Emerging Trends & Technologies in the Virtual K-12 Classroom
Institution: UCIrvine (Coursera)
Date: Aug 18, 2014 - Sep 22, 2014
Bio: "Emerging Trends & Technologies" is part of a four course Specialization Certificate for Virtual Teaching on Coursera. The technology trends they cover focus on supporting 3rd party resources that can increase class engagement; rather than the learning management systems used to structure and administer online courses.
This was the second offering of the course, and they decided to make all four weeks of the course content available at the start in a 'pace yourself' fashion. Each week's worth of material took about ninety minutes to consume, and was presented well with a conversational and informative tone.
While they introduce some general concepts of evaluating technologies, the majority of the course content is focused on looking at specific resources and stating their merits/limitations.
Accomplishments: Compared to the other courses in the series so far; the quizzes were shorter, more engaging, but still trivial to ace. The peer graded project was once again a prompt for the student to think and discuss the topic on their own, rather than implement anything from what they learned in the course. For me, this completes three out of the four courses in the Virtual Teaching Specialization.