Entering this course consisted of a lot of nerves. As I met my PBL group members last week, I felt how grossly unqualified I was as a participant. Well, at least that was what the devil on my shoulder was telling me. There is a huge difference in experience and expertise between myself (I just started as a Teaching Assistant 1.5 years ago) versus other participants (who have years and decades of experience in education).
This is really my first time taking part in both a long-term education pedagogy course and also an online course of this nature. Naturally, I felt wildly out of my depth. As I got started with the course with a healthy dose of trepidation and perhaps even a dash of regret (oops), I guess that put me in a pretty good position to start thinking about the first topic of the course:
Scenario: “I have just signed up to do an online course and I am excited to be there. But I have little experience of online courses and it feels really challenging to get started to connect and find my way with all these new sites and tools. I guess that other participants will be more experienced than me and I feel stupid asking about things. We are asked to create a Learning blog on the web; it feels a bit scary to do this. I do share things on Facebook with friends, but here, in the open? I want to keep my private life separate from my professional life. But on the other hand, my students seem to share and discuss all sorts of things in social media and use all kinds of tools and resources.”
– Topic page
How does a scenario written by someone else fit so well with my emotions? To my surprise (and also comfort), my group mates agree that they have similar sentiments. This consensus, in hindsight, actually set a very good intention at the start of the course.
That is, we are figuring this out together.
A little about my online experience
While I am categorically labelled as “Gen Z”, I would place myself closer to a digital visitor than resident. Sure, I log onto social media every day to watch dog videos and listen to true crime podcasts, but I am also notoriously known among my friends to only upload pictures of my pet turtle on my Instagram. I am not particularly keen on sharing my personal life on social media, even if they are only visible to my friends.
I first started work in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was at its worst. All work arrangements were remote, and it did not serve me well as a newbie in the industry. I was not sure how to connect with my colleagues through a screen, was too shy to ask for help, and ended up struggling by myself a lot. I was also taking training courses online, a mode of learning that was new to me. I found it harder to concentrate, a lot easier to second guess myself before un-muting to contribute to a group discussion, and a lot less connected with my peers.
As I attended more courses with different trainers, I realised that the method of delivery plays such a significant role in easing the students into online class participation. Trainers actively utilised additional online engagement tools (for anonymous input to discussion, for gamification of learning, etc) captured my attention better and made me feel more involved in class.
I try to reflect back a lot on my own struggles with online learning and interaction when I help to design online classroom activities. How do I make the online classroom experience conducive, approachable, and engaging?
As one of our group mates pointed out, ONL places us in a very unique position whereby we are simultaneously the educators looking into the student experience to better our online teaching, while also being the learners in online learning ourselves. I hope to maximise my experience in this course by both reflecting on my own learning of online teaching pedagogy and also my own student experience.
Wish me luck!;)
