Sunday, October 31, 2010

Going the Distance Together

Sometimes it feels like the journey is long, hard, lonely, and forever, as if there is no end, but in reality the distance is short and the experience is smooth, refreshing, collaborative, and worthwhile. I am talking about going the distance in the Certification in Online Teaching Program, a journey that started several months ago where each course builds on the other to gain the full scope of what it takes to design and teach online courses.

Reflecting back on the first day I considered the online certification program, it was just a coincident that I was exempt from taking two of my doctorate courses, that I searched the course website at Governors State University looking for a course to take and noticed that the university offered a certification in online teaching program. I discovered that the certification consisted of four courses, introduction to online teaching, facilitating online learning, designing online courses, and producing digital content.

I registered for the first course, introduction to online teaching, six months ago and I had a wonderful experience learning and understanding concepts in teaching and learning that supports understanding of what it takes to promote a successful online academic environment. I took the first course successfully. In that course, I learn that students learn differently (Different Learning Styles), teachers teach differently (Different Teaching Styles), and that the experience of everyone in an online environment will be different because of individual preference and uniqueness, but the goal is to ensure optimal learning and to promote flexibility, accommodation, and accessibility to support and foster learning. I learn that there are boundaries and that understanding the boundaries help to set limits, meet deadlines, and achieve learning objectives and the goals of the course. I learn that communication is essential and that collaboration and constructive and timely feedback is necessary to move people along a spectrum of uncertainty to certainty and that knowledge and understanding will lend to the application of concepts in the practice environment.

I learn that in the online environment, sharing must take place. When people share as a group, the benefits are higher than when people work independently. Through collaborative relationship, people achieve connection and a sense of purpose. In the first online course, I experience the connection because of the purposeful activities in the course and the collaborative experiences I had in the course room. After the completion of that course, I deferred the second course until there was another opportunity because of academic conflict with course requirements for the DNP program.

I decided to register for the second course this term (Fall, 2010), but found out that it was not offered, so I “thought” why not take a big leap and register for the third course instead, Designing Online Courses.

I registered for the third course, Designing Online Courses, and the experience in this course is similar to the first course, which exceeds my expectation. I am so excited to tell everyone that comes in my path the wonderful things I have learned in the course. The teaching and learning lessons in the course are, giving and receiving feedback, instructional strategies, course consideration and constraints, authentic assessment (formative and summative), content development, student-content interaction, student-student interaction, and student-instructor interaction.
At the same time that I am learning the different lessons in the course, I am actually experiencing the different lessons as a teacher-learner, and as a student in the course, engaging in student- content activities, student-student activities, and student-instructor activities.

Since the start of the course, I have had the opportunity to design an original course, develop a course overview, write course and learning objectives, develop three lessons with content for the course, develop formative and summative assessments, identify student-content and student-student content interaction for the course. I design the learning objectives using Bloom’s Taxonomy. I also draft a paper, which outlines the design of an online course and will finalize the paper at the end of the course for submission and grading.

The assignments are usually challenging but stimulating, and require critical and creative thinking to get from point A to point B.

The journey in the online certification program seems so lonely at times, but I definitely know that I am not alone, and that I have my colleagues to assist me, and in return, I assist my colleagues. I know that I have the instructor to facilitate the course and that she is available to lead me in the right path. Together, we take one-step at a time forward as we move from one course to the other in the Asychronous academic environment.

Now, I cannot help but to inhale and exhale deeply with excitement because I am nearly at the end of this course.