Previously on EDDE:AU:MOODLE

I think  my interactions with Autumm in virtual connecting made me want to create  a little trailer with dramatized highlights from my doctoral studies thus far.  Alas, no budget for extras, scripts, sets, and green screens, so I guess I'll leave it to plain text for now ;-)

This week marks the beginning of my second year at Athabasca's EdD program (survived year 1!), and I just began EDDE 803: Teaching and Learning in Distance Education. At the risk of sounding like an overachiever, when I received my textbooks for in June I ended up reading through them while I had some free time in the summer.  Luckily (it seems) that the bulk of the reading for EDDE803 is those two textbooks, so (with any luck) I won't be buried under a ton of additional articles to read.  This course seems to focus a lot on distance education teaching and instructional design, both areas that I am familiar with already due to my background in instructional design and my own teaching online for the past few years.  In EDDE 803 I want to take the opportunity to perhaps explore areas of distance education that I am not actively practicing - such as distance education that is not online.

For this course I am also undertaking an required teaching internship where I will be assisting an existing faculty member with the course that they are teaching. The course I've been paired with is MDDE 620: Technology in Education and Training, which is one of the courses that Athabasca offers to their MEd program students. I had access to the moodle course for 620 last week and I've already gone in and started comparing methods and approaches to teaching (and assessing) to my own experiences both as a learner and as a teacher.  The group of students in MDDE 620 are actually part of the "Greek Cohort", a program that AU just launched last year (as far as I know). Before I logged into Moodle I had actually forgotten that I was the TA in the Greek Cohort, so as I was going down the list of student enrolled in the course I was astonished at how many Greeks from Greece there were in the course...and 30 seconds later when memory kicked in, I realized that I was in the Greek Cohort. #facepalm.

This is going to be an interesting exercise for me. In a room full of Greeks my natural inclination is to just speak Greek.  However, the language of instruction in this Greek cohort is still English!  Even if the language of instruction were Greek (which would have been interesting in its own right), there is another small problem to overcome:  My academic language proficiency in Greek is pretty lacking.  Since I left Greece at the end of Middle School, my Greek is perfectly fine for every day conversations, but I really lack the vocabulary and ability to work in the academic register.  I can actually pull it off in an asynchronous mode, but I in synchronous environments  I constantly code switch.

Anyway, here is to year 2 of my EdD program!  May it go well, and may knowledge flow freely!

So, what are you up to this semester?

NOTES:
EDDE:AU:MOODLE is a reference to the comedy NTSF:SD:SUV

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