Looking Back – Looking Forward

Looking back: One year ago, today, I was finishing seven hours of video production work, compiling several hours of Zoom training videos into one 30-minute Teaching with Zoom tutorial for our faculty members. I was not alone during this mid-week of March 2020; instructional designers like me from around the country had shifted into high gear to support instructors transitioning to fully-online teaching due to campus shutdowns under the Coronavirus pandemic. Even today, I join many across the globe who are reflecting back on the struggle of the past year’s COVID-19-induced educational crisis. But we can all acknowledge that e-learning has served us well….

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Rapid Response Teaching & Learning in the COVID-19 Crisis with Zoom Video-Conferencing Technology

For those of us in online education, the necessary response to the COVID-19 pandemic was clear, but certainly not simple. Just as we had done for our global campus students, we needed to employ a video-conferencing technology for our on-campus courses as well. This would be a challenge for everyone: students, faculty, seminary staff, and particularly the educational technology team. And like many educational institutions around the world, this transition had to come rapidly in response to this Coronavirus-induced educational crisis. . .

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Connectivism as Pedagogy

The beauty of a blog is that it provides one with a platform to express an opinion, to agree or disagree with the most brilliant of minds. The blog provides validity to a voice, although possibly an artificial one. For, who am I to say? I am just me; but this is my blog; so I get to say. But how do we sift through all of the voices – including our own? This is, I believe, what George Siemens is concerned about, when he addresses the need to synthesize fragmented information distributed online – to make meaningful connections – . . .

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