Blog on Innovating Learning and Teaching

Hello Reader! Finally, having decided on the design of my blog, the platform I will use for my course and decided on the task to do, I can start my justification for the Orientation course. I will try to give my justifications and show my preliminary plan for the course. Once the plan is complete, I will get back to you about what I have achieved, what worked and what did not work.  However, for the plan as of right now, I knew there are a few things that I definitely wanted to include. I wanted to make sure that I have elements of connectivism in my course. This was something me and partner discussed extensively. We began our discussion about behaviorism, the fundamental concept behind most of teaching and learning. Since behaviorism focuses on defining behavior that is desired, it is important to understand the underlying theory behind this practice (Moore, 2011). We had read an interesting article regarding behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism, which was peculiar to me, s...

As I mentioned, the functional aspect of Edmodo was the most attractive to me, and I wanted to make my teaching as comprehensive as possible.  The next challenge was to think of what to post and what material to develop. The most appropriate course I thought, alongside my partner, was to develop an Orientation course, as an alternative platform to BlackBoard. It is also important to note that we primarily focused on an Asynchronous approach, since the nature of the orientation and the increase in student admission has proven that resources become a challenge.  The asynchronous approach in online learning, in this particular case, has the biggest benefit of cost-saving (Sherrod, Holland and Augustus, 2021). Furthermore, there is sometimes an issue, where freshmen who just entered the university do not have access to the Intranet, where most of the Orientation material is located.  Lastly, another reason why Edmodo seemed more attractive to me, is its availability (Borg e...

While preparing and thinking about the content of the course I would develop together with my partner, I realize that, after making the previous post on this blog, that the layout was a little uncomfortable for the viewer. Since I can view my blog from the perspective of a visitor, it is clear that some navigation issues may have arose.  The biggest thing that seemed out of place, was the posts appearing on the blog itself. Below, you may see the before and after.  The screenshot above shows how the post would be separated as a "featured" post, which in the context of my blog seems misplaced, since I do not necessarily want to highlight my latest post, since the blog is more in the format of a reflection. The solution was simple - remove the featured post and make all the posts appear as a thread of continuous posts. The screenshot above is the result of what is more continuous and clearly flowing. One of the reasons why I decided to make this change, is one of the sessions t...

We have discussed a variety of tools that can be used to create an online teaching course. Some of the tools we discussed are: Google Classroom, Moodle, Black Board and Edmodo.  Personally, I did not find Google Classroom as effective as the tool that I comfortable with, which is the Black Board. Since I am teaching a module using the Black Board, it is most closest to me. However, having this understanding of the Black Board, does not mean that I will stick to what I am most comfortable with.  The next tool we covered, was Moodle. This was significantly more alien to me as a platform, since the user-interface was not as friendly as I am used to. Moodle is quite a powerful tool, considering the variety of options it offers for the users, but this lack of user-friendliness for the teacher, and subsequently the students, was outputting to me personally.  I decided on a tool that I had researched together with my partner: Edmodo. This platform is overall quite user friendly,...