Month: September 2020

With the increased adoption of online-learning by the masses, there are many important factors to consider when building an online-learning community.

Technology plays an important role as the platform for online learning. A myriad of choices but not limited to, includes Moodle, Coursera, Skillshare, Udemy, BrightSpace and many more. These platform acts as a basis for which learning materials are stored and displayed. Such educational platforms are often described as data carriers between educators and students. A common form of these intermediary platforms adopts a streamlined structure to help facilitate online materials and deliverables to students. An example, the structure should revolve around sectioned areas of course introduction, a repository of reading materials, assignments, assessments and course progress tracker. Such a structured layout aims to allow students to explore the course and as well ; to follow a guided workflow of the course.

How online educators effectively build relationships and encourage safe communications in online & open learning spaces can be carefully tailored. Taking the Moodle learning platform as an example. The instructors is able to create a site-map of the course, giving students a skeleton view of the course, similarly to what a thought or ideas bubble should look like. Instructors are able to levitate Moodle’s ability to send notifications to students en masse, whether it be instructions on course-work or alerts to remind students on assessment deadlines. A commonly seen and widely accepted feature of platforms such as Moodle; is the discussion forums embedded in the platform. Instructors are able to initiate topic discussions, and it prompts students in the course to participate in online discussions surrounding the course-materials.

Online learning has been accepted by educators and students alike. Prior to the adoption of this educational method, online learning has been known as “distance education” (Johns, 2015). At the time of it’s introduction, students are able to utilize the online learning frame-work to take courses without having to be physically in attendance of a class. The act of taking courses online provides great flexibility as students may have time constraints or mobility as an example.

Online learning is often interpreted to be self-paced and interdisciplinary. This ideology holds true as instructional educators are able to provide learning materials and a frame-work of the course work online. In conjunction, it becomes the duty of the student to plan-out their personal participation within the course and set milestones on course completion times. Course instructors are able to aid in this process by providing guidelines on assignment due dates. And as well, instructors are able to dictate assessments such as midterm and final exams.

What I hope to learn from the course is how online-learning can be effectively utilized. In recent years, there have been a eruption of learning platforms as aforementioned. My main focus is how effective are these platforms with educational deliverables? Instructors and students alike rely on platform intermediaries for online teaching and learning, hence are the platforms streamlined and easy to use? A great concern many educators experience is the ability to migrate a traditional course-work teaching into a full-fledged online educational platform.  Furthermore, I am interested to learn how these platforms improves their UI/UX (user interface design) to better instructor and student’s over experience using it.