CECS 6100 Week Sixteen

My CECS 6100

What did I learn in this course? I learned a lot.

Well, that was my less specific answer 🙂 – so I’ll get to the more specific. I think the last question in the prompt is actually what I have been pondering this week. When I sometimes mention some innovative online teaching in the student-centered realm, I often get push-back along the line of “well, that work because of the teacher’s personality and isn’t replicable.”  If that is true, then what the instructor is doing is entertainment and not education and then we should just close shop and make a TV network rather than a college. But that wouldn’t really work, either. But maybe this bugs me because I am an instructional designer that sees the parts that are good design and realizes that the people saying this are focusing on the wrong parts. If all you see is the personality, then you might be missing some underlying promise.

But that could describe a lot in our field – focusing on the wrong things. That will continue to be a problem. However, our society is moving online more and more, so we can’t just give it up. We just have to keep pointing towards the good and pushing the bad out of the picture.

As far as what I learned in this course, I definitely expanded my knowledge of the boundaries of different tools. Games, Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, etc are all tools I have explored for education as an ID, but not as a student. So seeing them as a students gives a different perspective on what the boundaries are. So as a designer, I will push all the more to use tools within the boundaries that work best for them. Not that I now know all of those boundaries definitely – there is always something new to be learned. But when we do run into boundaries, it is best to stop and rethink rather than push through them. Some boundaries are good to push, but others aren’t.

The more that I think about it, the more I want to take instructional design in a MakerSpace type direction. That is what I hope to do with all of this. I want to get a group of people that are doing online instruction together to just think through things and try out new ideas as well as test tried and true ideas. Hopefully even bring some students into the process. UTA is working on some actual MakerSpace areas, but they take a while to finish, so I will need to think of a good way to facilitate that for now.