I work in the Business & CIS department at Dubai Men’s College. I first experienced on line learning getting to grips with WebCT when Rob Peregoodoff was the college coordinator. He was really helpful and I realized that the best way to learn something was to have a go but to have access to “just in time” training support as well. I became quite adept at using WebCT and could upload audio recordings for online quizzes and other bits which felt quite advanced at the time. Then it changed to Blackboard and I found that everything I knew how to do was redundant, which was incredibly frustrating. So I started using Moodle – which I thought was pretty good. At that point I completed the qualification to be a Certified Member of the Association of Learning Technologists. Then I got another role at DMC and stopped teaching! I have just returned to the class room and have started using BB Vista more frequently.
As a course administrator my most positive and memorable experiences of educational technology was learning how to write the HTML code to incorporate and audio clip into a listening test! But as an educator I really valued taking the opportunity for the students to use independent learning for some of my class time in an Ethics course. This meant I could focus on smaller numbers of students each week. Even now, nearly 10 years later many of my old students will tell me how much they enjoyed and remember that course.
I do have a number of concerns about the use of education technology. The technology changes so fast and its capacity is expanding so quickly that the cycle of “storming, forming, norming and performing” never seems to get fully completed. We always seem to be in the storming or forming stage.
The article by John Page contains a number of good points which I agree with. Expansion of time and place is definitely a benefit of educational technology. However, I think the key to effective use of educational technology is to always remember that the purpose of education is to find out information or develop skills which we can use in the real world. For that reason, Emirates Airlines spent millions on flight simulators so they could enhance the training if their pilots and make it more cost effective in the long run. But the skill they were interested in developing was an ability to fly and land a plane safely in real conditions – not in a simulator.
We need to ensure that with educational technology we always use it because it is the best option available in the circumstances – not a convenient but less appropriate alternative (like sending an email instead of walking across the office to talk to someone!)
By taking this course I am hoping that I will improve my skills not only in how to use educational technology, but also when.

The course I will choose for my project is BUS 1103 Economcis for Managers. It is a Semester 1 course in the new Business Bachelors programme. It uses on line material from Pearson MyLabs so I think has a structured use of educational technology which will be helpful for me in this module