Evaluation of the campus week 2009

As I wrote in my mail to my teachers and my fellows, the week in Bergen was a great experience. I think it was nothing less than a change of perspective, an enrichtment of teaching philosophy. I wrote it in my last blog entry: the topics we studied in Bergen for me were not only about e-teaching, but about teaching in general.

Three things I liked best during this week:

• All these new tools! As I already said I consider myself to be indeed advanced in using computers. But now I know so much more about useful tools the electronic world has to offer. There are a lot of things I want to change in the near future, and I hope that some of the tools I utilized in this week will simplify and/or enhance my work.
• The warm and familiar atmosphere. Like in most other human beings my wellbeing depends on the quality of the relationships I have, and in this week I was surrounded by so really nice people! We had exactly the right blend of workload and concentration on the one hand and merry mood and informality on the other. That helped me a lot.
• Enough time for hands-on training. It was so important to be able to practice all these new tools we learned about, and fortunately we had time to “play” with the computer. I always need this time and it doesn’t work for me if I am guided at every step of the way without being able to practice on my own.

There would be more things to say what I liked, but I think most of this was already done in my previous blog entries.
So now my ideas for possible improvements:

• Like I already said during the course a few things were not so transparent in advance. For example Task 3. I don’t think that it is coincidence that none of us did this task properly. Mark and me didn’t do it at all. And in my case that was not because of lack of time or willingness, it was just because I didn’t know what to do. When I read the task description now I understand what to do, but I wasn’t able to understand that before the course. I think if you are not familiar with e-learning in general or it´s learning in special, you need more specific guidance in order to be able to do the task (i.e. giving an example how the product should look). Another point of lacking transparency: even if the material was in it´s learning, in advance I didn’t grasp the amount of work ahead of me, and this not only in the campus week, but also in the following weeks. It is just the same: as a complete novice it doesn’t help so much that the information is available in it´s learning, because I wasn’t familiar enough with it to really understand the meaning. For me it would have been clearer and easier to understand to receive this information in a medium I am more familiar with: easiest would have been a letter with a exact description of what is going to happen. “You are member of a course now with 10 ECTS. That consists of a campus week… and following weeks of work on several tasks…”. Even if the information was available in it´s learning, I wasn’t able to access and understand it, because of my novice status.
• For me the idea of screen lectures is very very interesting. I think this is an important tool in e-teaching. For me it would have been a good idea to see more about screen lectures (i.e. available tools), and ideal would have been the possibility to make a screen lecture myself. But I understand that this is not possible without better preparation. Perhaps that would be possible: all of us had an idea what to develop as an e-course for virclass. How about a preparation task (very transparently described :-)): “watch one of the existing screen lectures (best the one by you, anne Karin, “introduction to the epedagogy-course), prepare a text that could serve as basis for a screen lecture of you on the topic you want to develop as an e-course, and be prepared to practice this making of a screen lecture during the campus week”.
• A change of hotel would be a big improvement, even if this has nothing to do with the course itself. Very good about this hotel was the free internet access, but that´s about it. If possible it should be nearer to the College, not so noisy, and a raise of standard wouldn’t be bad either :-) We´ve been working very hard in these days, and I think it is no unreasonable demand to live a little bit better, even if our home universities receive somewhat higher bills.

The last task in “evaluation of the campus week” is about my expectations for my own work in the next weeks. What I want to do is to really develop my e-course of mental disorders for virclass. I have specific ideas about how to do this, and I will do my very best to meet all the tasks lying ahead of us, because my goal for the final assignment is, that my developed course will meet your standards of courses for the virclass project.

And a final comment to the teachers? You did great work, you are committed, you are engaged, and all of this helped me a lot! Thank you very much for that week!