This week was a fun filled and packed week for me. It was Chinese/Lunar New Year this past Sunday so had a blast with my family and stuffed myself with tons of great food. It is Year of the Tiger. So Happy New Year to all.
I did some more research on CT Virtual Learning and Agora Cyber Charter School on their courses and instructional design. I must admit that I was struggling to decide what is consider a good and bad instructional design. Maybe because of my lack of education on it, but I think I got a gist of it by googling it and viewing my other classmates posting.
After reviewing the courses it made me realize how virtual courses are not much different than learning from a regular textbook. I would have imagined that virtual schools would have take advantage to integrate Web 2.0 to the next level and use other social/collaborative features such as wiki, second life, or even blogs to help and promote learning amongst classmates and teachers. Rather than seeing this I see a total lack of it. I wonder why is that? If virtual schools are to be 21st century learning, there needs to be a way for online courses to have that function or even more.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Bingo - you've captured my frustration! The point of using technology is to make things better, not to produce more of the same.
ReplyDeleteI also feel your frustration over what online schools actually deliver. Maybe there should be more truth in marketing and the schools should market themselves as cyber textbooks :-)
ReplyDeleteGreat thread here - and fun points. Market themselves as cyber textbooks - lol - great indeed.
ReplyDeleteI think that technology will eventually enrich options, as they do, globally. I am working at a college and we offer nothing online, nada! It is interesting because we are a technical college - and pride ourselves in being progressive, but I'm not so sure we are.
I guess I am saying, things will get better, and different - but not everyone knows how to use educational technology yet.
Fun thoughts here