1.

As a post baccalaureate student of PNU, what are the challenges and

opportunities of online learning? (in terms of: ePNU, course-E Educ 1,
schedule, professor, etc..)
Being a post-bac student is a challenge in itself, however, I believe that
having the online platform such as the ePNU made the experience
substantially easier. The system is fairly friendly to the user, it has clear user
interface wherein the professor and students can easily organize and
understand the tasks. To be honest, E EDUC 1 seemed to be the most
challenging course at first, mainly due to the fact that I had a wrong
impression about you sir, I thought that you would be the cliché professor
who will make things hard for the students, good grief it is quite the
contrary.

In terms of schedule, being a student and a worker is really hard – I have to

juggle between workload and school tasks. I can imagine that things will
be different if it were not for the online platforms that we use, it is quite
harder. In the previous normal, there will be more late students than not.
We will have to go from work to PNU physically and it can be quite
exhausting. I will probably miss half of my classes or turn up late due to
heavy workloads, and there will be a lot of conflict in schedule.

To be fair, it is not all good. It has been the ‘normal’ thing to have internet
connection problems or even hardware problems. Some of us may have
been attending classes in non-conducive places for classes – noisy
backgrounds, kids playing around, other uncontrolled factors, etc.
Personally, I’ve been facing a lot of challenges regarding work. Half of the
time, I was doing work while joining our synchronous sessions, among
other classes. Despite this, I have to make sure that I’m being an active
listener and having an ‘always-ready’ status.

Above all, an important lesson I learned about enrolling in this class is that,
I can be more, we can be more. We just have to have someone or a
situation that will push us forward in life. Due to nature of my work, I
believed that we can mostly learn from subject matter experts, but due to
 this class, I am humbled and reminded that every person, experienced or
not, can teach us many lessons in life. Other than what we learn in
classroom, I also learned about their life and the challenges they are
facing – with this, I can be more understanding and open to other people.
This will surely help me when the time that I become a full-pledged
teacher.

2. Teacher Bella often complain of numerous non-teaching tasks during

COVID 19 pandemic (such as distribution of modules, accomplishment of
school forms etc..) that adversely affect her online teaching. Does this
mean that teachers must pre occupied only with teaching related tasks?
Why?

I believe it should not be the case. It is true that as a ‘teacher’, our job is to
teach, however, we can argue not to grade students, or perhaps check
their work because we are teachers, we ‘only’ have to teach. We first need
to understand, that we are teaching in a formal setting. Formal settings
have standard procedures and rules we have to abide to. These rules are
formulated on what is seen as best for the system. I believe, what we
should change is how things are implemented. Some teachers believe in
student-centered way of teaching, I for one, believe in teacher-based way
of implementing things in school. There should be and effective and
efficient way on feedbacking among the admin and the teaching & non-
teaching personnel.

Further, teaching is just one of our many functions, we also have to make
sure that what we are teaching is having an impact in our student’s life. My
words cannot express it enough, that we teachers, have tremendous
responsibility on our students. We need to ask ourselves first: are we really
teaching? Or are we just saying words? Or are we just reading and
discussing what is in the books? Beyond these things, we have to make
sure that what we are teaching is relevant on the future that our students
will tread upon.

On the hindsight, Teacher Bella’s apprehensions on non-teaching tasks

should make her or us see that we teachers will face challenges, and we
must brace ourselves. It also comes to mind that; we will share these
challenges to our students and their parents/guardians. We need to be
more understanding and active in improving the overall situation.