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Well first, I base a lot of my interaction with education on goals.
Learning needs to be meaningful, needs to be relevant,
needs to be authentic, and needs to be applied to real world application.
But beyond that, for my learners, I think they need to have a safe environment, I know I do when I'm learning something new.
It needs to feel safe and comfortable.
So when we come together as a group, we get to know each other, have a sense of comfort,
present information to each other, develop a face to face community of learners, which is what's always talked about,
about being online.
And I think that's part of the beauty of it, so when you get online in this environment, you already know your peers.
And myself as the instructor.
You feel safe, you feel like you can ask your peers questions.
They talk a lot about, my students have talked a lot about,
"It's such a community there, I just email Judy, or I email Lee, or I email Mary for the answer."
And I feel like,
my students will say that they feel like they're in charge of their learning.
Which, ideally, is the goal.
I'm facilitating studying the guidelines, I have my goals and objectives,
but they're in control of their learning environment because of the way that I've designed these presentations,
and their experience online and in the class.
So I think that's why it's authentic and relevant, because they are doing something.
They're evaluating how they did it.
They're getting peer feedback.
They're having to write it up.
How they felt about teaching online, they have to write the pros and cons and how it worked for them,
and they need to write a piece about how they would make changes in the future.
And sometimes they say,
"Well do I have to write this up, can I not just present it verbally?"
And I go, "It's part of my assignment to have you write it up."
I go, "Because it's my belief that if you write it up and have that piece to reflect on later,
it will come back to you and you'll see what did work good and what didn't work good
and it will help you when you actually get out there into the real world."
Well I also do an end-of-the-quarter assessment and I ask specific questions for,
you know, after they've had the midterm assessment, or a small group inventory diagnosis.
I do one at the end to see future directions that they'd like to see go, plus I keep doing ongoing research of my own.
So, what I'm thinking of doing next time I teach this class is I would like to develop a module of learning.
So that they were in a group and each one had a specific role.
I've actually come up with an idea for a K-12 educator, if they were K-12 education.
It would be a technology task team.
And I've been looking at different areas where adult educators are going into the training field
and I'm trying to come up with a module that would be relevant for them.
So I know that I'm probably only going to get students from one of the two avenues,
so I'm hoping that this module would work for either one of them.
And then I'll get feedback on that kind of assignment also.