MINI-COURSE REFLECTION

            I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that we will have a chance to put our experience and knowledge to create a mini-course on Moodle. Liberty to develop learning content on whichever topic we choose was particularly significant for me since this is my first time creating an online course. My group is diverse, so we decided to stick with a topic that is somehow familiar for all of us - teacher's skills such as effective questioning, active listening, and consensus-building skill.
            Regarding the quality of groupwork and final product, I can say that I am satisfied knowing that we only had a couple of weeks to develop our learning material and integrate it into the Moodle platform logically and effectively. From my experience, creating a course is a continuous and never-ending process. Even when I start implementing the course, in every cycle, I would always change something as myself going through the learning process what is functioning well and what does not. Speaking of that, I am aware that there are undoubtedly many things that we can improve and make it better if we had more time. However, as I already said - I am satisfied with how it all went. I believe that there is no specific formula or rules how one course should look like, and I find true beauty in that - creating something with no strict barriers. Every educator is different, and every educator has his own way of teaching and pedagogies he values and respects. Hence, the goal of all educators should be that learners get valuable knowledge and/or skills from their learning contents and be able to visualise how those would help in their future professional work or life in general. I firmly believe that our mini-course is able to provide the goals mentioned above. Content that we provided in the course related to 'Questioning', 'Listening' and 'Consensus-building' should be used as possible tools in the classroom work and should not be perceived as the only 'right one'. On the final day of course creation, all of us went through the course's content and did final check out.
During the development of this mini-course, I was working on two modules - 'Questioning' and 'Consensus-building', together with my peers, Sadia and Marina. Since I am a real pragmatist, I was mostly engaged in creating a group and individual activities of these two courses, self-assessment quizzes, but I also reviewed and made suggestions for improving the rest of the modules' content. I can say that was real group work. During the creation of the course, we tested different solutions until we found the one that we perceive as the best at the moment. I find particularly valuable suggestions and comments of McRhon and Viktoriya as they represented "fresh eyes" for our modules. Sometimes, the course designer has difficulties seeing how a particular part looks like for the learner, and our peers provided me with that perception giving me space and a chance to improve modules. To visualise how the course will be conducted, we conducted the facilitator's manual. I was engaged in creating a facilitator manual for Module 2, and together with Marina, I have created a Module 3 facilitator manual. 
            My experience significantly helped me during the process. A couple of years ago, I created a course with over ten topics, and over 600 people went through it. Therefore, I was fully aware of what kind of issues could come during a course's conduction. Indeed, the online and face-to-face environments do not ultimately provide the same conditions for implementing the course; therefore, it was valuable and challenging for me to "be thrown into the fire" of creating an online course. I am genuinely grateful that I got a chance to be engaged in this type of process, and I am sure it will help me in my future professional work.