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Orientation Course - Who, Why, What.

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, since I was always drawn towards these concepts.

I am personally attracted towards these concepts, sine they are fundamentals, but my interest has piqued even further, when I started to analyze what is happening in the educational sphere around me. I realize that these fundamental concepts, that were established at the end of the 20th century, are still not being practiced in academia to its full extent. We went from going to the moon with the first computer that fit in a space craft, to having devices that are x10 stronger than this space craft - in our pockets. Yet teaching theories have been established before the space craft, yet the development has stagnated.

Considering these developments, or lack there of, I wanted to focus on another aspect that was born out of these three (behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism), which is constructivism. This development, focuses on the teaching and learning occurring amongst students, as communities, through the medium of the internet and other contemporary means (ibid.). 

I want to allow students to use the internet, firstly through Edmodo and its availability of communication through comments and direct messages, to learn and encourage students to use the internet as part of their learning. 

Now that this is established, let me focus on WHO this orientation course is targeted towards. WIUT has over a 1000 students enter the foundation course each year. Our job, as university representatives, is to introduce the students to the university and all of its aspects. In order to make our job more efficient, an online orientation was considered and developed. 

Since we have the materials already developed for last year's students, we were discussing and thinking about how to change our approach and make it more in line with connectivism and new theories that we have learnt. 

The content of the orientation course is simple - introduce the main regulations and procedure as well as the important services students can access. Since we already have the videos, we will be working around what we want to do with the activities and how to incorporate my favorite part - connectivism. 

(521 words)

Moore, J. (2011). Behaviorism. The Psychological Record, 61 (3), 449–463. Available from https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03395771 [Accessed 30 March 2022].

Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Available from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm [Accessed 30 March 2022].

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