You know that feeling....

You know that feeling where you start to sweat and your stomach flips? Ok, well, day two of Summer Term UMUC Masters of Distance Education program 10 weeks/3 courses/full-time job/husband retiring from the Air Force/moving/gravely ill Mother-in-law/becoming a one income family (my income).... ahhh. In over my head, yes. Time to get back to work--absolutely.

DETT 607 Instructional Design

An ongoing assignment in this class is a Critical Reflection on the learning and assessment activities in the course.
Goal

• Reflect critically upon all your learning activities in this course. These include the assessable as well as the non-assessable tasks such as reading and researching that you carry out on your own.

Skills development

• Cultivation of skills in critical reflection in and on your own learning activities.
• Development of strategies for capturing the less overt and less tangible aspects of your learning.

As part of this assessment task, you are required to reflect critically on all your learning activities in this course. Present your critical reflection in the form of a short analytical paper.

In this reflection record, be sure to comment on what you learned about course design and development for open and distance learning settings, and what advice you have for the organization that is considering the adoption of elearning at a distance as a training solution.

This assessment activity is designed to help you capture your engagement with this subject. Your critical reflection record will give me an insight into your thinking on the subject matter content, your experiences in this course, the learning opportunities it offered, insights you gained from them, including also its failures and weaknesses.

So, my thought is that this blog would be a good place to place my thoughts on this subject throughout the course. This is day 2 in my class.....I got nothing

Passwords and Stuff

So, today I decide to go back in and post some more in my learning log. Unfortunately for me, I have too many passwords rattling around in my brain, and forgot the one for this site. Easy fix, but frustrating!

Anyway, summer term at UMUC starts in one week. I am taking three classes and have already gone online to print out the syllabus for each class, mark due dates on the calendar, and generally get a feel for what is going on in each class.

DETT 607 Instructional Design and Course Development in Distance Education. I have been looking at this class with longing for the past year--it is the "meat" of what I am interested in regarding distance education.

OMDE 610 Teaching and Learning on Line in Distance Education. This too is a greatly anticipated class. One of my first career steps in the field of distance education is to BE a DE teacher online. I have applied to teach EDCP (Introductory courses) for UMUC, however don't have my Masters yet and will probably not get the job this year. I am not easily discouraged and will find some institution that will allow me to teach something online.

DETT 615 Assessment and Quality Assurance in Distance Education. Yes, I am a nerd and I love it. Very much looking forward to this course. Two of my main frustrations with my previous life as a corporate trainer was quality and measurable outcomes. This is a fairly new course in the OMDE program, and should prove to be extremely valuable in the future.

I will be posting my musings regarding these classes throughout the summer in the hopes of gathering thoughts that will be helpful with my capstone course OMDE 670--which I will take in the fall.

Oh--lunch time, bye!

First Blog

Ok, so here is my first blog post. I figure it is time for me to start using these Web 2.0 tools, even though I am deathly afraid of revealing my true "neardy" nature. I had somehow arrived at the conclusion that bloggers tend to be those type of people who laugh too loudly at their own jokes or puns. I am still under that impression, but thought I would try to see if this blog could help me organize the vast amounts of information that I have gathered as a student. So here goes.