Individual Discussion Post:
Prompt – What is online learning? Using personal examples, describe how online learning has influenced your personal learning journey. How has data, security and privacy OR open educational resources affected your online learning experiences? What did you already know about the topic, what do you know now based on the course readings and activities, what do you hope to learn?
I view online learning as a very vague term. The internet is such a vast space filled with just about endless resources and possibilities. When I reflect upon my personal learning journey thus far, the internet has undoubtedly been an essential part of my education. I feel that as I grew up, the internet has grown up with me and that as the years went by I relied more and more on completing assignments using digital tools and finding information online.
Of course, online learning has had an extreme impact on my learning journey throughout the past year and a half. At the beginning of this pandemic I was on campus in Victoria coming to the end of my second term of first year. Right before finals, I was sent back home and watched all of my face-to-face courses transform into virtual ones and complete all of my exams and final assignments remotely. Just like myself, the whole world had no choice but to change the way they work, learn and play from in-person experiences to interactions in the virtual space.
With that, I can confidently say that this past year my relationship with online learning has grown exponentially. Had you asked me what I knew about online learning I would not have had much to tell you. Yet, I have now experienced two full semesters completely online. I consider myself proficient in Zoom, WordPress, Brightspace and all google applications. Throughout my experiences with online learning, I have found a lot of pros and cons. I think that I find myself having a hard time separating online learning from the pandemic itself because they both affected my life at the same time. However, pandemic aside, there are definitely plenty of benefits to online learning that I had never considered before. For example, the lack of need for people to be physically present in the online classroom, opens the door to a lot of opportunities for welcoming guests into the space. Last semester, I took a tech class that had weekly speakers that came in to share their experiences in education and edTech. Most of the speakers we had were working teachers or people from different places that would have never been able to visit our physical classroom. In all, I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to be forced to learn what I did about the online learning space and look forward to seeing how I will integrate my online learning experiences into my future classroom as an elementary school teacher.
Moreover, I really enjoyed learning more about these topics through the readings this week. As I mentioned, last term I took an EdTech class that touched on similar topics (open educational resources, online vs. in-person class, creating content, privacy) but I liked exploring them deeper here. As a future educator, I take a lot of interest in understanding how to create a healthy relationship between face-to-face learning and e-learning. I think that the articles made some great points about the benefits of online learning and it really made me think about the relationship between content and pedagogy/support structures in the education space. Moving forward I definitely want to research more about privacy online and how to create safe virtual spaces for myself and my students.
Resources:
Weller, M. (2020). Chapter 6 – 1999 E-Learning. 25 Years of Edtech. AU Press. Retrieved from https://read.aupress.ca/read/25-years-of-ed-tech/section/2f403890-5fb5-431a-baf8-876144a4656d#ch06
Weller, M. (2020). Chapter 11 – Open Educational Resources. 25 Years of Edtech. AU Press. Retrieved from https://read.aupress.ca/read/25-years-of-ed-tech/section/ad633722-07b5-494f-80e7-a572f543bc1c#ch11
Regan, P.,& Jesse, J. (2019). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(3), 167-179. DOI:10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2 Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2 Note: UVic login is required