Blog Journal #9

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 My Experience with Distance Learning (so far...) 

My experience with distance learning has been nothing short of a sh** experience. I have often found myself extremely unmotivated in every aspect of my personal and academic life. Why should I do school work when I can lay in bed? Why do I have to wake up for classes when I can just sleep through them and do the work later? I honestly feel like I haven’t learned much this year, I feel like I’m just posting work at 11:59pm on Friday/Sunday and scamming my way through University. I know that is a sentiment that resonates with a lot of people. There are times when I get a short burst of productivity but they don’t last very long. This has simultaneously been the easiest and hardest year of my academic career. I honestly don’t know what I could do to improve this experience for myself or for my future students. 


Open Educational Resources (OER) 


Open educational resources are easily and freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing. When I typed this into the search bar, I found a website called opensource.com which took me to an article written in 2013 by Carolyn Fox. In the article, Fox describes why open resources are being used and how they are beneficial. She also offers a list of resources.  


PowerPoint Assignments  


These PowerPoint assignments drove me INSANE. I thought I knew all there was to know about making an effective PowerPoint presentation... long story short—I was wrong. The first assignment which required we present a lesson to a fictional student audience and record ourselves whilst doing so. Making the presentation was the easy part, recording it was where I wanted to rip my hair out. My microphone would not cooperate. I sounded fine in some parts but in other parts I was lagging like an iPhone on 1% battery. For the life of me I could NOT fix it so I eventually just gave up and submitted it as it was. For the second assignment I did an interactive PowerPoint trivia which was slightly better just more time consuming. I don’t think I ever want to do that again.  




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