REFLECTION

GROUP C- UNIT 1

This is my first experience to attend a course offered by E Teacher Plus by evolution. Before opening of this course, I was very excited to learn how to teach online because it is the need of hour that teachers must join hand in hand to shift to online teaching for the benefits of students. The very beginning of the course through attempting a quiz encouraged me to learn about online course. The course is well organized as every unit starts with Lesson overviews and activities part that contains a video introduction of unit, objectives of unit are enlisted, activities with due date and relevant reading.

The most interesting part which learnt from the beginning of this course is how to collaborate with our small group members.   Creative assignments on different topics related to our course is given to us which encourage to give substantive comments on the work of members of our small group as well as the members of other groups too. Whereas in traditional classroom some students may be less inclined to put their ideas forward, the online environment requires you to present your thoughts. Feeling comfortable about sharing ideas and best practices has made building relationships very easy even though we all are located in different cities.

The best part of the Unit 1 is to introduce learning activities. The activities like “Course Planning-Need analysis; analyze your context, Delivery Mode and Students; institutional support for Online Teaching and Learning, Investigation Jigsaw as per the course goals and expectations. The instructor presence is always there to guide us through email messages and timely feedback. By doing all learning activities mentioned in Unit 1, I discovered one thing that in F2 F class , we as teacher mostly remain involve with completing text and other material related to text and give less time to creating meaningful activities. Secondly we never grade the activities and take them for granted. What my observation about TTLO says that I learnt to create knowledge through these activities and how to be present all time with my students for their learning through well timed feedback. Such a nice effort to develop a supportive learning environment is great achievement which I will say I am unable to do so in F2F classroom. i decide to apply all these techniques in my future online course as well as in my F2F class too.

Fostering discussion is basic of online course. Activities like Topic group discussion and regular group discussion allows student to work at their own pace. The online exchange of ideas often results in a high quality of discussion. A quality discussion starts with posing of good question. Instructor provides a structure to generate a successful discussion and describes his/her expectations explicitly for content and quality. Online discussion is assessed and graded for better learning. Participation is graded so it motivates   online students to work on given criteria to pass the course.Ko and Rossen (ch#11 ,pg. 359) that participation grades for an online course should constitute somewhere between 10 and 40 % of students’ overall grade. However you choose to define “participation” makes sure that a significant part of the grades depends on what the student does in the shared classroom, not simply on the completion of assignment submitted to you alone.” I am convinced to add this component in my future online course as well as to incorporate it in my F2F class as well.

IN THE END, I WILL EXTEND MY THANKS TO MARLENE, OUR HELPFUL AND NICE INSTRUCTOR FOR HER GUIDANCE AND EVOLUTION ON GIVING US A CHNACE TO EXPAND OUR KNOWLEDGE ABOUT ONLINE COURSE.

ENJOYED