I wanted to professionally advance in my career hence was thinking of doing my Masters. From a long time I was trying to find a suitable course that is very flexible & suitable for my stream. I started talking to people in my college & I was surprised to find the number of staff who were studying either for their first masters or second masters or some doing doctorates. Then I got motivated & felt I should also do something. I had a desire to do my Masters as soon as I completed my Engineering degree but couldn’t do it because of family commitments. After talking to all my colleagues I got a very good feedback about USQ & also got excellent feedback about Masters in Education Technology. I looked into the cost of this course & it was quite expensive so I was hesitating whether to enroll or not one fine day I checked last date was already nearing and then finally I made the big decision & enrolled for this course.
I was very happy after I registered myself on this Masters. It was something that I always wanted to do. But still with the distance Masters I thought O.K it is very flexible I can study anytime & anywhere.
Yes the course is very flexible & totally different experience but you cannot just study anytime, you need to discipline yourself fix regular times for your studies. But yes the idea of studying from anywhere has worked perfectly well with me because I don’t have to leave my family & go anywhere to attend the classes, I can study at home, wake up early in the morning when my kids are sleeping & even when I was holidaying in Muscat in my brothers house last month with my family & my assignment was due I found it very convenient to work on my assignments online from there & submit it.
When I started the course I use to log in to USQ & then start reading the discussions & by the time I was ready to respond to them I got busy with my work. I kept doing this for a week At times when I wasn’t able to do activities in time & participate in online discussions it put me off a bit & then thanks to my course instructor Petrea who gave me a tip that there is no need to read all the discussions. This was a very good tip for me. From then on I started doing activities & also started posting my views on the discussion boards.
Now I have got the hang of the course I am thoroughly enjoying it. I love the discussion boards. You share & learn so much from each other in the forums.
I was very happy after I registered myself on this Masters. It was something that I always wanted to do. But still with the distance Masters I thought O.K it is very flexible I can study anytime & anywhere.
Yes the course is very flexible & totally different experience but you cannot just study anytime, you need to discipline yourself fix regular times for your studies. But yes the idea of studying from anywhere has worked perfectly well with me because I don’t have to leave my family & go anywhere to attend the classes, I can study at home, wake up early in the morning when my kids are sleeping & even when I was holidaying in Muscat in my brothers house last month with my family & my assignment was due I found it very convenient to work on my assignments online from there & submit it.
When I started the course I use to log in to USQ & then start reading the discussions & by the time I was ready to respond to them I got busy with my work. I kept doing this for a week At times when I wasn’t able to do activities in time & participate in online discussions it put me off a bit & then thanks to my course instructor Petrea who gave me a tip that there is no need to read all the discussions. This was a very good tip for me. From then on I started doing activities & also started posting my views on the discussion boards.
Now I have got the hang of the course I am thoroughly enjoying it. I love the discussion boards. You share & learn so much from each other in the forums.
When I look back & see the amount of skills that I have picked up along the way & all the knowledge I have acquired in just a matter of two months it’s amazing.
This course has been very helpful in my educational context as well. I had always heard about Blogs, Wikis & Podcasts but never felt a need to understand the intricacies of these tools and how will I utilize them in my educational settings. But now after reading a lot about all these tools I have got ideas how to make use of them at my work place.
I work in Library/ILC, this area has a great potential for all these new tools. I have decided to create Podcasts for different areas here in the Library. It could be used to disseminate news and information, provide audio tours of the Libray. I have already spoken to my supervisor to purchase some audio podcasts of books that we could upload on our ADWC podcast server and then we can look into ways of how we will loan them out to students. I could create a Blog for the Library and could have online reviews of the most popular fictions books of each month.
I read about Social Networking I was surprised to find that my 9 year old son is already a member of the google owned orkut community which they have setup to communicate with all his cousins who are in different parts of the world. I also liked the idea of social bookmarking. On our Library computers usually the teachers in ELC bookmark sites that they find are relevant for our students and at the end of the semester the list is compiled & organized according to semesters & then included on the image machine. Now I feel this will be the place to look for relevant information for bookmarking.
This is an article that really fascinated me. “Digital natives, Digital immigrants”. I agree with Mark Prensky. What he says is 100% true. We the Digital immigrants are the ones who have to empower ourselves with the changes in technology.
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
I am looking forward to learning loads of new stuff from this course that helps me to enhance my skills further.
