REFLECTION

THE BEGINNING

During the spring of 2003 I began looking at various educational technology programs. I wanted to learn formally again and technology had been a recurring theme for me throughout my educational career. In order to help streamline teacher workload and increase motivation and learning in students, I had been implementing varying technologies in my classrooms. However, my knowledge base was small: I barely knew how to create a web page and absolutely no knowledge of HTML. Even more importantly, I wasn't aware of best practices in designing and delivering these technologies within an educational context.

I was looking for a program that had substance; I didn't want yet another educational philosophy course or courses which barely touched the surface of integrating technology into K-12 environments. I kept thinking there had to be more, and so I continued my search for a better, more substantive program. I wanted a program that would teach me how to create environments, how to implement curriculum, and how to design and deliver content online. After approximately six months of searching and comparing online programs, I found that program right here at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

After I had spoken on the phone with Dr. Wedman, he contacted me by phone about three months later to see if I was still interested in the program. This extra personal effort made a significant positive impression on me. Not long after, I filled out the application to graduate school, took and passed the GRE, and signed up for my first classes for the summer of 2005.

I sometimes forget how little I knew about technology and how unaware I was about how to learn in an online environment. I didn't take right away to collaborating online or sharing with others. I had been so comfortable doing work alone that I was at times proud that I didn't need to collaborate with anyone else to help solve problems. However, over time I found that I enjoyed helping others online and helping my classmates solve problems. In turn I learned more than I would have if I worked alone. Eventually I received much help from others and in the process built friendships that exist to this day.

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF LEARNING

This by far was an aspect of learning that drew me to this program and fueled my desire to learn more from the professors here. Their understanding of how to deliver content in a way that encouraged discourse, higher-order thinking, cooperation, and collaboration enabled me to be successful throughout the duration of my program.

Community of Inquiry Model
Looking back, I can see that the MU program had an excellent implementation of the Community of Inquiry Model by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000):

By having structured, sequential lessons and an open, welcoming teaching presence, many of my professors were able to foster a welcoming environment for educational activity and conversation. Through their strong cognitive presence in emphasizing the important content and higher-order questioning, we were able to come away with a prime educational experience in which we interacted with each other and learned through the act of conversation.

Cooperation and Collaboration
Throughout the program, cooperative and collaborative learning were key components in the asynchronous online learning experience. Cooperative learning has been defined as a method of learning together in which the learners may subdivide tasks or are autonomous (Dillenbourg and Schneider, 1995). This is in contrast to collaborative learning where the students work together and have positive interdependence; in other words, they need each other to succeed (sink together, swim together) and by supporting each other they work on achieving a "joint solution to some problem" (Dillenbourg and Schneider, 1995).

Most classes that I had at MU had components of both cooperative and collaborative learning. Most of this was easily accomplished within the asynchronous learning environment, Sakai. With the understanding that successful learning is social in nature, the online environment's affordances were taken advantage of to easily implement cooperation and collaboration. Sakai not just a platform for the professor to deliver online content and for students to absorb, but the role of Sakai was to give each student a voice, a picture, and a medium for asking questions at any time.

In this environment there were many things occurring at once. As students were learning, they were learning at different paces. Since the environment was social, some students became mentors to others since they were "one step ahead" of other students and could provide insight and advice. In this way, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development could clearly be seen through students supporting and helping each other (Bransford, 1996). In addition, since it was within an online environment, all students could learn from the "periphery" or become directly involved in the conversation itself--even if it happened yesterday or a week ago. That's the beauty of online learning.

The collaborative aspect could also be seen from simple collaborations on a problem that may have lasted one day to a full semester devoted as a team to completing a group work. Johnson & Johnson (1996) reported that students "have feelings of greater self esteem than they do in competitive and individualistic settings". On a personal level, even if I was in a group that involved a "loafer", the end product had more ideas utilized than I would have come up with on my own.

Never before MU had I as much experience interacting with professors and students, asking as many questions, or discussing or debating as many topics as here with my MU classes. Don't get me wrong; the concepts of cooperative learning and collaborative learning are not new to me nor to education. However, somehow it neatly slipped by many of those delivering online education. Rather than a social event, online learning became an individual and isolated event. However, the capacity for facilitating the social nature of learning is tremendous within online environments, and MU took advantage of that and taught their students what online learning could and should be.

PROJECT-BASED LEARNING

One of the things that attracted me to MU was that they stated students will "learn by doing". Most of the classes culminated with a project demonstrating learned or acquired skills. In addition, most of these projects were open-ended in regards to the content we were to address we just needed to demonstrate the competencies within them.

It's been shown that "learners of all ages are more motivated when they can see the usefulness of what they are learning and when they can use that information to do something that has an impact on others—especially their local community" (Bransford, 1996, p. 61). I would agree with this, but also add that in doing so, it makes the learning highly contextual. By making each project contextualized to my own life and world, I was able to see the process more intricately, have more questions, usually have more problems, and overall learn the issues in a more in-depth and realistic manner.

THE ITERATIVE PROCESS

The evaluation, design, and development processes taught within the LSDD track helped me to understand what an iterative process designing and developing learning systems and content can be. The evaluation process can be humbling, but over time I learned to welcome the criticisms, as that is what makes a better system in the end. Understanding the value of user observation and usability studies are key in the refinement of a system.

Most things I created at the very beginning of the program I am still iterating. As technology progresses and I see newer, better, more usable ways to display and convey information, the systems will continue to be evaluated and improved as long as there is time (and money as the case may be). Understanding this process from needs assessment to summative evaluation, from beginning to end (which then loops back to the beginning) has been one of the most beneficial parts of the program in regards to seeing how everything fits together.

ONLINE LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE SUPPORT

It wasn't until I started taking some of the design courses that I began to realize my interests had names, and there were pedagogies surrounding the various design fields. In particular, computer supported learning/work and performance support were the two things I have been focusing on even before I had many technical skills to utilize them. It was the desire to learn more about computer-supported learning and developing and implementing performance support systems that drove me to attend MU.

I feel proud for some of the things I was able to perform and implement due to my education at MU. One in particular was the small performance support system: CEEHI Hearing Screening Tracker. It was an idea I had to sell to those at the State Department of Health and Social Services. Through the development of a thought-out prototype and demonstration, I was able to get an extra $40,000 that year to purchase equipment in order to start the hearing screening loaner program and implement it. It would not have been possible without my training in this program. For that, I am very grateful.

FUTURE PLANS

I am currently in the middle of "future plans" as I am currently in the PhD program here at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I plan to pursue my interest in learning technologies research and hope to eventually make a contribution to learning technologies as applied to special education.

References

Bransford, J. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. National Academy Press.

Dillenbourg, P., & Schneider, D. (1995). Collaborative learning and the internet, [Online document]. Available: http://tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/research/CMC/colla/iccai95_1.html [2008, 17 April].

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1996). Cooperation and the use of technology. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of research for educational communications and technology (pp. 1017-1044). New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan.