IT648 Course Reflection

1. What have you learned from this online class? Describe your learning experience briefly.
This course had refreshed and deepened my understanding about telecommunication and its usage in education. I originally took telecommunication as something like telecom, which was similar in their names. Reading the provided handouts and the experience on the term paper had provided me with opportunity to take a tour on what telecommunication is and how it could be used in education and the research fields that are related to this topic. Telecommunication is a revolutionized way to communicate, it is communication based on “tele”, which is a prefix that has to do with distance. So, telecommunication could be any kinds of communication means via distance such as telephone, internet, television, video conference, satellite, and things like that. And as internet becoming one of the most preeminent methods in telecommunication, web-based instruction, online learning has become the main topic to study and investigate in education. Most of the current research topics nowadays, are found in web-based or internet-based instruction or learning.

2. What were your weak and strong points?
My most conspicuous weak point was still, as I had described before in other courses reflections, the inability to read and grasp information quickly and efficiently. This weak point could be viewed in two contexts to understand its severity. Firstly being in the graduate study background it could be a pity to have such weakness, that is to say, this course is a graduate-level course, which contains a lot of reading task and requires one to quickly and efficiently grasp information so one can ponder and reflect and then make sense and then put useful information into sensory and working memory. My failure to do so made me have to spend extra time to read the materials again and again and try my best to CONCENTRATE. The other way to view this weak point is from the content of this course. Reaching into the telecommunication means we are reaching into a web-based era to some extent, which in turn means we are reaching to an era of information-explosion era. In such scenario, it is another pity if one fails to grasp and scan information very quickly from the huge amount of information sources from one’s lap-top screens, mobile phone screens, and television screens, etc. I do confess it is a pity for me, but I have been trying very hard and struggling with distraction and low efficiency. My strongpoint, on the other hand, could be the skills and competence to develop a web-based instructional site, due to my pre-experiences in computer graphic designing and web-development work.

3. How did you like the interaction between you and your peers, you and instructor? Explain in details. Provide examples if necessary.
Although I strongly prefer face-to-face classes (it sounds a little ironic for an IT student to say this), I still enjoyed the interaction with my peers and instructors in terms of the Group project cooperation. I think we worked very well when we tried to use differ telecommunication tools, which is one part of this course. Although we are in distance, we chatted and communicated through text, audio, video, this made this class more like a face-to-face one because we all feel connected. This has become a consensus among our group members. It is much more vivid and interesting in terms of interaction compared with a normal Blackboard-based online course. As to the interaction with the instructor, I’d say I didn’t spend a whole lot of time spend with Dr. Wang academic on this course because my overload of other courses. But I really appreciated her in-time feedback to hour discussion and assignments.

4. Reflect on the communication tools (individually) used in this class: email, discussion board, chat room, Voice Board, Live Classroom, and Blog. Which tool did you use most, why? From your experience, explain the advantages and disadvantages of each communication tool. Provide examples if necessary.
Email was the most common communication tool, too common for us to pay attention. I only used email to have contacted the instructor, and since we do have hour own email, instead of the blackboard email, the chance for using email in this course became even rare. Along with the announcement function, email was the tool for me to receive information from the instructor and ask questions. The advantage of email was people’s familiarity with it, and also its asynchronous feature give students more time to organize their question so they might become confident to interact with the instructor. The disadvantage would be being slow and its interactivity depends on both sides’ precondition of logging in on time. The discussion board was probably the most frequently used tools in this course, if we statistically analyze the using frequency of each tool. I ascribe to the most using of this tool to its mandatory feature, for we have to post our group discussion and comment on others every week. The advantage of discussion board is that it’s convenient for a group of people to discuss diversified topics, because it is threaded. The disadvantage, in my opinion and in this case, is that it has to open a new small window to view contents, which is very awkward and time-consuming. There are other threaded discussions that will add a post directly under the last post when you hit the “post” button, which might be better. I used Live Classroom once, and Voice Board once, only for testing reason because they were the content of the group project in that week. The advantage of Live Classroom is it’s being an synchronous supplement for an asynchronous web-based class. It solved the problem of distance so that people located in different places can join in together and have one “class”. The disadvantage was when there are lots of people in the class, it is very hard to speak without bumping into each other’s voice. The advantage of voice board is it’s being a supplement for the text-based instructional interface, and it is asynchronous so shy students do not have to worry when they speak to record their voices. I never used the chat room, but I think it is pretty much like the Google chat and the chatting function in Live classroom, thus the advantage in my opinion would be it’s synchronous feature and text-based feature which provide some people who prefer secure environment to communicate without speak or chat face-to-face. The disadvantage was that, when it comes to a lot of people, participants will get lost because after they finished typing and hit the enter button, they can no longer locate their last post easily because of the fast rate of new postings.

5. How helpful did you think the group work in this class was? Explain why?
Actually the group work was my favorite part in this course. On the other hand, it helped me feel that this is really a class, with peers and instructors. I enrolled four courses this summer, one hybrid and three online ones. I almost felt separated from everyone and lost the sense of having a class. It was the group work made me feel that I am not alone and I am with people. On the other hand, group work deepened and expanded my understanding about the topics provided by the instructor. When we discuss on a topic and evaluate a tool, we present our own opinions and listen to others, and we took turns to had our speak-time, it was like an online seminar, in which we will fear from others different voices and different perspectives to view things, something that you might not think of, such as educational usage of a certain tool, you may get it from others. And personal ideas could be narrow and shallow; hearing from others may tackle this because other opinions help one jump out of his/her own method to think.

6. Suggestions for the instructor to consider in the future:
This is a good course. You just need to spend time to learn new things. I think it might be good if the first several handouts would be about the general introduction about this field, telling people what is telecommunication, what’s the current application in education, what would you do if you want to become an expert in this area. This would provide an overview to students so we can go deeper and deeper later with these concepts in mind.

Artifact: Course Reflection