HRE 490 - Foundations of Online Teaching and Learning
HRE 490, Foundations of Online Teaching and Learning, was the first course in the HRE eLearning program. Some students call it "boot camp," and it was indeed like that in many ways. As someone coming in to the program with a non-academia background, much of this information was completely new to me -- but very exciting to learn about. The idea of the course, looking back, was to provide us initial exposure to topics we would revisit in later courses. Some of the topics covered included:
To learn these topics, students were asked to create an eLearning Guidebook, as part of a proposal for a fictional eLearning program. Weekly research was conducted to develop this guidebook, and this guidebook can be viewed here. A final presentation was also required to accompany this guidebook. The other primary assignment was the initial development of this ePortfolio. The portfolio has evolved significantly from its initial form, but the reason I chose Google Sites can be found in an assignment I completed below. Also below are all my submitted assignments, and my weekly reflections from the course.
As part of this e-portfolio assignment, I researched electronic portfolios. I read the basics of e-portfolios via Wikipedia, then reviewed the basics of e-portfolios through the e-portfolio link at Penn State University (http://portfolio.psu.edu). One of my colleagues successfully used his PSU e-portfolio to land his job. A third page I used for research is, in my opinion, the best "one-stop shop" for e-portfolio comparisons out there. Dr. Helen C. Barrett has created her e-portfolio in more than 30 different online tools, including Google Sites. Of those Dr. Barrett reviews, three stood out to me: WikiSpaces, PBwiki, and Google Sites. I'd never used any of the three. WikiSpaces has a nice Wikipedia type look to it. We use PBwiki as part of the HRE 490 course for a course collaboration point. And Google Sites has the name Google attached to it, so it has to be good, right?
I ultimately chose Google Sites because I am a frequent user of most of Google's other tools, such as email, the newsreader, the calendar, and other tools. I like the idea of having all these tools tied to a single point, and I like being able to add the gadgets like you see on several of my pages here. In fact, the "Coursework" and "Reflections" sections below are actually Google gadgets that display those pages on this page. Pretty neat!
References:
Barrett, H.C. (2008). My "online portfolio adventure". Retrieved January 11, 2009, from http://electronicportfolios.com/myportfolio/versions.html
Electronic Portfolio. (2009, January 10). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved January 11, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_portfolio