Learning Theories and DE Assignment

Well, just last week I finished assignment #2 in the MDDE 603 course. It was a collaborative assignment that I worked on with three other people. It was a different experience doing this type of project in a distance learning course. We used e-mail as the primary collaborative tool. It went really well because the people I was working with were very efficient and had a good work ethic. This is my second experience working with others in a distance education environment and I enjoyed it even more than I did the first time.

The assignment involved applying learning theories to suggest changes in a distance education course. The theories we chose were Cognitive information processing (CIP), Ausubel's meaningful learning theory, schema theory, and I chose constructivism. One of the complaints I have about the masters program I am doing is that it does not provide the means to participate online using synchronous technology (i.e. Elluminate Live!). I was pleased with the assignment overall and I hope we get a good mark.

Now I am starting the unit about motivation as a part of the learning process. Being a junior high teacher I have first-hand experience about the effect of motivation on learning. I hoping to learn a bit about how I can better motivate my own students.