The start of a mystery tour

I've always wanted to be an electrical engineer since I was a little boy, and, to make a long story short, I graduated as one. Teaching was a profession I didn't want to get into, and as a university student I made up my mind that I would never be a teacher. However, life thought otherwise. Towards the end of my studies I joined the university as a summer trainee, and before I knew it, I was giving exercise classes to freshmen and second-year students of electrical engineering, and then learning about teaching and how one learns. Soon I was teaching my own courses adapting and applying the new ideas I'd picked up. I've built lots of little electronic gadgets as a hobby, a lot of them, funnily enough, to demonstrate electrical phenomena in the classroom.

My interest in teaching grew immensely. I learned about PBL, I was very excited about the approach, and so together with a couple of colleagues, I designed two PBL courses covering basic circuit analysis. The mathematics required in the subject posed quite a challenge in the course design. Building and developing the course was hard, often frustrating, but all in all it was fun. The course itself turned out to be very thrilling. We did this for several years and we even published the results of a little study we made on our experiment [1]. This resource-consuming experiment ended when we ran out of funding and human-power. All the effort I put in and the tricks I tried to get students to learn have been in the classroom—keeping things as simple as possible, little gadgets and circuit simulations to arouse interest, group discussions, and so on—where we've all been present in the same physical space.

My opinion on remote learning over the Internet is prejudiced, perhaps because of the burden of having to acquaint myself with new software, or perhaps because communication via a screen is so limited and hence difficult, or may be simply because it's so different from classroom teaching. I've used Skype to teach a friend on the other side of the world, and I don't know how well I've managed to communicate, but I'm sure that not as well as if we'd shared the same physical space. This experience was not as satisfying as in the classroom.

So, where am I going with this write-up? I have often been out of my comfort zone before when teaching or studying, but I feel that I've never been as far out as I am now: this is the first time I'm writing a blog, the first time I'm attending an online course, the first time that all the tools I'm using are new. I'm apprehensive about publishing a public blog reflecting my learning experience. After my unnecessary initial anxiousness about getting the technology to work, my first impression of the webinar on Tuesday the 13th, was, "Wow! So many people from all over the world connected, and this works!" A few minutes into the webinar, I noticed I was distracted by the continuous stream of comments on the chat and soon after by the slides—shown at a slow pace, thank goodness. Where should I focus my attention, on the instructors and what they are saying in the video, on the slides, or on the comments in the chat? I didn't even notice that a question was directed to me there. (My colleague brought this to my notice shortly, and I then quickly responded.) I clearly have a lot to learn. I'm simultaneously apprehensive and excited, just as one is at the beginning of a journey to a strange new land. What comforts me is the enthusiasm of the participants in this course, who in all probability are novices just like me on this journey, which hints that I may be at the start of a magical mystery tour. I hope it is.

Reference

1. Costa, L.R.J, Honkala, M. & Lehtovuori A. "Applying the problem-based learning approach to teach elementary circuit analysis," IEEE Transactions on Education, Volume: 50, Issue: 1, Feb. 2007. DOI: 10.1109/TE.2006.886455