Contribution to My Learning (Assess Digital Learning - EDLD 5315)

I’ll be honest that when I first learned this was a research class I thought I was going to dread the entire course. However, we weren’t even through the first zoom session for class when I realized that this was going to be different from the research I was thinking about. I learned quickly that action research was going to be all about me! I wasn’t going to have to research something that didn’t really fit into my situation, I was going to be spending my time focusing on something that was directly impacting me in my job. I learned that action research was completed by educators to focus on a very specific topic pertaining to them. It did not take long for me to get involved in this class and actually enjoy completing my literature review instead of somewhat dreading it like the first one I had to do! 

Starting with my Innovation Plan in mind, I started to think about what I wanted the focus of my action research to be. I started by creating an Action Research Outline to sort out my thoughts and get things in order to progress with my action research. I then researched and completed that Literature Review that I enjoyed, instead of dreaded! Finally, I worked to develop my Action Research Plan to guide me going forward. 

I liked how in this course the discussion questions that we had to do were directly tied with the assignments that we were creating. I also liked having set deadlines for those discussion questions so that it helped me make sure that I was doing them while working on the assignments they linked to. Not all of my courses had deadlines like this, nor did I feel that some of the discussion questions in previous courses really helped with the assignments. I made sure to complete all discussion questions and reply to my peers in most of the posts. I'll admit, this last discussion post got away from me and I didn't do any replies, but completed replies for the rest of the posts. I appreciated getting resources and ideas from the posts throughout the course. 

Another thing in this course that I found very beneficial were the class meetings that we had. I appreciated that we only had enough for what we needed and didn’t have them just to have class. I also liked the office hours that were in place of class on the weeks we didn’t need to have a full class. 

I believe that I participated in this course more than I have in some of my previous courses due to the fact that the topic was enjoyable, the discussion questions were relevant, and the class meetings were just enough but not too much. However, I could have participated more in replies and engaged more with my peers to get more out of the course. I would give myself a grade of 90 out of 100 for my participation in this course.