Class Discussion Forum in E-Learning course
In my 6311 E-Learning management and strategy, I have come across a whole lot of new eLearning approaches. We have tried the second life and discussion forum in almost every session. Although my classmates and I kind of complain about the heavy load of those work in and after class, but when we look back, we always can find something useful we have learnt from those innovative activities.
The teacher asks us to post our answers to each week's reading topic questions, and then to ask and answer the questions between our classmates in the Moodle discussion forum. There is no right or wrong answers, and the more we post the higher grade we can get from them. So it turns out that all of our classmates are very motivated to post our thoughts, comments and doubts to other students' work. And that way, I realize that I eventually have achieved more that this class initially could offer. There, we share our personal learning experience, and raise question from our own daily study life. We discuss certain terms and concepts which appears in our reading, and then we put our work in the key term glossary to share the understanding with classmates. We also are required to write a reflection after each reading activity and course design activity in the Moodle discussion forum, so that we are asked to review our work again and usually I could always find out some parts of the work which still needs to be improved or revised.
So I think the discussion forum in my eLearning class is quite innovative because I have never come across it before. And with the help of the internet, we could just share a lot of useful resource, knowledge and information there. Actually, we call it a "risk-free environment" since the we are graded based on the amounts of our posts instead of what we write down. So we don't have to shy away or feel embarrassed to ask questions, share our own opinions or even to point out someone else's mistakes. Thus, we are encouraged to be creative and "bold", we have developed our critical thinking and collaborative skills by both working individually and together.