Final entry

There is an old English proverb, “there is no feast in the world that does not end finally”. Although we have been enjoying the feast very much so far, and no matter how long the feast will take, we have to face an end of it. This is exactly how I feel now when writing this final post for the blog. The blog has been very enjoyable and it has given me much more than I had expected. It is sad to see how time flies and we are already near an end of it. Although an end of this course, it is also a new beginning for every one of us, where all that we have acquired from this course will continue to be applied.

When I flipped back to the course schedule, I realized how much I had learnt thus far from this course. First and foremost, I learnt what is intersubjectivity which happens to be a new term for me. Intersubjectivity, contributes to the collaboration at a distance and has the effect of making the learning context richer. This richness can be conceptualized as a social and interactive process, occurring as a consequence of the attempt people make to understand each other overcoming limitations such as language, attitude, gender, and age. I understood this term better when Dr. Tee explained in detail. My preconception of this term at the beginning was similar to scaffolding.

Another interesting part about this class was the Wiki. Wiki was a creative approach to allow us to interact collaboratively and have a deeper understanding to develop something. Even though we encountered problems at the beginning , with Dr. Tee’s guidance and scaffolding it was more of a success as I began to know what Wiki really is .Wiki is something new to me as I can be considered a newbie in Wiki. But, now I could proudly try Wiki with my students as I know how it works and feel it is a good activity to stimulate high order skills. Besides that, I feel Wiki is not an easy task for DE learners, with so many sharing, collaborating and coming to a consensus could be really an uphill task.

Of all the aspects, one of the most significant things in this course is producing the module. It was my first time creating a module for DE. One can clearly say that creating the module requires a lot of proper planning. We come out with so many drafts considering so many factors that could have an effect in DE environment. However, in that process I learnt a lot as now I understood that in a DE module you cant think base on your instinct but think of the instructional strategy first before deciding the activities. Though there were many sleepless nights and frustrating days of thinking how to make the module better, it was worth the pain. At the end , when I tried it with my students they were able to do it independently successfully.

All in all, I must say that I have gained valuable insights in the various aspects of this course. Not only that, I would really like to express my appreciation to our dedicated lecturer, Dr. Tee, for giving such an impressive and interactive course. You never gave up on us and wanted to make us ‘thinking participants’ rather than ‘spoon-fed participants’ .Lastly, I believe that everything you have given us will be very beneficial for us in future to help our students and acquiring knowledge is a never ending journey, and there’s no designated path to follow. As Carl W. Buechner said, “People may forget what you have said, but they will never forget how you have made them feel.”

Learning Module

I just want to share what I felt of the learning module. Firstly, it is not an easy task to prepare a learning module for DE learning as we have to bear in mind so many factors and constraints compared to face to face learning. When we ( Suganthi & Me) first showed our first draft to Dr. Tee, there were many things practically we were not able to see . When Dr. Tee asked us the 'Why' questions , we were like Dr. Tee has a point, 'why didn't we see that earlier' or 'yes student might not understand this'. Dr. Tee's comment was an eyeopener to me in many ways.

Perhaps, when we were doing our module we were basically thinking of how we would do it with our students in classroom( face to face) and using that expereince to create the module. As Dr. Tee said when you are doing the module think of the instructional strategy and not based on your instinct. However, another constraint we have is the technology itself, as we are still grooping with new advanced technology . It will be like we had decided to assess the student in a specific way but not sure if such technology is available, so we resort to the ones that we know for sure. I guess in this sense it is of advantage for those who has a good background of the technology .

Anyway, so far we have done nearly 10 times of changes and drafts. In fact after seeing the presentation of some groups this week. we again saw teeny-weeny things which we could improvise. It is really an uphill task but not an impossible one if we have the time.I really have my hats off for those creating programmes for distance education learners.