Category: Reflective posts

My Online Learning Experience in Twitter

A. Discuss the difference between online educational content and openly licensed educational content
Openly licensed educational content is educational resources that are free to use, reuse, modify and share with others. Also, it is not necessarily digital. On the other hand, online educational content is completely digital resources such as videos, audios, images, and texts. Online educational content is not always free, which is a big difference than openly licenses educational content.

B. Find an open educational resources (OER) and present it on your portfolio, either by linking, embedding, or by including a screenshot

Source: Polyphonic.

C. Review the OER using the evaluation guide found in the tutorial, provide a brief comment on this process in your post

This source created by Polyphonic is a good example of an openly licensed educational content. The information is sort of an introduction or guidance to the importance of a legendary rock band’s drummer, John Bonham. Even though the information is not peer-reviewed, the information sounds accurate considering it’s quite a common assessment to John Bonham’s capability as a drummer. There are no spelling errors or typos. The information is easily understandable, even though I doubt someone who has no knowledge in reading music scores would understand the content of this video fully. I think it was a very easy layout and interface since it immediately let the audience listen to the part of John Bonham’s playing accordingly. The video quality is 1080p, which is high enough. Since it was video content, I don’t think it is convertible to other types of formats. One problem was that it only provided a French subtitle, not an English one. This content does not encourage students to participate or test their understandings and I don’t have any means to add that to this content unless I republish it with a following set of quizzes embedded to the video. The license of this video fully allows educational reuse of the materials. I could modify the materials by adding embedded quizzes to test the viewers’ level of understanding.

D. Discuss how you might use OER in your own life or professional work.

I was really inspired to use OER in my professional work because a part of my work is to find a public, free source of information. I build an manage a database regarding corporate mergers and acquisitions and asset acquisitions and divestitures in the energy market, and since our work is regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission we should always link our data to legit and free sources. I could use the same technique to find OER for our data compliance and integrity.

A. instructor-centered versus student-centred learning

Instructor-centred learning means instructors are the center of the course, telling students to do/fix/learn everything. It is also called Instructivism. On the other hand, student-centred learning is linked to Constructivism and Connectivism, implying that students communicate with each other to facilitate formal/informal learning. There are clear pros and cons of each learning method. While the goal of any course should be to let students learn how to learn about the course topic, the instructor-centred system could have a highly controlled course curriculum and learning experience even though it could be overwhelming in MOOCs settings. Student-centred learning in the massive nature of MOOCs is quite fitting to the purpose of using the Internet as communities as a source of answers and support, while course topics could be less controlled.

B. asynchronous versus synchronous learning

In asynchronous courses, learners meet with the instructor and fellow learners to learn in real-time in the same space. On the other hand, synchronous courses do not restrict learner’s time and space. Online courses are generally synchronous, meaning that learners can learn at different times, posting on online boards and doing their assignments at different times. These two concepts are not entirely separated. Either it’s an on-campus or online course, a course could contain both asynchronous and synchronous components depending on the course design.

C. your thoughts on connectivism

I highly agree with Siemens, G. (2005) that the connectivism is essentially a viable learning theory for the digital age. Since the sharing of information is drastically faster and wider without much restriction in time and space, learners in this era tend to have a learning process in which they can access and process a variety of topics and information. The author points out that one of the principles of connectivism relies on learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions. In my opinion, connectivism fits more to a setting where learners are adults or experienced students because is hard to expect from a grade 7 child to express their opinion in a logical and useful manner. However, I still think that there are some elements that children could use the principles of connectivism. I think children could make their decisions for their own learning process. Children should be able to have a range of options and opportunities to decide what they’d like to learn because it is directly related to the learners’ motivation. Even though public school systems are not providing such options, I think this is already happening through their usage of smartphones and the Internet, since kids nowadays are able to access to media, news and information by themselves without much control or restriction. There’s a lot of debate if this trend is right or wrong, but I believe that this type of connectivism presents a great opportunity for the public to access to insights, skills and knowledge in the digital era.