My name is Muni and I have been in the education field for the past 18 years now. I taught Accounting and Economics for 8 years in secondary school and then ended up teaching in National Diploma in Business Level 5 in a tertiary institute. I was introduced to e-learning where I was teaching face to face and via online platform known as Fresh-e learning. E-learning was used to teach students online and attend to their queries using chat which was one of the tabs online. I also answered to students queries via one to one message at the same time. I found this blended learning quite interesting and flexible as well. Students having issues with not being able to attend face to face sessions were allowed to study from home and therefore were easier for us teachers to download almost all the contents for delivery online. We used multi modal activities online to allow students to attempt to these activities and these were part of their weekly assignments and tutorials as well.

Moreover, some of the online tools were quizzes, matching, video presentation, audio presentation, cross word and you tube clips. Through experience for 8 and a half years teaching using blended ways of learning via online and face to face allowed students to get flexibility, increased access to content and able to do the activities at any time convenient to students at their own pace, effective support from staff and it was compulsory to reply to students messages within 24 hours and therefore all the queries made by students were dealt with.

Moving to corrections facility and teaching in a prison environment is a big challenge for me due to limited resources. There is no internet access to students therefore almost majority of the content for courses are provided to them as hard copies and soft copies via moodle (e-learning platform). Students (prisoners) attend two sessions face to face class in a week and are supposed to do activities and exercise via moodle. I had a big challenge of putting those matching exercise and some other exercise on moodle for students to have access to and found this pretty useful I guess. Students accessing and attempting to the exercise are being monitored and monthly report is being taken to see how many students and the hours they have been using the online tool.

The reason for doing this programme is to up skill myself more towards numeracy and literacy education and knowing the theories would be really helpful to me. Hope to do well as I have enrolled in two papers and working fulltime is pretty crackingJ.

Muni Gounder