Contribution to Learning 5318/5389

This spring session has been a journey. I have had my highs and lows. There were things that I felt super comfortable with and then there were things where I had to really challenge my knowledge and learning capacity. But one thing I have grown to appreciate is the amount of support I have gained from my fellow classmates. They are the best! These two courses especially provided opportunities for all of us to provide feedforward for each other.

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The idea of building our own course was really interesting and exciting to me. I had experience with building courses for elementary students but not for adults. It was for sure a challenge but I felt very comfortable getting my hands dirty and designing a course for a target audience. Something that I had to change in the middle of this course was the duration of my blended learning course. I originally had the idea of constructing a five week course, however after collaborating with classmates and reviewing my outline and three column table, I decided that expanding the length of the course to ten weeks would be more efficient for my soon to be participants. This also made me think that, yes, it is important to have a completed course. However, if I am not continuously looking for ways to improve my course or experience for the intended audience, am I not adapting to situations? Sometimes educators get caught in the same mindset. I am glad that I stumbled upon this thought during this course.

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One of the biggest challenges in this course was at the very beginning when our primary professor had to step out for personal reasons. I applaud Dr. Sue for stepping in when duty called even with an already full plate. This course proved to be very interesting to me from the early stages as it focused on developing alternative ways to build and showcase professional learning. A hot button topic for me and many educators today. One of the things that I had trouble with in the beginning of the ADL program was the “Open to your interpretation” flow of the assignments. However as I am edging toward the end of this journey, I am now more confident in how I present and interpret the information in our course. I cannot say that I am 100% fully confident in all that I do, but I do feel that I have risen to the challenge and have performed greater than I thought I ever would. There’s me busting out of my original fixed mindset that I have always had.

However, my success in these courses could not have been obtained by myself. I had a great group of people who I could always count on and look to for guidance and wisdom. I collaborated often with Ashleigh Carter, Annababette Diemecke, Valary Patterson, Dawn Short and Kristin Winzer. These were my go to people who not only are great collaborators but I have also come to consider them great friends.

As for me and my contributions to learning, I feel that I have also provided a similar amount of support and guidance to anyone who may have required it. While our bi-weekly classes were helpful, I would work hard to schedule and attend Zoom meetings with my fellow cohorts and frequently use our ADL Group Me thread as a way of communicating. The great thing about technology is that we have so many people who live far away from each other but with the click of a button, we can instantly collaborate together. The Blackboard discussion boards also played a big role in how I contributed to mine and other members’ learning. I would often not only participate in replying to a discussion but provide feedback and comments to my classmates as well. My goal was to reply to the original discussion and then reply to two to three of my fellow cohorts. So now for the fun part, the self assessment score that I believe I am assigning myself. Overall, I will be giving myself a 96. I am basing this on the reasons mentioned in this post, meeting deadlines and the contributions to learning that I have provided to my classmates. Thank you so much to my professors for presenting their knowledge and skills that will help us in our journey. Until next time!