Moodle Week-11 Task

Teaching in 21^st Century

For the first article; I do agree with the author that today’s learners are digitally literate, mobile, always on, experiential and social, they have their own acronymic words that they use on their daily life communications; I do not agree with the author in his comparison between faculty & students which give a general impression that faculty do not use interactive networked learning and multimedia in their teaching approaches. I do agree with the author that new trend should be in collaboration learning within the team/group through the blended courses (face-to-face or online). I agree with him that technologies like wireless, video conferencing did help a lot in collaborative and mobile learning.          

For the second article; I totally agree with the author that learning by doing is the most effective way to learn; I consider it a real way to offer authentic learning to students. That is why I did choose to use a simulation tool in my project to offer my students a real world scenarios to achieve experiences and deep understanding with real work environment scenarios also they can reflect (metacognition) on their level of knowledge to know the areas where the need more information .

For the third article, I totally agree with the author that digital native and digital immigrants’ terms are context based terms and it has nothing to do with ages, I do agree that our peer-group influences the manner in which we use technology for socialization.

Generally; I agree that our role as a faculty is a facilitating/mentoring in learning process, developing the culture of lifelong learner to our students, using the technology that can be fit to achieve deep understanding to our students (simulations, video, audio,..), using a project-based which contain a real life scenarios.  

Moodle Week-9 Task

Gamification

Excellent article (http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=2031772) about using game mechanics to enhance eLearning; based on the concepts giving in that article I would say that my students “Target Audience” are really “wanting” this simulation tool as it give them the opportunity to practice most of  the lab  exercises and most of them are “liking” this tool. So it does worse “rewarding” for them to use the simulation tool which achieves students’ engagement and deep understanding “teacher’s rewarding”.

The simulation tool is built with a structural way to achieve short-term win (the easy parts assembly like computer’s power supply, DVD...) and long-term win (Assembling the whole computer unit), this fill in “Linear flow of Goal” model.

The simulation tool does have a “learn” section with written instructional “navigation” steps about the assembly process for each section in computer unit. Then another section call “test” is there to give a feedback to user about his progress (measure user progress) by letting him/her do the assembly in his own with different levels till last level of assembling the whole computer unit.

“Reward schedule” within simulation tool is not there, I think it is a good idea to have some reward points/coins but I can’t do it as I do not have the code for this simulation tool.

I think that some of the critical success factors of this simulation tool are simplicity and its user-friendly interface.