EDTECH 522 Culminating Reflection

As a course culminating reflection, we’ve been posed two questions to answer in a reflective blog post.

What technological knowledge have you learned in this course? What pedagogical knowledge (e.g., knowledge about adult learning theories, instructional design, online learning, and teaching) have you learned in this course?

It would be somewhat easy to dismiss the first question. I have a background in Computer Science and worked in the IT field for some time, and so technical knowledge is something I have a fair amount of. However, the challenges that I was presented within this course provided plenty of opportunity to either hone technological knowledge I already had, or to learn skills that I had not used before.

While I had done some recording of videos and screencasts previously, I’d only ever done so in a rudimentary manner with recording and editing that was good enough for the internal usage at the time. With the multiple assignments we did during the course, I was able to hone the skills of creating and editing those recordings as well as learn a few new softwares for doing so.

I also learned a great deal about the workings of the myriad LMS softwares that are available for online learning. My only previous experience with any LMS has been from the student side, so it was a great learning opportunity for me to have access to the teacher side of blackboard and learn about how that is set up and used.

Pedagogically and androgogically, there’s a great deal of new information that I learned. As an adult ed instructor, I was previously familiar with many of the androgogy aspects, but so much of the theory and practice about online learning as it applies to teaching is mostly new to me, at least from the instructor side. As a student, I was able to recognize when a course seemed like a good course, but when I learned about the different rubrics and compared online courses, I was able to then identify what those things were that made a course a good course. This learning alone will help make any future courses I create/teach easier to create and they will have a higher probability of being of a higher quality with fewer iterations.

Explain how your learning in this course will make an impact on your current or future work. Will any artifacts you created be shared with your students or colleagues?

In my current work, due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, we are attempting to transition to at least a partially digital delivery of coursework. My learning during this course has allowed me a bit of a head start in understanding how the new system (Lantern, built off of the Canvas LMS) works and allowed me to assist my colleagues as they also work on the possible transition. Aside from the transition, our situation at my current position is mostly non-technological due to security restrictions, so the work we are doing could lay the groundwork for some relaxing of these standards and opening up some additional technological abilities.

As far as my future work goes, one of my longer-term goals is to complete my MET and teach at the collegiate level. One of the reasons that I decided to add the Online Teaching – Adult certificate to my MET was to add an additional credential that might make me more marketable to a college or university. Specifically, the learning that I have gained in this class will hopefully allow me to apply it to teaching collegiate courses online in the future.

Due to the transition to Lantern mentioned above, many of the elements of the blackboard lesson I created have been shared with my peers as examples and as work within the new coursework. None of the other artifacts have been shared as I don’t know if they really apply to our current situation, but much of the learning that was gained through their creation has been shared or will be.

Overall, during this course, I’ve learned a great deal about teaching online, the elements of a successful online course, the creation of media as part of the curriculum, and the theory behind many of those things. Without a doubt, much of that learning will benefit me as I move forward in the MET program, and in my career.