Session 1

Hi Class,

My name is Melissa Sakoonphong and I am a second year graduate student in the Educational Counseling and Guidance program at CSUSB.  In addition to being a graduate student, I also work at Chaffey Community College as a Counselor Apprentice.  My hopes and educational goals for this class is to learn as much as possible about e-learning, earn an e-learning certificate, work towards a M.A in Instructional Technology and/or Ed.D. More importantly, my professional goals for this course is to use the knowledge from this course and apply it to online guidance instruction, train new competent counselors, and ultimately develop a tool that will help counselors track and quantify one-on-one student sessions so community colleges can adequately allocate resources to increase graduation rates.   

My prior experiences with e-learning have been limited to online and hybrid courses at the community college level from an end-user’s perspective, and one E-Learning Design and Development course,  so I still have quite a way to go in terms of learning the basics of an e-learning course from an instructor’s point-of-view. Because I am comfortable with learning new technologies and desire an asynchronous type of interaction(s), I prefer online learning as opposed to face-to-face.  Whether the online course utilizes familiar technologies or not I am confident in my ability to learn new things, which is why I am super excited to be a part of this class and hope this course will take me one step closer to helping students achieve their goals.