Open Sourse Course Reflection

Open Source Course: Digital Citizenship for Everyone: Resources for Students, Teachers and Families

Personal reflection:

This course advertised itself as a course designed to teach the participants how to create digitally responsible users of the internet. It also supplied resources for teachers and parents for lesson on digital citizenship. Overall, they shared resources that are available through their organization, but you need to purchase those resources if you wish to use them. The course used Blackboard to teach the lesson. Through Blackboard users were able to listen to the instructor and speak back, or they could comment through the use of messaging tool. The course used polling questions to include the participants and a virtual whiteboard to show images and draw attention to specific details. The presentation of the information was a little different from traditional learning in the way that I was only focused on the instructor. Others were commenting, but since it was hard to track both at the same time, I found myself tuning out the other people in the class.

This particular class felt more like a webinar in the way that it was mostly lecture. There was little I was required to do as a participant. I think that this class could have incorporated more critical thinking skills. There could have been more opportunities for me to test out the materials and resources, by role playing the experiences of students in a classroom that uses these resources. This particular class was also experiencing a lot of technical difficulties. In a tradition classroom, when this happens we can usually fall back on non-technology based resources and still meet the daily objective. In the open source class it just seemed to waste a lot of time. The class was only scheduled to be an hour long, so the instructors ran out of time to present all of the information. In on-line learning we are limited to solely web based interactions, and when computer issues arise we are let scrambling to get assignments completed. I learned this lesson this week the hard way. My computer contracted a virus that rendered it unusable. I was unable to continue my assignments until I gained access to another computer. While I was able to find another computer, I was unable to access my files on my old computer where I had already started the work. I ended up having to start all over again. These issues do come up in the traditional learning environment as well, but are usually not as devastating and costly.