Week 15: Final Reflections

Final blog reflection due by Tuesday
Reviewing your previous blog posts, what, if anything, has changed in your attitude toward online schools and online schooling over the past 15 weeks?

A lot has certainly changed over the past weeks. I will highlight two main changes below.

First, I used to believe that it is important to study the effectiveness of online schooling; whether they are better than traditional schools or lacking. This course has showed me that that this study might not be straightforward after all. In fact, it might be more beneficial to study what works in online schooling and apply that to traditional environment. In my interview with Dr Brian Woodfield from Brigham Young University, I took the chance to ask this question again and his reply was, “ That’s a good question? But against what?”. There are no simple benchmark targets and variables might be too many to make the comparison effective. It has taught me that instead of just focusing on the comparisons, we should perhaps think about the processes that work better for each media.

Also, I used to think that online schooling is a lonely and boring process, without the face-to-face interaction found in traditional classrooms. To a certain extent, I still think it is true but I realized that the younger generation nowadays might be as comfortable in an online environment as in a traditional one. In fact, with the explosion of social media, interaction has taken an entire different form and many face-to-face environment are tapping on its appeal to engage young learners. With the overwhelming number of online tools to enhance the social presence of students nowadays, some might argue that online learning is actually more collaborative and exciting than traditional classrooms.

Week 13: Difficult aspect of researching for final project

What was the most difficult aspect of researching this topic?

The most difficult part was finding out the design considerations of online science labs. Most of the literature was confined to studies on implementation and effectiveness of program; and not much was be found on design consideration. As a Physics teacher, I was curious to find out how designers of online science labs view virtual learning and the outcomes that was focused on during planning.

I had the privilege to interview Dr Brian Woodfield, Professor at Brigham Young University (with help from Dr Lowes). From our conversation, we talked about bringing principles that make video games successful into virtual science labs. The interview certainly opened my eyes to the world of online wet labs, gave us insights that would be difficult to gather on our own.