Post #7: Communication Technologies and e-Learning

After this week's readings, I learned a lot about e-Learning and I will try to make connections as much as possible with my teaching experience. The chapters present us the necessary skills, effective strategies and examples of technologies that will foster and develop communication and collaboration skills and also e-Learning guidelines and activities. These activities can have as audience all the subjects involved in the learning process such as students, instructor(s), parents and college administrators. Technology, then, can serve a variety of purposes, since facilitating and being a catalyst element for learning until enabling principals to easily contact parents to talk about their kids performance in class or issues they might have. Along with that, technology can also be used for the three basic forms of communication: point-to-point, one-to-many and many-to-many. Thus, there are tons of possible situations wherein technology can be used.

I have taught this semester a unit on communication and collaboration and students collected many tools that can be used. For instance, they used skype, Edmodo, Google Docs, Socrative, Poll Anywhere, Twitter, Google Hangouts, Remind and many others. However, careful planning is necessary so that Communication and Collaboration tools can be effectively used and have a real, concrete impact on students' learning. I personally believe five aspects are essential when planning those activities: purpose, content, time, participant's roles and forms of interaction.
I think these five components make up a good basis of what effective communication with technology would be.

Examples of benefits from the use of technology-supported communication are: it gives the students the flexibility to work on their assigned roles and assignments even in the comfort of the homes; communication through emails, Google docs, and social media can definitely help students bring together information more easily; classroom blogs or webpages with daily or weekly posts help students and their parents keep track of that is going on in the classroom; Google Drive helps save paper in communities with limited budget by sharing assignments, feedback and grades with students and parents, and many other situations. Using technology, the students can freely express and communicate their ideas without the barriers of the classroom. Communication technologies, therefore, have definitely opened a new perspective on learning regardless of grade levels, subject areas or topic. 

As for e-Learning technologies, I have myself experienced for the first time a fully online class as a student. I would say, first of all, that technologies such as Learning Management Systems and Communication Technologies are essential for e-learning courses, even more than to f2f instruction. They not only help students keep track of their assignments, grades and deadlines, but also enable interactions between teacher-student, student-student or between groups of people. I also believe careful planning is even more important because there is an extra psychological and practical factor involved in e-Learning. Students enrolled in online classes already envision the "burden" of being away from a physical learning environment, which puts more pressure on him/her. From a more practical perspective, students have to be more independent, autonomous and disciplined. In most online classes we don't usually see a closer connection to students due to their diverse characteristics, to the lack of human contact before, during and after classes and because human beings don~t usually feel encouraged to interact with unknown people.

To sum it up, I cannot judge yet whether e-Learning is better than f2f instruction since I have only seen the perspective from a student. In a near future I might have some experience with online courses as a teaching assistant and then I will feel more confident to express my opinion based on both experiences.