I have to admit, that I am not that experienced in designing courses for online learning and as well don’t have that much experience in blended learning. Why? It has to do with somehow a lack of time to go deeply into these topics and develop myself material for blended learning. Maybe one would think that’s an excuse but maybe I have to explain it a bit.
I’m very much interested E-Learning and blended learning, as well as using new tools. At the University where I work as lecturer and consultant we have an E-Learning platform where we put all our courses online and it’s called Moodle. Moodle is very useful for dealing with different tasks. That means all what is about admin tasks can be fulfilled very well and smoothly. But as well sharing different materials with the students, as Presentations, PDFs, Microsoft Docs etc. – what I like as well is, that one can discuss a topic on a forum (which as well can be led by students) and as well you can evaluate written work, tests etc. – but then there are much more features which I don’t know yet and haven’t used them until now. So, that means I like a lot E-Learning tools and I’m interested to learn more about it but even with Moodle is again a time limiting factor where I don’t have enough time to explore all the possibilities and details. Although we have E-Learning experts giving us information and workshops but in the end you have to do it yourself and bring your material in a new form and shape.
In our group discussion it came out that it’s very important to find a good balance between online learning and „face-to-face“ teaching, which I still agree completely especially when you think about the challenges and issues we face today to solve our future of this planet. Therefor it’s absolutely important to keep as well the „face-to-face“ exchanges and that the student still learn, aside E-Learning skills, to talk to each other and show empathy and authenticity.