The most memorable online learning experience for me personally was an online course that I took here at Uvic, EDCI 337. EDCI 337 or also known as Interactive Multimedia Learning. This class for me was particularly memorable for me because not only was it my very first online course ever but it allowed me to create different ways of teaching and learning. Growing up I had difficulties when it came to doing work, it wasn’t that I wasn’t able to do it however, it was the ways the teachers wanted me to do it. I would come home from school after just sitting in classes all day and essentially reteach myself everything because I didn’t learn it “right” the way they explained it. I remember even here at Uvic I took a Statistics class and had gotten a question wrong ,however, when I spoke to the professor about it they told me that in fact I got the right answer and I got it using a valid formula but it wasn’t the formula they wanted me to use so that’s why it was marked wrong. EDCI 337, moved away from that traditional way of teaching, just lecturing and black marker’s and whiteboards and actually created something immersive, captivating and inspiring. There were many different programs that we used such as Kahoot (Figure 1.), Powtoon (Figure 2.), Prezzi (Figure 3.) and much more.


Figure 1.


Figure 2.


Figure 3.

“Cognitive presence is a bit more abstract of a concept, but it basically covers looking at the entire learning process for ways to encourage students to think about their learning, reflect on that learning, and sharing their learning process with others. Examples would include encouraging learners to take ownership of their learning, building in reflection activities, and creating avenues for learners to share and interact with those reflections (for instance, by blogging).” (Crosslin, 2018). Throughout my whole semester in that class Cognitive Presence was absolutely present. With each assignment it wasn’t as mundane as answering questions and handing them in but creating educational content and sharing it with others and allowing one another to build off ideas, in some cases you were even allowed to use your content as a game and track progress and get feedback.

“The educational significance of communicative media is that they allow for interaction between learners and teachers, and perhaps even more significantly, between a learner and other learners, without the participants needing to be present in the same place” (Bates, 2019). Communicative media is in my opinion such a strength to this generation. We’ve heard stories from our parents and grandparents about how much reading they had to do and how everything was more independent. In this digital age of learning the amount of information one can obtain is immense however, we shouldn’t forget that human are social beings and need some sort of communicational path. Communicative media provides just that for everyone, there is no hierarchy or power, everyone’s input is important and most importantly there will be a way to teach everyone regardless of how they retain information. This experience has completely shifted my outlook on online classes and learning in general.

References
(2020). Retrieved 10 March 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XzfWHdDS9Q (Kahoot)

(2020). Retrieved 10 March 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRw3rMgtNiM (Powtoon)

(2020). Retrieved 10 March 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLMP6E5JSQM (Prezi)

Bates, A. W. (2019). 7.5 Broadcast or Communicative?. Retrieved from https://via.hypothes.is/https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/chapter/7-4-assessing-media-affordances-the-samr-model

Crosslin, M. (2018). Chapter 5: Effective Practices. Retrieved from https://via.hypothes.is/https://uta.pressbooks.pub/onlinelearning/chapter/chapter-5-effective-practices/