Malcolm Knowles said, “Adults should acquire the skills necessary to achieve the potentials of their personalities. Every person has capacities that, if realized, will contribute to the well-being of himself and of society.”
I have been teaching higher ed for a little over 20 years and have gone through many iterations of digital learning/ curriculum support. From Zip disks that were passed around the class, to HTML, to WordPress, to LMS, having a way to provide a “home base” for course content has been an important part of my teaching practice. In terms of my own learning, I began taking asynchronous online courses (before we even used that word) through Teachers College as a young teacher myself in California, and am still doing that today (this is making me feel both old and that I can’t finish things!). Through these changes, I have found that online as a support for synchronous learning (even if it’s just a small portion of the time) seems to work better at things like creating community and accountability than fully asynchronous, and I’m hoping to delve into solutions to that in this course.
While this prompt is about my personal online learning, most of my experience has been teaching, and most of that has been synchronously and in the last two years. This (as many of us know) has its own engagement issues, with some students in-person and some in Zoom, but that is more towards classroom management than quality of instruction. Anyway, I look forward to talking about all these things and more!