“In 10 years’ time, technology’s greatest impact on higher education will be the opening of accessibility and the movement toward more blended classrooms, making classroom time more efficient and focused on personalized learning.” —Anant Agarwal | President, edX (03/27/13) This summer, I had the privilege of enrolling in EdTech 522: Online Teaching for Adult Learners. This course surely lived up to its course catalog description, which describes it as “an online course emphasizing andragogy and best practice in online teaching, analyzing online teaching tools, planning, facilitating, and assessing collaborative and interactive e-learning experiences, and gaining practical experience teaching online” (BSU, 2017). Broken down into six modules, this course exposed learners to a wide array of topics beneficial to an online course designer or facilitator. These topics addressed ranged from adult learning theory, understanding the online learner, best practices in online teaching, comparing online courses, reviewing online learning tools, creating Rich Media tutorials, designing an online course, and teaching hybrid/blended courses. As you might have concluded, this summer course—offered over a seven-week period—was very labor intensive but I must admit it was one I found to be personally enjoyable as well as technologically insightful and professionally rewarding.
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“Many of us believe that hybrid learning can give you the best of both worlds: You get the access and flexibility of an online course with the additional support and comfort of a classroom interaction along with faculty and your classmates.” —Kevin Currie Blended learning...hybrid course...1:1 program...Web facilitated...fully online...these are some of the terms used to describe the instructional phenomenon of including technology and/or digital tools into the teaching/learning process to enhance the learning experience and meet the needs of students. Unfortunately, these terms are tossed about the technological realm of course facilitating by the uninitiated and those novices experimenting with tech tools in their lesson designs. Fortunately, Ko and Rossen (2017) provide some clarity to this issue by suggesting a graduated approach to technology integration and adoption into the teaching/learning process. In other words, how do I tell if it is Web facilitated, blended learning or truly an online course?
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AuthorFrank Gomez is a career educator who has served in various capacities and levels in education. He is currently pursuing an Ed.D. in Educational Technology (with specializations in technology integration and online teaching and learning for adult learners) at Boise State University, while serving as the vice principal and a junior high teacher/Technology Integration Specialist at a Catholic TK-8 school in SoCal. Frank is interested in poetry, philosophy, the interdisciplinary nature of education, and of course technology. Archives
August 2018
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