Saturday, May 26, 2012

CEDO 550--FInal Reflection


Facilitating online learning was a class I really didn’t think I would take, but I am glad I did.  One thing that stood out to me is that good teaching is good teaching.  Good lesson planning and development is good lesson planning and development.  The same basic elements apply to good teaching, no matter what the forum.  

That being said, I do realize there are certain things that you need to focus on as an online teacher.   Timely feedback becomes more important when there is no face-to-face interaction.  Thinking about this actually made me realize all of the opportunities for feedback there are in a traditional setting, and I think sometimes teachers may miss some of these opportunities.

Building relationships is also more of a challenge in an online environment, or at least it is something you have to make a more conscious effort to do.  The building of teacher-student and student-student relationships happens no matter what in a face-to-face environment, but in an online environment, more thought needs to go into planning activities that can facilitate the building of these relationships.

In our last posts we talked about the future of online learning, and like I discussed there, the future of online learning is difficult for me to predict.  However, I know it has a place in education, and it is up to us as educators to make sure it is implemented in a way that continues to facilitate student learning.

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