Blog #4 – Session 4 – eLearning Practices in Higher Education

I learn important eLearning practices in this session. Practices that will add value to my teaching.

I learned about microlearning. In the first week of the session, we design our microteaching through a micro learning environment design (MicroLED) process. My microLED involves; the overview, and the lesson plan which includes the assessments (formative & summative) that I will integrate into my microteaching. This exercise is quite useful because it's more than an activity for this ED403 course, the microteaching I designed will be used in my course. In fact, I am creating it purposely to be used in the upcoming weeks when the particular topic will be delivered to students.

Microteaching is relevant to my context. It is effective and cheap. In SINU, where resources are scarce this is a cost-effective yet efficient way of teaching especially challenging topics. Furthermore, microteaching saves time which is important for such courses as human anatomy and physiology (A & P), where a huge number of students were usually enrolled. I can simply create and deploy the content quickly. The contents are clear and specific. This will motivate my students to watch and learn, it will be worth their time.

I am grateful that I learned about this efficient method of teaching. I already thought of ways to use microteaching in my teaching area. I will use it to explain complex topics in the A & P course. Topics that I don’t usually have time to go through in detail in my F2F classes. Also, I will use it to teach students important ICT and academic skills that will help them do the activities in the course. I often do not have time to explain to my students the basic ICT skills that they should have learned. To help them progress smoothly in their study, I will use microteaching to help them catch up on some needed skills be it in ICT, or academic skills such as referencing. I will use microteaching for other practical skills as well. For instance, when we have labs, I will use microteaching to go through important procedures or concepts before the actual labs.

I would like to point out that there are challenges with microteaching. How can I connect the microteaching videos smoothly and holistically? This will require proper planning and organization on my part. At the moment, I am planning to address this challenge by providing teaching guides. I will make sure to provide clear guidelines that students should follow carefully. In my course, students will be encouraged to watch the microteaching in sequence. To help with this, short videos will be posted in chronological order. I will look into other measures to address this challenge.

Another challenge with microteaching is about online learning. In the Solomon Islands, it is not convenient to go online. I would really like to do some microteaching synchronously, but it won’t always be convenient for my students. To address this, I will provide asynchronous lectures and make available the links through Moodle.

I am glad to find out solutions to an issue that I have chosen to write about. In session 4, as part of our assessment, we were asked to identify an issue in higher education, and through literature review find solutions to that issue. I selected an issue that is important to my current context. Like in many universities around the globe, the current pandemic has pressured SINU to go online. Unfortunately, SINU is moving slowly in offering courses online. For these reasons, I find it necessary to choose a topic that will help us set up our online learning environment. I chose to find out innovative assessment methods that we can use for our online learning environment.

I have learned through this ED403 course that there are many new ways to assess students, especially in the online learning environment. We don’t have to assess students the same way, all the time. As educators, we need to be creative with the available technology. Therefore, I spend some time researching assessment methods that I can use to assess my students online or digitally. This is not only for my teaching area; I intend to share it with my faculty members. I have identified four assessment methods that I will integrate into my course next semester. These are; ePortfolio, Online Discussion Forum, Online Quizzes, and group and peer assessments. The details of these assessment methods were presented in my paper. Note that these are not the only methods I will include in my course. I will integrate other relevant assessment methods into my elearning environment.  

Indeed, this session has thought me important elearning practices that will definitely add value to my teaching career.