Week 4 Blog: OLT

Online Learning Tools (OLT)

The exposition to the many OLT this week is just awesome and amazing. I did not know that all these things exist; how naïve can I be sometimes. This week I was very excited as I trotted along trying to create my voki. It was a totally new experience and quite a challenging one, but through trial and error, I got my way through – this is all part of learning.

I am happy that we are being given these tasks to do because it actually made us aware of how demanding the role of e-facilitator is to bring about effective and successful learning online. We, as e-facilitators will have to be knowledgeable about what is happening in the world relative to OLT. I am grateful to come across the many OLT (web 2.0) that I will explore and can use in my course f0r 2013. I know it will take a huge amount of time to plan and prepare and ensure that the tools will be workable in our context.

Voki and the likes is a good way of getting out advertisements of important dates to students because once this is pasted on the course page, it’s for good, and the same information will be given to students regardless of time or place.

My current course does not have any assessments online; these are all done on face-to-face because of security issues. I know this can’t be always the case so with the assessment OLT, I will explore these and try to select the best for my use. The EasyTestMaker is a good one, but I do need to look at the others also.

With the OLT, an e-facilitator can make his/her virtual classroom as interesting and enjoyable just as a face-to-face facilitator does to his classroom. The success of an online course is dependent on the e-facilitator in bringing about his/her students of different countries in different places into the virtual learning environment to share and learning from each other’s experience and make the VLE the most exciting place to be.

The reading on ‘Myths of online learning’ is yet another contribution to enlighten us of the important role the e-facilitator will have to take not only in creating an interesting and enjoyable course, but also keeping in mind what he/she has to do in cases of technology limitations and prepares him/herself for it in providing his/her students with alternatives so that the learning does not stop when the internet connectivity is at fault.

 The e-facilitator is the KEY to successful online learning.

I enjoyed this week’s readings and work.

Many thanks to our e-facilitator.