Personal experience

Hello Everybody!

Before we jump down the rabbit hole into the topic of online learning from a research point of view, I think it’s a good idea to take a minute to talk about my personal experience with online learning and ask oneself a question: what is online learning for me?

Personally, the first things that come to my mind when I hear online learning are the various specialized web-services that are now widely popular: edX, Coursera, Lynda.com, Udemy, Khan Academy, iTunes U, and many others (sorry if I didn’t mention your favorite). However, I remember how some of these sites started out in the beginning, and they were much different than now.

From this perspective, my journey into the world of online learning began with Lynda.com and VideoCoPilot.net sometime around 2007-2008. Back then I had tremendous interest in the various new editing software that could help work on images, drawings, videos and other graphics. Also, the infamous Adobe Creative package was really taking off at this point, and Lynda.com and VideoCoPilot at that point were really the two go-to places to learn how to use these applications. At that time, these sites only had various training videos, which got bundled together into thematic courses on Adobe Photoshop or Indesign, for example. These systems lacked interactivity and testing of the knowledge gained, thus limiting the educatory use. But as we know those were just the beginning.

As a side note, around this time was also when our school introduced an online learning platform to exchange learning materials and submit homework, called Moodle. While it wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind when thinking about online learning, it is defiantly a big part of this topic. Even though Moodle was a basic platform in comparison with what we have now, it provided a lot of functionality and we will definitely talk about such systems in the near future.

The next big turning point that I remember is the introduction of iTunes U to iPad sometime around 2012. This was a whole different beast altogether, because these courses that were not based only on video material, but rather had a mix of various mediums. Text, video, interactive visual materials, and most importantly tests and quizzes on the material covered. Testing of the covered material made a big difference for me, as now it created a strong incentive to study the entire material, remember what is covered in order to extract more value from the course. At the same time, the flexibility of learning was retained, which in my eyes is one the most important advantages for online learning.

Overall, the newest courses in my opinion are quite close and build on the ideas that we started seeing around 2012. Flexibility, interactivity, and testing of the covered material in my opinion are the core parts of these courses and what the build on. What is your experience with online learning? Have you ever tried using online courses, and how did you like it? Please leave comments below.

Daniil Domanevski