My Week 1 reflection

I'm a little late with my Week 1 reflection (!) but I wasn't think I would write one. Now I think I should.

I found the first week really interesting and alot of fun but also a bit of a scramble. I feel I learned a lot about the people in the class very quickly and love the different backgrounds that I see--people's experiences are much wider and more varied than in my f2f classrooms.

I did find a couple of unexpected things: First, I research high school courses, where the kids often write as little as possible so I was surprised (and pleased) by how much people wrote in the discussion forums. Second, although I wanted to get off to a quick start, I didn't want to overload people with new tools in the first week but I think I may have done one too many for some people. I will try to figure out a way to go a bit slower next time. And third, I absolutely did not expect the two groups in the discussion forums to structure the discussion so differently. Next time I will be more explicit about what I expect (if I can figure that out--the poll results are split between letting the discussions evolve and having threads).

I think I will also slow down the first week because the scramble came from all the adds and drops, plus the few "missing" students who for various reasons were not posting. TC allows almost two weeks for adding and dropping, so we had a couple of drops, which meant that the class (which had been closed) opened up and we got some new students. These new people are great additions but getting them organized was a scramble for me and undoubtedly for them, in part because Moodle is not integrated with ClassWeb so I had to keep checking who was registered and then getting the Moodle people to add them--a two-step process that I hope will not happen once TC actually goes over to Moodle. So that is another reason to start a bit slower next time. The other reason to start slower is that there are a few people who haven't gotten on board with the assignments and I don't know where they are or what is going on. In a f2f class, I could ask, but in this case, it feels like a black hole out there.

That said, I think the most important thing I have taken away from this week is that I realize that I am going to learn more from the students in this class than I do from the students in my f2f class. That is partly because many have a lot of online learning experience, but also because I can see the results of your thinking in a way that I can't in a f2f classroom. This is supposed to be one of the advantages of asynchronous learning and it really does seem to be true.