ETAP687

Sitting here with my laptop, reflecting on the past week and a half of activities since the start of class makes me take a deep breath and sigh.  I have been trying to juggle 2 online classes, work related projects, research, student coordination of experiential education, the development of tutorials for my online review class and preparations for a lecture that I am presented this past Friday.  It is now Monday and I finally have a chance to post a blog entry  I had to drop the other online class that I was taking and I have managed to complete a couple of projects for my work that will free up more time for me to focus on this class.

I have to apologize to my classmates as my participation in the discussion area in this first module has been less than stellar.  Not to say that I did not read each post and gleaned some great information from them.  I had very little time to contemplate a response in a timely manner.  I intend to change this for the next module.

At this point, I only see limited usage for parts of online learning.  Parts that can be incorporated into our current curriculum that will make the educational offerings richer.  To me, Brown and Adler’s piece “MInds on Fire…” emphasized the importance to incorporate a discussion board or blog into the experiential education course of my curriculum.  Currently, we have students write a weekly journal entry that describes their experiences during the week.  This entry is emailed to faculty only.  Brown and Adler point at the need to develop a sense of community that not only helps share student’s experiences with each other but improves their writing and reflective skills (p.24-25).  I really had not realized how this piece is missing when our students attend their clinical rotations.  They move from the close knit community they formed over 8 months of classroom interaction to an isolated environment.  I assume that communication happens outside of the journal entries but it would be great to create and capture this in a online forum. 

Another area that I need to develop further is our case based activities.  We have hundreds of sets of cases that I could convert to digital format allowing the interactions of students with the case.  A discussion could be created surrounding the case allowing students to interact with each other concerning their thoughts on the case.  This could facilitate a reflective practicum (Brown & Adler, p.28)

This first module has given me a lot to think about going forward with my future course designs.  However, the course I am designing for ETAP687 is a little different in its offerings and focus. (4)

I am new to this type of tool.  Call me old fashioned but my journal entries are usually written and not typed.  I am having some difficulty with voicethreads and I have not been able to add my introduction as of yet.  I will not waste time by adding it here since I hope to conquer the log in and editing hurdle soon.  I am feeling somewhat overwhelmed at the moment with all of the new (to me) technologies involved with the course.  I am also enrolled in another online ETAP course this summer session not to mention my full time job.  I hope to gain a lot of knowledge from this course concerning online course development in addition to the knowledge gained through interactions with my classmates.  Please bear with me as I try to “catch up” on how all of these tools work.  Cheers. (2)