1st Reflection for EDIT565

April 21, 2008 - heather parker

My understanding of E-Learning was limited to commercials advertising on-line universities such as University of Phoenix and what I learned in EDIT 430 regarding blogs. I didn’t consider the depth or controversy surrounding E-Learning and its progression in education. Prior to EDIT 430, I knew little about blogs and how they could be useful in education. I heard of them, in fact an acquaintance suggested I create a blog because I like to share what I am learning and sometimes I have a lot to say about it. I learned that blogs can be used in elementary classrooms for writing and expression, not to mention they are simple to create. Privacy issues can be dealt with separately…….a teacher has to pay for the protection using a secure blog site, instead of the widely used free sites. Blogs alone open doors for students to share work instantaneously with their parents and teachers still have the ability to oversee the projects and protect their students. Students also get the opportunity to use tools on-line…hence e-learning. Additionally, I was not aware there is a difference between Distance Education and E-Learning. I am still trying to wrap my mind around the differences and the similarities, which is difficult because they are not polar opposites.

E-Learning can be made effective for students with different learning modalities and styles, such as our pilot lesson for the University in Africa, by educators, professionals, officials and communities alike lending a hand or sharing the wealth. I think Doctor Javeri provides an example worth imitating. She went to this place; saw their “computer lab” that the people had not used because they didn’t know how to turn it on and so she turned them on and then showed them skills (like setting up an email account) we might have learned in junior high or high school or college. Since starting this class, I envision myself taking these e-learning authoring tools and sharing them with my other family in San Jose, Costa Rica. My friends’ fifteen year-old brother cannot attend school because he has a learning disability that the schools cannot support. Not to mention that his family cannot afford to send him anywhere else. So he stays at home. Can you imagine how frustrating that is? I would like to take something we have here in the U.S. to share with him. Although the instructor may not be present with the student, the student has one-on-one time with the instructor that he/she might not have in a regular classroom because time is allotted for that time alone. E-Learning allows time to expand in that the instructor and the student do not have to be in the same allotted time to make learning viable.

Something that struck me in Chapter 2 of our textbook is that e-Learning supports trusted teaching methods. I inferred my claim from Clark and Mayer’s discussion on “methods for retrieval and transfer”. They state that “e-lessons must incorporate the context of the job in the examples and practice exercises so the new knowledge stored in long-term memory contains good retrieval hooks” (p.41) It reminded me of how children make connections with the real world and what they learn in a book. The child will learn more from a book when he/she can make a connection to what he/she already knows. Similarly, students in e-Learning courses must be able to do the same. One of our classmates mentioned something similar when we discussed planning our lesson for the students in Africa. Our lessons must speak to their world. We must seek to understand them and know where they are in order to get them to the next location. I believe e-Learning will become an integrated part of educational history. We will have similar battles as we do now, because money is still a god to a lot of people and those same people do not like to share, but every step we take matters. ~ END ~