Now that you have seen what other people did in creating their units, is there anything that you might do differently if you were to redesign your own unit?
First of all, I thought designing the unit with my partner, Kar Hwee, was an incredibly rewarding experience. I appreciated how we tempered each other with perspective and enriched each other’s experience with creativity and alternate approaches. I wouldn’t trade that experience at all.
I liked the LMS we chose to use, Moodle. I found so many useful tools within Moodle, but given more time, I would have explored many more of the add-on modules that are available within the system. Some of them, such as the oral presentation tool Nanogong, were incredibly useful and innovative, and they allowed us to open up the teaching and learning experience to tools that I wouldn’t have originally thought to utilize. There are so many of these modules that sometimes, the research can be overwhelming. Having others help to sort through those options is key to offering the richest subunits a teacher can muster.
More than anything, I gained a sense of how time-consuming it is to be an outstanding online teacher. For one unit, we probably spent a combined total of hours that would exceed four times what I would spend as an in-classroom teacher. The experience of building a productive online unit confirmed what I have read in several of our resources: don’t underestimate the time it takes to be an exceptional online teacher. What might originally seem like relatively straightforward tasks can easily evolve into an incredibly labor-intensive project but one that can offer enormous rewards in both creativity and overall understanding.
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