MEET AN eLEARNING GRADUATE
Ben Knuchel
College of Science
Master of Science in Occupational Therapy
For the last six years I have been practically living at Cleveland State, and this year I will be finishing my master’s degree in occupational therapy. Since the beginning of my sophomore year, I have been taking an increasing number of classes with an eLearning component. When I first started with the online classes, I thought to myself, “Hey this is a pretty good idea. I get to take all of the credits I need for the semester, and still keep a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, I’m in.”
I was really hoping for self-paced classes that I could do on my own time, and maybe even get the whole class done early. And that is almost exactly what I got. I had a few readings every week and a test to make sure we actually did the work. I ended up having to take a little more time to finish the course because I could only do one lesson per week, but it allowed me to process the information and retain it for a bit longer than if I had done the whole class in a week.
As I progressed through my education, my experience with eLearning changed dramatically. When I got to my senior year, all of a sudden almost all of my classes had an online component. Some of them just had all of the materials posted for a face-to-face class. You may not think that is a big deal, but it completely changed my classroom experience. Instead of trying to copy entire Powerpoints and trying to keep up with lecture during class, I could print the lectures and take notes when there was an idea was phrased in a way that made a difficult concept easy to understand.
By the time I reached grad school, my eLearning classes became very interactive with class discussions. We even had to post entire presentations to teach material to our peers. I was finally getting to hear the opinions of the people in the class that never spoke up, and it really helped foster some important friendships in my graduate program. And when I started to see the same patterns emerging in the discussions that started to make the classes more like a chore, I decided to put a little bit of humor into my posts. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times that I got emails and comments in class about how many the other students and quite often even the professors enjoyed my posts.
The flexibility of my eLearning courses helped me become a better learner, gave me insight into teaching, and helped me cultivate a style and creativity that I hope to carry over into my future career.
