Reflection (Contribution to My Learning) - 5318

This Instructional Design (EDLD 5318) course was one of my favorites in my Lamar program so far. I enjoyed being given time and direction to create a course for future use. In my current role at our district, one of the things that I do is train staff on how to use technology in their classrooms. I have been thinking about creating some online courses via Google Classroom for teachers to utilize as they choose and this course gave me the push that I needed to start working on it.

I realized rather quickly that while I can get a course together quick, it is better if I take the time and make it more valuable. I realized that I had a lot of videos in my Google Classroom course that I created and while videos are good, I don't want just videos so I'm working on help guides and other resources to use as well. The timing was hard to get some input from peers due to state testing and end of year things taking up a lot of their time and energy. However, I was able to get four people either from my Lamar class or my peers in education, their names were Ashley, Kristi, Mackenzie, and Martha.

I will admit that due to the chaos of testing "season" (I'm also our District Testing Coordinator), I did not have much collaboration with my Lamar peers outside of the discussion boards. However, I enjoyed that this course allowed me to extend my peer group by bringing in educators that are not part of my Lamar courses. The three educators that I was able to get outside of Ashley who was from my Lamar group, all three were from different districts so I enjoyed the different feedback they provided.

I did realize that it is hard to get feedback on what I need to improve upon. I saw many areas I could improve upon such as adding resources other than videos, making the class more visually appealing, and changing up the module lengths and amounts. However, the feedback I received from peers was that it was a good course and they felt as though they would be able to learn what was needed and meet the objectives with the course I had provided. I think that maybe they don't know what they don't know and maybe don't see that it could be better. To help improve, I am also looking at different online courses that I've been a part of outside of Lamar and taking things that I like from those and will use them in the future.

While I think I did well on the assignments due to my interest in the material, I continue to struggle with the discussion posts and collaborating more with my peers in my courses. I did my initial discussion posts on time and completed replies to peers, but honestly I did what I needed to do and not much more. I have struggled with this through the entire Lamar program. I think part of that is due not giving myself enough time to really dig into the posts as well as the fact that I have a strong group of educators that I work with and bounce ideas off of and I feel like I get alot from that group outside of Lamar.

I believe that I did better in this course than I have in previous courses simply because of my interest in the material. I think that my self-assessment grade for this course is a 90 out of 100.