Last week was very hectic for me, which explains the lack of posts on this blog. Prior to committing to the WELPS certificate and the IPT 525 class, I knew it was going to be one more “ball” I’d have to juggle on top of the other “balls” I have to keep in motion. It’s symbolic of the many roles I have in my life: a father to my son, a husband to my wife, an instructional designer / trainer to an important contract job, etc. The list goes on. If that’s not enough, I also operate and maintain a business networking organization I formed 2 1/2 years ago. Still, the effort I’m putting into the current class has been rewarding.
It’s definitely a different experience to the traditional form of learning I am used to. Most of my education was spent in classrooms on campus. The WELPS class I’m taking is entirely online, taught in an asynchronous manner. Think of it as one big discussion board like the old online newsgroups. The instructor posts topics, questions and assignments to the bulletin board and the class interacts through discussion threads and we’re graded on our participation and quality of our content.
The upside to this experience is that I can participate in the class at times that are convenient to me, so I’m not bound by the traditional schedule of “class is every Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 6:00 p.m.” The downside is that the discussion threads in the online classroom environment eventually resemble e-mail overload. While the start of the discussion threads may be of value initially with feedback and insight about the topic from fellow students (including myself), they tend to taper off into responses of “I agree”, or “good point”, with less and less value. This is not a criticism of my fellow classmates, but merely a simple observation about the class.
I’m enjoying the class and learning a tremendous amount of information about e-learning. The field has changed a lot since I graduated with my Master’s in Instructional and Performance Technology 8 years ago and I hope to immediately apply what I’m learning back into my current work and consulting endeavors.
This week we are on the topic of SCORM and I’m sure I’ll have thoughts and ideas about how this impacts my current work. Also, there is a paper that needs to be submitted on resuable learning objects (RLO). Not a big one, but the beauty of the assignment is I believe about 1/3 for the content for the paper has already been written by me via this blog. It’s been an objective of mine from the start to see if blogging will help with my papers and assignments. By the end of the upcoming week, we’ll see if my experiment works.
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