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t occurred to me that real learning requires the removal of classroom walls in the sense that students need to be made to feel empowered  in their ability to learn independently, as well as in the amount of information they learn. 

Personal stories give life to a faceless person, just as they do in literature.  We come to know, like, love, despise, and sympathize with characters the more we know about them.  Online it is very different in the sense that we are communicating interactively, but unless we become ‘real’ to our students, there will be a disconnect between instructor-student that must ultimately interfere with knowledge acquisition, particularly since effective teaching presence has been shown to directly affect the quality of education in online environments based on interactions between students and instructors (Alex – Breeze presentation module 5).

Specifically, I need to ask myself:  Do these questions simply ask student to use their  foundational knowledge, and book resources,  in order to answer the questions? Or do they need to think, analyze, research and push themselves cognitively in order to understand, and answer, the posted questions?

  Online learning requires a different framework of thinking and behaving.  It requires a sense of self-reliance, responsibility and an openness to collaboration and reflection. 

Many of our high school students are not equipped with these survival skills. 

online learning not only allows students to learn according to their favored multiple intelligences (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.), it also allows students to learn according to their own rate of information reception.  While the classroom forces us all to be quick thinkers, and immediate responders, many of us are not.  We need time to formulate ideas, responses and concepts.  Students who cannot respond immediately are left out of the learning environment and many may eventually ‘check-out’. 

Seeing others accomplish things that I had either not thought of, or was too intimidated to attempt, made me take chances. 

This is what learning is all about – moving out of our comfort zone and pushing our possibilities.