For some reason when I transferred from Spring Arbor University's Master of Arts in Communications with emphasis in Education and New Media program to Western Michigan University's Master of Educational Technology program, I skipped taking EDT 5410. I guess I felt I had already learned everything the course covered and therefore I should strive to take more difficult courses.
Well, this plan worked for some time, but this past Spring, when I was experiencing feelings of major stress from work and home situations, I fell behind in the course I was taking, EDT 6480 and ended up having to take an incomplete. The incomplete ended up putting me on financial aid probation and I was feeling quite discouraged about my abilities to complete my Masters and graduate as planned.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon how you look at it, I ended up unemployed for a period of time and was able to finish the incomplete and come off from financial aid probation, as long as I took a course this Fall and completed it on time and with a good GPA score. When I met with my Program Advisor this past spring and discussed my program and talked with her about the problems I had experienced, she suggested that I take a course that would be fairly easy for me, to give me a little bit of a "break," and yet it would still apply towards my program requirements. So, I registered for EDT 5410.
Yes, this course was fairly easy for me, but only because I had already used and been using almost every tool we were asked to use, reflect upon, and discuss in the course. But, surprisingly enough to me, I still learned quite a bit in the course through the readings in a book I previously hadn't read, Instructional Design by Reiser and Dempsey (2007). I also used a few new tools, such as online photo editing tools I hadn't used before, but even though I had used or already was using many of the tools, I found that I really enjoyed exploring them from a "learning" perspective instead of just using them occasionally as possible tools for integration into online course or other such things.
I really enjoyed this course and through this course I was able to further the development of my ePortfolio, which has been a goal of mine for quite sometime, so I'm very excited about that. I still have some work to do on completing the ePortfolio, but I'm thankful I had to opportunity to use it as part of this course and I'm looking forward to continuing to complete, maintain, and update it in the coming year. Although I've shared the link in a previous post, I will share it again here: CHalvorsen ePortfolio
No comments:
Post a Comment