Week 13 - E-learning and Instructional Design

This week we read about E-learning and Instructional Design.  We were to read the chapter to find relationships between our own experiences and what we read.  This is my first online class toward my master’s degree, so I haven’t had that much experience with e-learning, but while I was reading this passage seemed to fit with the experience I have had thus far.  “Consider further the terms online learning, Web-based instruction, and distance learning, all of which are often used interchangeably. …Learners may interact with each other, with learning management system (LMS), or both, and may do so from the same or different geographic locations.”  This fits with my experience because I am learning from a distance and our instruction is web-based.  Every week we are provided instructions for whatever task we are to complete through web-based instruction.  Plus, every week we interact with our classmates through posting.  Another experience I’ve had is “The scenario of the solitary student working alone at her computer late into the night with little or no contact with her peers still exists, but many current and future learning systems will emphasize shared experience features.”  While we do interact with our classmates through posting and blogging, I am also a solitary student working late into the night. 

There was another passage that hit home to me more in my teaching experiences rather than in my online educational experiences.  “The bottom line is to consider the learning outcomes possible (intentional and informal) along with the affordances of various technology combinations and then create an instructional design that takes advantage of these factors in an artful, flexible, and theoretically appropriate fashion.”  The important part of this passage is the “consider learning outcomes”.  This is something we, as teachers, must do when planning our lessons.  We must consider what outcome, what lesson we want our students to learn.  We must know what our purpose is for teaching that particular lesson.