Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.

Weekly Reflection #3

Another interesting week of tech in week three! This week, I appreciated learning about ways that we can explicitly incorporate tech into our classrooms and our lessons. This week, I wanted to reflect on the pros and cons of flipped classrooms and online/self-paced learning more broadly.

I have thought and heard about this topic, and have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I can see how it may be beneficial for some students. I can see how some students would learn better at their own pace, particularly high school students. At the same time, I can see it being a total disaster for other students. I have worked with a number of students who have done online learning either through COVID, through summer classes, or just to get ahead of their classmates. I have never seen it work particularly well. Most of the online learning courses I have seen (largely high school level) involve a YouTube video of sorts, a guided notes sheet, and little else. The role of the teacher is nothing more than a marker and someone who responds to the occasional email. To be frank, I am not even sure what the role of the teacher is in many of the courses. It doesn’t even appear that you need to have any content or pedagogical expertise to run these courses, as long as you can cross-reference an answer key. I feel the same way about many (all?) of the online courses I had to take at UVIC during COVID. When a course consists of PowerPoints labeled “Fall 2017” that you have to read over by yourself, I start to question what the point of the course is and why it costs hundreds of dollars a person to pay an instructor to upload years-old, reused documents.

However, this week’s class kind of opened my eyes to a better way of doing flipped classrooms/online learning. The content on Live It Earth was engaging, different, and clearly had some thought put into it. The content went beyond “read this thing and make a 250 word forum post on this thing that no one wants to read and then make a fluffy, pointless response about how great another person’s response was”. There were actual hands-on activities, engaging video content, and enough choice for students to pick what they were passionate about. I think that this model is so much more what we should be doing within our education system, and it seems to harness the dynamism of technology towards a more robust, student-centred view of learning.

Anyways, that was a bit of a rant, but my broader point is that online learning has extraordinary potential to make education more accessible, flexible, and engaging, and that the way we currently see it executed by school districts and post-secondary institutions borders on completely useless. In some cases, I have seen students regress after a year of online school. However, this week gives me a bit of hope that there are people out there doing good work to change the way we see online education and what it can be. I can only hope our institutions and decision-makers follow suit. I would be curious to hear what other people’s experiences are with online learning and what worked well and what didn’t!

3 Comments

  1. mdintino

    Thanks for sharing Markus!
    I really like how you put links in your blog post to make it easier for viewers to visit other sites!
    -M

    • sineadswan

      Hi Milana and Markus (M squared–I like the sound of that!)

      I also appreciate the links as it makes it easy to compile the information you are sharing with us. I would appreciate if you could show me how to create those sorts of links, like the link you put into the “Live it Earth” text.

      Thanks!
      Sinead

      • markusmeyer

        Hi Sinead,

        I’m hoping that this is learning you can do on your own time as I am currently at capacity. Thanks!

        All the best,

        Markus Meyer
        V00911656

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