Introductions, Distributed and Open Learning, Privacy & Security in Distributed & Open Learning Environments
The beginning of this course was a little bit rocky for me as it is asynchronous and therefore more difficult to become familiar with as there isn’t face-to-face instruction on how to complete activities. Additionally, I always work Tuesday nights and cannot attend the optional webinars. However, I am lucky to have a couple of my cohort members from my Elementary Education program taking the same four summer courses as me. We have been able to connect with each other almost every day, which has kept us organized and fostered collaboration and communication between us. I am super thankful for these two!
Introductions
I am glad that we completing introductions to our whole class and just to our social pod group. The whole class introductions, although nice, had a LOT of introductions, so it is time consuming to go through them all. That’s why I appreciated the social pod groups, as there are only four of us, so it is nice to read and see pictures of all the members!
I am thankful that my social pod group is active and timely in their work. The group that I meet with from my program have spoke about their concerns with their pod group because not many people are contributing, making their time with this course more difficult.
Notes
Discussion Post #1
To start, I want to emphasize that I am thankful that my group has been communicating nicely within our discussion forum. Having my group complete responses on time has allowed me to stay organized and on track with this course!
I created this screencast with audio to document my reflection to topic 1. I tried to screenshot our discussion posts and add them here, but when I did that the pictures became quite pixelated and hard to read, so I thought this was a good opportunity to try something that I haven’t before!
This quick and easy video helped me record my first screencast on my mac:
FIPPA, Data Security, Privacy & Acceptable Use Quiz
I completed the topic 1 quiz alongside my Education cohort members. We bounced ideas off of each other, and helped each other make sense of the documents that we had to search in for information for the quiz. When we completed the quiz, I was a bit frustrated that we couldn’t see our grade right away, but I think it was actually for the better because we had time to leave the quiz alone and think about it before we retried. I would’ve liked to know what our score was though because if we had gotten all of the questions right, I could’ve taken it off my to-do list. However, it worked out in the end because we got our score and completed the quiz again to get 100%! I really enjoyed this quiz because these documents and topic are very confusing and it was nice to have the answers to common questions neatly in front of me.
I enjoyed watching Twitter to see the #EDCI339 tweets. I joined in on some of the fun early on in the course! Twitter helped me to understand more about open education, in that being this is one network that knowledge can be gained from, along with the rest of the internet!
Overall
I enjoyed topic 1 and the team building that came alone with it. From my cohort members that meet almost daily on zoom, to my social pod group members, I am quite content with where I am at in this class. I enjoyed the talk about constructivism, innovation, collaboration, dialogue, student guidance, pros and cons to online learning, OERs and ethical concerns about big data in education! I am now confident in my understanding in open and online learning, open being online but separated from from formal learning boundaries and more about learning through interconnected networks and communities and online learning also being called distributed, eLearning and remote access learning being learning online through synchronous or asynchronous learning management systems. I can see that in this course we are technically learning in a distributed way, but we are also being given tasks that allow for open learning, through Twitter and through connecting with group members without actually ever meeting them!