Reflection: Week 6 (E-learning Week)

E-learning week was being described by Dr Tan as having become "Eeeeeee!!"- learning week... for some of us... hahaha... Appropriate description of it for many of us... Simply overloaded with tonnes of assignments/discussion forums/online work to do... it was like finally a break from school but the comp has become the staple food for this period... literally hours and hours and hours of companionship.... Really trained us to make this lappie and that deskie our best-friend...

They say for times like SARS outbreak and possible epidemics, e-learning week like this would ensure learning continues in midst of such crises... but I wonder if we would be in the right state of mind to continue with studying and handle this amount of workload. Should we have an epidemic and lessons are halted, isn't the crisis around us so overwhelming that ensuring our friends and kin are alright takes precedence over studying?

Focus, e-learning lesson... ours was quite different from the rest. Got to come out with a student-centred learning plan to convince teachers of the usefulness of this approach, with ICT aids... rather similar to our assignment 1... that's why many commented it became like double work. Nevertheless, it got us to plan for possible student-centred learning lessons and how ICT can help... so we got more practice. Won't call this drilling us, but I guess with each practice comes more fine-tuning of our ICT-aided student-centred learning ideas.

E-learning has its pros and cons.

Pros:

• Allow for OTOT(Own time Own Target) learning...
• save on travelling time for those who needs 1-2 hr travelling time...
• Allow for mass posting of discussion on discussion forums(though a bit enforced and became a bit meaningless towards the end...)

Cons:

• Too much repetition of the kind of ICT tools used across different modules
• Too much work and not all the lessons are that suitable for e-learning, for e.g. the chemistry module's lesson is supposed to deal with what makes a good lesson plan and to critique on 2 lesson plans. Content delivered to us are just 4 slides and we need to use that to critique on 2 full lesson plans... in the end, the tutor has got to re-teach part of the e-lesson to ensure we have gotten the right concepts.
• I haven't experienced any network down, probably becos I'm staying in hall, but friends using comp at home were complaining about blackboard's inability to support the massive number of users.
• Not easy to get immediate feedback from the tutor with regards to the lesson. Not every lecturer is like Dr Tan, who uses Skype to avail himself to us... others were mostly communicating through blackboard. Some were rather active, modelling what a teacher should do in discussion forum activities by posing guiding questions and adding value to the discussion. Others were less active in engaging us the students during the e-learning week... more like e-tasking us than helping us learn.

Ok... believe it's long enough... To cut the story short, the full value of e-learning week was not experienced and could have been better. All the best for future batches of student teachers.