End of 1st Week Reflections

I had this impression before I started this course that online schooling is all multimedia with no teacher interaction at all. Finding this out this week was a big surprise.
At the end of the week, I was left wondering how can we address all the con arguments mentioned on this week's discussion forum so virtual schooling can be improved.

Me and Online School/ing

I was born in Cairo, Egypt and now live in San Francisco, CA. I earned a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University then moved to the US to complete my masters in Computer Engineering at West Virginia University (WVU). Since graduation, I held several positions at Intel Corporation in the Bay Area in California and currently I'm a Training Program Manager in the Sales and Marketing Group. While at Intel, I have worked on a couple of technology in education assignments,the first was a project manager for the localization of an online learning solution SKOOOL and the second was a project manager for the deployment of 500 classmate PCs in rural parts of Egypt (Article). Outside of the office, I enjoy volunteering in the community, running, teaching a group exercise class, playing tennis, modeling and reading.

 

Over the last few years, I realized that education is at the heart of the change needed to sustain development in underserved communities, the kind of education that teaches people how to learn not the one that teaches facts. I then developed a strong desire to find a way to merge my information technology background and experience with my passion for education development in my country Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. This course will help me understand and evaluate existing online learning models, their success criteria and impact. I'm hoping to learn how technology is used in schools today as well as ideas on what’s still needed and how to improve.

I took a few online courses and deployed a few in my role as a training program manager, overall my experience has been positive. The flexibility and ability to research topics on the fly as opposed to the limitation of being in a classroom worked very well for me!

Dina