and outcomes? Suggestions are offered for ways of gaining feedback from students to inform your continued teaching practice and pedagogical decisions.
The module were presented in the best way: videos, self-reflections online and personal development online after watching the videos.
Personal research could be carried out after we had done some more activities online and we were sent a long list of links dealing with the points we might need to develop. I have bookmarked a lot of links and I will have to continue learning since there is going to be a great change in education online. There is so much to learn and web tools are now a sort of obsession: which to use? How? Which can work better?
More questions : open LMS or not? Now I am doing an introduction course to Moodle to see how it can work and if I can decide to use it.
What made the course interesting were also the great discussions online: we had a lot of good students who posted a lot of comments in the forums and this made it an enriching experience.
We had two activities to prepare which were based on what we had been doing and I wrote a specific blog online as a teacher blog to get my students more engaged. The project has just started but this course has given me a lot of interesting ideas and tools that I am going to use when I get back to school in September. The blog, padlet and other web 2.0 tools will help me teach on line.
I am pleased to say that Coursera with this MOOC has really widened my horizon and I have met a great number of teachers like me who are carrying out a CPD and are interested in learning.
This is the link to my blog: it is still under construction but I have devised an online activity about WW1 to be done with some students in the new school year.
http://learningtogetherinenglish.blogspot.it/
I would also like to leave this interesting link where they have collected our interesting links related to this course:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yujGIqATN953Et6bUaptzx16viJPScdlLfODMKmKnIw/edit#gid=0
Some teachers have also written their learning diary online: this is a great online diary by an English teacher.
Here is the link to Hannah Ruthryreman's blog:
My learning diary
She has done a great job! Thanks Hannah for sharing the great experience that you have now acquired.
In particular I liked this section of the blog that she has written and shows us how she is engaged in CPD :
https://hannahruthtyreman.wordpress.com/category/classroom-practice/technology-classroom-practice/
We have been given a long list of tools and blogs for learning more. This is a great blog which was shared on Twitter:
http://nikpeachey.blogspot.gr/p/my-downloads.html
I am also aware that there are a lot of issues that are important when working on line.
I came across this interesting article on line about CREATIVE COMMONS:
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2015/08/copyright-and-creative-commons-explained.html#.VdeM9vntmko
So thanks to the Tutors and people who worked on line for developing this " cool " course and I am looking forward to the next session online!!
Thanks to the Community of learners who worked with us.
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