1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
I think that the most important thing I learned was how complicated it is to design and implement a good online course. Having students with very different backgrounds: some argue about socio-cognition (vau!) and some don't know what reflection is.
2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I struggled all week with my motivation - it was sometimes interesting and sometimes annoying.
3. Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?
There are many questions. As theories behind elearning are quite new, they often arise more questions then they have answers.
4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?
How to design and implement a good online course?
When I joined this course I had intrinsic motivation. Course sounded so interesting but for some reasons I lost my motivation. So actually I was looking answers why it happened in readings of this week and I tried to reflect my thoughts and expectations just to understand what is going on with me.
I'm not enjoying this course and I'm not having fun. I do understand that I have not been very active during this course yet, but I found so many people among students who are even less active as I am. So the problem is not just me.
Materials of this course are great - very interesting but also difficult. The problem might be that even if students have questions they don’t ask them. I know that I don’t. Usually these questions do not have one right answer and they need some discussion. This is something what is ease to do in classroom: you just ask and you get an answer and then you can ask again and all the time you actually think along. Here, even when I do ask my questions - my thoughts are not all the time with the context. Here time actually disturbs learning process and synergy. Plus I do feel that we have to much information: over 100 pages of different articles, over 100 slides plus blogs of students/facilitators to read. Everything has different approach, different layout …
Second thing is that I don’t know were to start: where should I post my question? Wiki? Forum? E-mail? Blog? I tried blog but I don’t still have no answers. So this is a wrong way. But I don't know what is right! EMIM forum? Until now it is more used to test and it is unclear to me whether it is for deeper discussion or what kind of questions it is for? Here perhaps might be a good idea if facilitators would take a bit more active role and post some questions there. I spent a lot of time to go through other blogs in our course. There are few brilliant students who write brilliant posts. Perhaps it would be good idea that facilitators will choose every week some interesting ideas/questions to post there so everybody will have a visible opportunity to read/discuss with others. So good posts/ideas come visible for them who don't know much about elearning and we could have several brilliant discussions. Perhaps here some encouragement from facilitators side might help. At the moment there very little discussion about theories we read and questions we have. Another thing: I read that many students write that they have no questions … I can not believe this…
Another thing I thought about is that perhaps there are too many tasks for students. In the begging there are to many environments were we have to create an account. Perhaps this is a little scary? For me it was! And it takes time to get to know those environments - more then one week. All students have different background: for some it is technically to demanding (don't be in love with different environments!), for some it is theoretically to demanding (my background is in adult education and sometimes it is hard for me to understand everything or to select what is really important). As we don't have classroom discussions and explanations I do feel left alone with my study and struggles.
Too many challenges create frustration and kill motivation. My suggestion is to take some time off and give students more time to adapt.
5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog
6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I wrote 2 comments for Jasna (actually one was more to Terje), one comment for Terje. Via skype communicated shortly with Oleg and Lesavik
More I read different blogs (facilitators and studens) and their comments. I still need some time to adapt.
3 comments:
Hey Kersti,
You're not the only one who is feeling "alone" , totaly agree with most of the stuff you wrote here, especially the answer under the fourth question.
I'm kind'a loosing my motivation too (communication among team members sucks,don't have will to comment on other blogs, becouse I have the feeling that I'm running a monologue),but we have to be persistant and not let those feelings to win, the victory must be ours, no matter how hard it is sometimes, we'll manage somehow.
Don't say that you weren't active becouse that's not true, you are executing your assignments regularly and that's more than good,it is excellent, be proud of yourself.
I'm glad that you wrote comments on my blog, although we don't have the same point of view in everything, and I appreciate that, thanks Heavens we're not clones :)
Keep up with the good work, I'll see/read ya' around :)
I wonder if people have questions why don't they ask these questions...and if they don't get an answer immediately why not to try another approach, another tool..there are so many options how to make yourself visible..
we will have too much information anyway, just the question is how to find out what is needed for me and what is interesting for me... we are not able to read everything today...so we need some sort of attitude that for example i am nor going to read everything from the beginning to the end, but go through text first diagonally or read only the abstract and then make a decision is this particular text really for me.
I have to admit that I first took a wrong approach, I just wanted to say hello to everybody in this course by commenting their blogs (to let them know that actually somebody is following their activities) and you seemed to be one of the last participants. I am sorry about that. 70 students take quite a bit of time.
But no excuses...
Anyway thank you very much for your honest feedback (also our discussion via Skype), we really appreciate that. And don't make same mistakes while designing your courses in groups :)
About asking questions: this is again 'trust thing'. If you don’t know exactly how to behave and you are afraid to make mistakes (maybe this is the problem! Although we are form different cultures everybody still is afraid to make mistakes? Countries in south have this kind of culture where making mistakes is not a good thing. Estonians have their communist past, but what is the excuse for Finnish? To shy…).
About too much information: Again I think that to be able to read diagonally and decide after this what is important or not, this requires some previous knowledge about the subject. I tried to read the materials of 4 week diagonally and I am not satisfied with the result. But I have read papers diagonally before and decided whether it is useful to me or not - this happen when I wrote my bachelor thesis. After reading some 30 articles I gained competence to decide what is important enough and worth dig deeper.
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