Self-Coding Activity and Reflection
Reflection
After I have completed categorizing my posts according to the different phases of the critical inquiry model, I would like to briefly share my thoughts about the cognitive strategies that I used during the course by answering the following questions:
Did you engage in each of the phases of the critical inquiry process?
All my posts can be categorized as one or two of the phases of the critical inquiry model; however, I put many of them under the categories of exploration and integration. I think in each lesson I was very focused on understanding the nature of existing shortcomings in online education and obviously on searching for possible answers and solutions.
Were you able to resolve any problems or dilemmas?
The ideas presented in the course “Engage” about promotion of social presence were very practical and to a great extent cleared up the area. Before doing this course, I had little information about the importance of social presence in online education. The presented approaches to effectively promote trust and a sense of community among learners are key in ensuring maximum interactions of learners with the content and teacher.
What might you do differently in a future course?
The thing that I will do differently in a future course is to emphasize more on collaboration and dialogue among learners. I think this can be a good starting point for critical discourse, involving students, assessing the state of knowledge, and generating constructive ideas. I, as a teacher will direct the discourse and provide learning activities that are engaging and aligned with the learning objective.
How might you engage with your students to ensure that they are working through the entire inquiry process?
I will try to explain this inquiry process and the phases of the critical inquiry model in a simple language to students. I think this will take time but it’s worth doing it as students should eventually grasp the point behind all these theories. Having said that, educators should be very cautious on their selected approaches and topics for introducing self-coding and promoting reflection because students can easily get overwhelmed and bored by these concepts.
Do you think that working through this course in an open platform like WordPress helps to encourage reflective learning?
Most definitely. The whole idea of internet was to offer an open and neutral platform for expressing and sharing ideas, views and different formats of contents. People can use different formats in expressing their thoughts and that’s the beauty of using a platform like WordPress for a course. Now I appreciate more the value of such tools than before after knowing about the CoI model. Learners need to be connected through their views, by exchanging ideas and sharing their knowledge and all these things are possible by utilizing all these web-based tools such as WordPress and similar platforms.