Thoughts at the end of my Distance Learning course

I’m thankful to have been able to take this Distance Learning course. As an online professor and as a mentor of online professors, I’ve learned several things that will be quite beneficial to both those I mentor and myself. It is rewarding to study concepts and practical tools that will apply quickly to the work I do.

I haven’t done much with online course evaluation previously, and this week, I’ve been able to evaluate peers’ courses that they’ve designed for this course. That has been helpful to me to think through how things are laid out and how I can keep improving my own course design. It has also reassured me that I know a lot about online education.

While I was able to design part of a course (Introduction to Online Teaching) in Wikispaces, I wish that I had been able to make a course in Blackboard or ReggieNet (ISU’s version of Sakai) since they are the Course Management Systems that I work with professionally. However, I wasn’t able to get that to work from my end. I have also learned that there are many more resources about online learning than I was aware of. 

One of the resources that has been helpful to me has been a series of videos from COFA at UNSW. I highly recommend these to other online instructors!

One of the things that I learned from this class is the need to keep experimenting with new online tools. I think that I’ve been afraid at times to jump into a piece of new technology and “test drive” it in a course because it might not work perfectly or because I might have students who understand it better. In the future, I will try more things and celebrate those tools that work well for me.