Wow, what a journey of almost four months! From thinking this is just one of those “open network learning” course, which can fulfil my credits requirements for advancement; to trying to implement the ideas learned during scenario discussions with my PBL 8 buddies into my daily work, this has been a great learning and growing experience for me.

Education in the 21st century is no longer an ivory tower hobby of an eccentric elite, but it has invaded all parties of society.

In one of my earlier post, I did say something which I still strongly believe, and that is a great distance education experience should be equivalent to a great online shopping experience.

An excellent online shopping experience is when the product is clearly ordered/categorized/labelled in an easy to locate manner. There is always someone to chat with when you get stuck somewhere during your purchase process. And your products were able to reach you with the shortest waiting period.

So I do think if we can “create” this great personalized education environment for our students, where all information is needed can be accessed easily for them. If they need to require extra information, or have encountered questions where needs support, they can locate us quickly. Within this environment, we can guide them and facilitate them and encourage them having more collaborative relationship with them and among them.

And yet, in order for us to create an environment that’s a student-centred and encourages them of being collaborative with us and among them, couple things we should also keep in mind:

1. No assumptions have been made. For example, to have a productive distance learning experience both for the teachers and the students, we need to make sure the technical support is there and will be there. This shouldn’t be assumed. Or when we try to encourage the collaborative learning experience, we shouldn’t assume the social interaction will automatically exist. In order for us not having these assumptions, these require us, the educators, to also be the investigators in this case, where we need to do more investigations ahead of time.
2. During our course planning process, where we should also pay attention to how to make the course in a way that students can feel they are present, and they can fully immerse themselves into the environment without any hesitations.

These are only some thoughts and more digestions are needed. As of yet, I haven’t really figured out what and how to deal with these issues yet. But as this journey continues, I think for me the learning is also continuing.