Assignment 3 Final Reflection

Objectives and expectations

For this assignment, we had to choose a 4 hours on-line short course to blog our thoughts, expectations and experiences during this course. I wanted to compare this on-line course to in-class course which I had had in USYD last year. So I had a strong interest on it and would like to see the differences and find out the advantages and disadvantages.

In terms of expectation, I had a bit disappointment with the course I did. I expected that I would learn more about German which I couldn’t learn from the class. However, I didn’t expect that the effectiveness of this German on-line course would have more benefits compared with the German in-class course. From this point, we can see that e-learning still has a huge space to develop. I was still happy that I got a chance to do this language course online, luckily, not too long, only 4 hours.

A Learner’s Perspective and experience

Once I read the outline for this assignment, I had no idea what kind of courses which I could do it on-line and it only took 4 hours. Then Victoria said we could choose a language, German came into my mind at the first time. The reason I would like to choose German was I had said already that I had completed German beginner level in USYD last year. So this course would be easier for me to learn. I never thought of doing a language course on-line and for free, so I didn’t know where I could find such a course. The module activity guide provided the BBC website to do this online German course. Thus, I didn’t spend time on searching another German course and after I tried several times, the technology on BBC website was efficient; there were no speed or connection problems.

There were lots of aims of different modules and the basic aim for doing this on-line German course is provide “an introduction to German language and culture, designed for use in social and work contexts.” as the BBC website states. It sounds very attractive to learners who are interested in German language and culture but don’t understand German.

As a learner, from my perspective, I would like to learn new things by reading or writing and also involve some visuals and activities and proper feedback. The audio on BBC website was excellent and you could replay again and again. The learner activities like speaking, matching words and writing were effective and feedback was provided with matching words and definitions. Speaking feedback is essential and important to learn a new language; this technique was needed to develop in the future for the on-line course.

This course attracted me in the first hour and I enjoyed all the visual works and audios and activities. This one hour experience was the most interesting because it was fresh and new to me. By the course was going on, I felt border and border. The modules and features of this course were the same. This repetitiveness was really annoying and I would like to finish this course as soon as possible. (4 hours)

After I had done 4 hours German course, I realized that the traditional learning style was more suitable for me. I found I was easily to forget what I had learnt if I didn’t do any written work. I couldn’t ask any question when I was doing that course online. Another point, as a non-English speaker, the right pronunciation of German alphabets was necessary but it wasn’t provided online. However, I still believe that it is a good course for the people who want to have a basic overview of the German language and culture.

Conclusion
In conclusion, this online course was another activity I did added to my building blocks of knowledge. I need more time to build up the new skills to fit the online course. I still have learnt many things during learning this online course and experienced both positives and negatives. I think there is huge improvement and development for this course to become more and more effective and I believe that more and more people would like to spend time on doing an on-line course.