AET 541 E-Learning INSTRUCTOR: MAMDOUH M. MAHMOUD

Welcome to AET/541 where the knowledge and skills you have learned in this program are taken to the virtual context. If you are wondering which learning theory is more appropriate for the online environment, how students can be motivated online, how bloom’s taxonomy and other educational modules fit the online setting, this course is your gateway to tackle, research, experience and evaluate. My name is Mamdouh Mahmoud and yes, my first and last names are almost identical, they have the exact same letters but in different order and they both mean the same! What do they mean? You may ask! “Praiseworthy” is the meaning and I hope that I live up to that name. I am married with 4 children and they whole family spends most of the day in our Educational center where students of all ages come to learn different subjects and enjoy a great learning experience. My two oldest children do an online charter school program while my youngest ones go to a private school. My wife and I run the place with few other teachers and staff working for us. I always had a penchant for knowledge and education. I love to learn, teach and help others learn how to learn and teach. Yea! It is all about learning I guess! I love to apply the best of what I learn and learn about everything I do to be able to do it better. I hope you see this clearly manifested in our E-learning for Adults class. I am confident that with your dedication, participation and our lively and informative discussions, you will find that this course is really worth your efforts. Let us work together on making it a praiseworthy one! We will learn together how to connect the educational areas of instructional design, learning theories with technical tools for adult e-learning education and training. As part of this course, we will be discussing challenges arising within the E-learning environment. I always love to be online studying and participating in social media sites. At the same time, I find editing a video or audio challenging and time consuming let alone creating a website or a blog such as this one  this does not mean you stop and abandon what is challenging. Rather, research, find the best way to approach it and identify the resources that would make executing the task possible. This will surely turn to become a motivational experience that will lead you in a journey exploring areas you never thought possible. Recently, I just subscribed my business to Lynda.com, an educational site with plethora of information and training on literary everything that the modern professional, student, trainer will need. I forgot to mention that I love hunting, fishing, outdoors, sports and gardening. I’m curiously waiting to see your bios with all amazing and interesting lives and experiences. Posting your bios by the first day of class really helps all of us to get a head start by knowing the human in each other. This is really the core of all learning experiences, in my opinion of course! I am sure that all of us here are well aware of the importance of having goals and objective. Weekly objectives make the topics discussed in this course streamlined aligned with our readings and timelines. Cognitive overload is one of the challenges resulting from how information is presented. Having weekly objectives is a great solution for such challenge. Cognitive load is one of our topics in this course as well. Here are the run-down of our six weeks learning objectives: In week one, we will learn about learning theories and the most appropriate among them for the online setting. We will also learn about cognitive load, its types and ways to deal with it. In week two, we will learn about motivation, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and how to identify and use motivators for your class. We will learn how to start your own online classroom. In week three, we will learn more about Bloom’s taxonomy and how it is used in E-Learning environment. We will also learn how to incorporate the use of audio-visual tools for online learning. In week four, we will discuss the definition of the roles of both the learner as well as the instructor/facilitator in online settings. We will also discuss different instructional strategies for E-Learning environments. In week five, we will discuss how to support and strengthen the student-instructor relationship. We will also discuss the different types of feedback and reviews such peer-reviews. We will also discuss the instructor’s role with the continuous rapid technlonogicalchanges. In week six, we will discuss and lern how to evaluate the instructor’s role in designing courses that copes with the continuously changing technology. We will also work on understanding the proper use of copyright material. Hope you enjoy this interesting and important class, be part of this experience every step of the way and upon finishing, you will have all the skills needed to transfer all skills you learn to real life.