Online Course Development

Ok, I’ll admit up front that I did not devote what one could call ‘quality’ time to the webquest assignment involving zunal.com. That is, unless keeping one eye on the monitor and one eye on my son’s homework can be called ‘quality’. But hey, such is life. Something tells me many others out there deal with these same quality issues.

In a way, restricting the activity to simple searches on a handful of search engines was beneficial. It revealed how restrictive it is to use only general words or terms. In my case, I used the word wilderness, or term wilderness management. In future searches, I would be a bit more specific about the topic I’m seeking help with. Rather than simply using wilderness, I’ll try wilderness recreation, wilderness and fire management, or something similar.

I used four search engines: Ted.com, Merlot.org, YouTube Edu, and Science Daily. When entering the term wilderness management, only one of the four came up empty:

Success with the other engines varied. The best result was with Science Daily:

I was reminded of how liberally the word ‘wilderness’ is used in science and natural resource circles. It is seemingly used to refer to a variety of lands containing some type of wild character. Even in the Science Daily reference, I am not convinced that this technology would actually be used in wilderness areas. The Wilderness Act of 1964 mandates that no mechanized use be allowed in wilderness areas. There are caveats of course, but I don’t believe this is the case with the technology referenced by Science Daily.

Overall, though my search results this time around were less than stellar, I the exercise opened my eyes to some new sources of information. I imagine that I will use zunal.com again, or simply utilize one of the engines contained within. Of course, it pays to enter the activity with a specific, focused topic in mind. Otherwise, time slips away (and leaves you with nothing mister, but…)

Now, normally I’m a “fools jump in” type of person, but I have to confess this blog post idea took me back a bit: I felt a bit vulnerable just going for it and posting without complete crystal guidelines as to what I meant to be doing, so I was glad when Olga (thanks Olga!) asked for some more guidelines on what we should be posting about. And this comes from me, one of the “Gen-Y kids” who should be totally all over “new” (I guess blogging has been around for a while now) technology!

It turns out being given too much freedom of scope for an assignment can be a scary proposition for a student! This was an important lesson for me: if I find not having an explicit set of guidelines for an “assignment” difficult, than how would undergrads feel if I did the same to them?

–Alana