Unit 1 /Activity 4 - Role Play

Being a e-student!

Well, I will leave here my personal testimony and experience.

As a teacher I felt the thirst of enlarge my knowledge (and if possible to improve in my career). In my school I play coordination tasks, such as ICT Coordinator (now responsible for the Technical Component of the PTE) and administrator of the Moodle platform and other tasks that I have been assigned for, not to mention the many meetings that we have to watch.

I don’t have much time to spend with studies or trips to the university and attend classes.

Conciliating the family and professional life it’s a difficult task, well, and if we add one more task the academic life, more complicated it will be.

To have a husband, a four year old boy and a four month old boy asking for our attention during all day and all night, little time remains to dedicate to studies.

Another aspect that weighed in the decision to attend or not the course was the fact of having to spend extra money from the family budget to pay for the course and once the number of family elements would grow also the family expenses would increase too.

Once, it passed through my mind giving up this master, but, as this was something I always wanted, something related to technology, I decided to go ahead.

Since, this master can be done in part-time and this was a plus because I knew that I could never finish my studies in such a short time.

In this master we (e-students) have the opportunity to try and experience new programs, new technology and many virtual learning environments, and I consider this as something that I was looking for . It’s really a different learning style, which prevents exclusion of students with limited access to or little knowledge of high technology media.

We can work as a group, we can work in pairs, and we can work as a team. We can learn with our colleagues and with our teachers.

I’ve had so far very good experiences of working in group, working in pairs, and working individually at a distance.

Things can really work at a distance….i can access to each course everywhere and anywhere I want, I can work in building documents, search on the internet, talk with my colleagues just by having with me a computer (laptop) and a mobile net. I can choose during a 24 hour which time will be spent with each course and the best day of the week to work. I can access instantly to information and completely regardless of time. That’s what freedom of Time and pace means along with freedom of space.

Every new course that we start, there’s always so many new things to learn, so much new information, and many activities and tasks to develop. This can be done not only as an asynchronous way but also as synchronous. We have flexibility and option choice too. We can manage the time needed to spend with each activity or task. We can decide whether we want to deepen knowledge or to search information about related contents.
(This was posted on UAberta Moodle on Sunday, 15 November 2009 by 4:39 p.m.)