Personal reflection on the topic Learning and Communicating Online

Personal reflection on the topic Learning and Communicating Online

Introduction

To be a part of an online environment has helped me to amplify my potential to learn and enhance my knowledge and understanding of communicating online. The time I have spent taking the online courses has turned out to be a worthy experience for me. Apparently, I find online lessons more interesting than traditional style of education. Online education has very distinct advantages over traditional classroom training. Of all the advantages that this offers, the most obvious is the flexibility by not having to travel or spend too much time away from work. Regardless of how it is tagged, online education, in essence, is a collection of technical and social arrangements that allow learners to be connected to educational resources, human and/or technical, that are remote from them. An educational resource can be a person or group of people who are capable of communicating and sharing knowledge that is valued by a learner. Online education also defines that set of applications through which learners are connected to distant tangible resources like remote instruments (e.g., telescopes), video libraries, and collections of course materials including objects like lecture notes and slides (Thomas, 2011). In this paper, I will reflect on my experience that I had during the course of learning and communicating online.

Discussion

My enrolment in the online course has provided me greater retention and stronger understanding on the issues, this is because online education allowed me to combine multiple resources and educational elements such as video, audio, quizzes, interaction, forums, chat and examinations, in order to strengthen my learning skills and potential. There is also the ability to review and replay the content of the items as many times as necessary until I have learned the content completely.

After taking this course I would say that online education as a tool for distance learning is a teaching method that allows the teacher and the learner to be separated from each other in time and in space while remaining connected by means of appropriate technology. Accommodating diversity is at the very core of online education. Today's online education is a direct descendant of correspondence school educational courses (Rudestam, 2010). In their earliest instantiation, correspondence courses used the technology of the day—surface mail—just as today's distance learning makes use of computers and networks to solve what we might refer to as structural diversity problems (Collins, 2009). Through distance learning technologies, learners—disadvantaged because of space and/or time issues—are not prevented from learning because of structural diversity concerns. In short, online learning has proven successful when learners are not in the “right place” or available at the “right time” to take advantage of learning resources (Scardamalia, 2006).

During the attainment of this online course, I have earned the following benefits:

Opportunity to organize my study time

Save time and money

Acquire responsibility for my own learning

Teaching methods are dynamic and easy to understand

Individual work is optimized

Team work is done in a simple and natural manner

Learn ...