Welcome to the course! We are very excited to be working with you!
If you have never taken an online course before, this will be an exciting and challenging one for a starting experience. New online students often struggle when not having the teacher present. So, online instructors do many things to make a class more structured for students, including very prescribed activities with set expectations, many step-by-step instructions, and patterns for due dates and assignments so students know what to expect.
This course features none of those.
One of the concepts we will be looking at in this class is the difference between a personalized class and a traditional class. What we described above would be a traditional class, even if it is online. A personalized class is very different, as students have much more control over many different aspects. While this "freedom" sounds great on the surface, many students struggle with that freedom.
Of course, this class is delivered in a highly-personalized manner (at least, highly-personalized compared to any of the other AEA PD Online courses). This is to give you the experience of online learning as a student, which helps you make some judgments about this mode of learning. This will cause some anxiety, and our purpose is not to make you feel lost. We will use these "daily" announcements (they won't be every day) to help anchor you a bit, but you still will have quite a bit of freedom in this course. Each day, we will list activities for the day and links to them... these are suggested, and they often span over multiple days. We will also list "upcoming due dates". You will want to make sure that you are on top of due dates, even if they are a few days off (you can always work ahead of schedule if you would like). The first of these announcements will be coming out on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2017.
What can you do in the meantime? Here are a few activities that will help you to begin grounding you in this course.
Activities
Read over the course information section found
here. This includes:
Course Overview
Course Instructor Information and Grading Policy
Course Calendar
Course Announcements
Links to Course Forums
Links to Small Group Discussion Forums
Course Tutorials (Scrible and Jing)
2. Subscribe to the Daily Announcements forum found
here. Select "options" and "Subscribe via email".
As we mentioned at the beginning of this email, students new to online learning may struggle with the feeling of not having a teacher present. In this class, you not only have one, but you have two of us to help facilitate your learning. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask. You can email us at:
Mary Trent at mjtrent@kuemper.org
Deborah Cleveland at dcleveland@aeapdonline.org
We are looking forward to the next month.
Mary and Deborah
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