End of orientation

How can it be that the first two weeks of classes are over already and we are off to Bower Place tomorrow!!!! I feel like I have been glued to the Moodle for two weeks prior to orientation and now it is over.

What a good two weeks it was though! Full on but I think everyone, lecturers and students included all finished up with a sense of achievement. On Friday, only 7 students had yet to log on to Moodle. Out of the seven only one had attended an elearning session and she had just forgotten her password, so I think that is pretty good considering we had 40 students(?).

I have been really impressed with the students interacting on the Moodle. I created a new student account today as part of the video tutorials I have been creating for students (see http://elearningtutorials.blogspot.com) and when I logged into the classroom for Certificate IV I could see all the postings in the last ten days which includes around 230 postings made by students:



In the elearning sessions I ran I encouraged students to post their questions to the appropriate forums and I also encouraged them to answer each others questions if they could and they have really risen to the challenge.

I truly believe the orientation sessions are so important, especially to get them excited and really keep reinforcing the notion of community!!!

We are also using blogs for online journals and I think most students have created them. We have had some issues with privacy and I will collate a list of students email addresses and then everyone can invite each other to read their blog and set their blog up to be invited readers only. In hindsight I would do more investigation on privacy - I hadn't anticipated students having so many issues with other people outside of the class reading their blogs.

I am hoping the videos I have created at http://elearningtutorials.blogspot.com will help everyone with the blogs and the moodle. I will keep creating these as we go along with the aim of having a complete set of them for the students next time around. I also have handouts for some tasks and they are on this site as well.

I really would have like longer for the elearning orientation sessions (moodle and blogs) - I was meant to have a full day with all students but only ended up with 3 hours as we couldn't get computer suites all day!!! Students also stated they would have liked longer. It would have been handy to have some time in the second week also to troubleshoot problems.

There was only a small number of students who didn't have basic computing skills. In retrospect it would be good to be able to identify these students and get them some assistance prior to the orientation sessions. Although these students will have access to me in Bower Place on Wednesday afternoons and all day Friday from tomorrow it would have been good to alleviate some of their stress before the orientation sessions - I worry they will be behind the eight ball now. Though having said that, other students have been really helpful and I have been on the Moodle answering any queries every night and weekends so they haven't gone unassisted.

Overall though, I am very pleased with the outcomes from the last two weeks and can't wait to see what happens next! :-)