Self-Reflection

Transcript: 

 

In this reflection video I will elaborate on what I have learned during the ‘Teaching Adult Education Online’ course delivered by Open University of Cyprus. I will also talk about how this impacts my approach and believes towards online learning.

​

I will focus on 3 areas which I found important:

​

1. Teaching

2. Content

3. Social Presence

​

To set the scene, I want to mention that present Covid 19 pandemic and the sense of insecurity heavily impacts my participation in the whole IMAESC programme. Unexpectedly, the entire programme has been so far delivered through online learning. I have had little previous experience of online learning and I did not find it as successful as face to face learning environments. I was worried if studying online I will be able to connect with my peers, establish learning community and if I am fluent enough in appropriate technologies. Then, I realized that online teaching is already very popular and considering the current situation it may be a primary format of delivering adult education in the future. With this in mind, I was motivated to use the opportunity and engage with the course to improve my overall engagement and understanding of online learning. And I am grateful for that!

As I said, currently, my approach to online learning is shaped by experiences in 3 areas:

​

1. Teaching. I realized that following teaching strategies helped me to be more engaged:

 

• Emotions. During a synchronous sessions, hearing you Andreas express your current emotions in relation to the session, therefore making space for such expressions, helped me to feel more like a ‘human’ rather than ‘avatar’ and consider the learning space as safe. I think it is important to express feelings and emotions online as without physical presence and non verbal communication it is difficult to read the emotions of the other people.

​

• The power of personal encouragement. As I am not used to participating in online discussions I felt quite out of place contributing to our course discussions. A little message of encouragement really gave me a more confidence in my ability and value of my posts.

​

• Variety. Variety of teaching materials and variety of prompts to engage with, made learning exciting and adventurous. I enjoyed learning by reading reflections and personal experiences of other students, trying out new tools, collaborating. I learned that taking a risk in trying something new and possibly embarrassing myself has a great learning potential.

 

2. Content. The is a lot to talk about here but I will mention two theories which will impact my learning and research.

​

• Connectivism. I find this theory extremely relevant to how the knowledge is applied and extracted today. Inspecting everyday life through the prism of Web 2.0 and connectivism opened my eyes and stimulated to ask questions of how does current education responds to it? I think this question will stay with me through the duration of the programme.

​

• Transformative Learning. The article by Mezirow installed in me a conscious motivation to develop autonomous thinking by challenging my frames of reference. I think that within online learning environment, relating to new information by looking at my own previous experiences and attentively processing experiences of others, gives me such a possibility.

 

3. Social Presence. Interacting and learning with peers is what often determines how much I learn. Following strategies proved to be fruitful for me during this course and I wish to explore them further:

​

• Collaboration. It is always more difficult to complete a task in collaboration with others, especially when using new tools, not knowing eachother, interacting with new information. Nonetheless it is so much more rewarding and memorable! I got to gain new perspectives, fresh ideas and in depth understanding of new concepts! I am eager to try new tools and strategies for collaborative learning projects!

​

• Expressing emotions and talking about lived experiences. I already talked about it, but I want to reiterate one more time how beneficial I found to relate to peers and the teacher in this way, constituting my sense of belonging to a community and sense of interacting with ‘real people’. I have to be honest and admit that expressing myself in this way online is really difficult and challenging, I am certainly not 100% comfortable with it just yet, it is a process, but I am up for it!

 

To summarize, I believe that online adult education is full of potential but at the same time carries specific challenges which need to be addressed. I think it is extremely relevant to our contemporary, digitalised, distanced world and therefore important for adult educators to engage in.

​

Thank you for watching and listening!

​