Last trimester was an opportunity to test the repeatability of what I did last year for my online classes. It didn’t require a lot of planning as I already had the structure in mind. The Moodle course site will look mostly like how it has with my previous classes. The new Discord server would also…

Educational technology is ultimately limited by the people who use them. It’s one of the things I learned at work as an IT guy in UPOU. I anticipated the possibility that it wouldn’t matter much even if I agreed to use the platform that students would say they liked the most. Not everyone is going…

My hiatus from teaching coincided with the influx of a new generation of undergraduate students at UPOU. They were among the first products of the Philippines’s recently established K-12 program. Many of them were also those who passed the University of the Philippines College Admission Test (UPCAT) who specifically chose to study online under UPOU’s…

Knowing and experiencing It’s not that I was in denial that the struggle is real. I just didn’t go through it as badly as some. The University of the Philippines, particularly the Los Baños campus, was not a place of hardship for me. It was home. It was, and still is, my comfort zone. While…

Chance renewed The wait only lasted one week. Lancaster University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences sent me an email notifying me that my application was up for reconsideration. I just needed to make a few clarifications and submit some additional documents. I was extremely thankful for the renewed chance, but I wasn’t going to…

Taken down a notch… That time between 2009-2011 was extremely important for my professional growth and personal maturity. Perhaps a bit of that went to my head, as I started to believe I’d have little problem pursuing my PhD. It didn’t take long for me to be proven wrong, though. I made attempts to apply…

Note to readers:This is turning out to be much longer than I had envisioned. I initially thought this was going to be a 3-part blog. But at this rate, it can easily make it to 10 parts. I apologize if it’s getting harder and harder to follow. But I still am keeping track of where…

Right at the beginning, I started to notice how my habits were taking shape. Hmmm… I was going to use the term study habits, but that would be me being too generous to myself.

While it was never my first choice, personal circumstances led me to taking up my PhD in distance mode. Time will tell whether or not this will end up being a good choice. But I would need to make the most out of it. I had thought that my experience as an online teacher would…

I was one of them. Not that I thought it was a smooth ride overall, but I think things started out nicely. Within a few years, I had built enough confidence to start teaching with a bit more authority. But the change in dynamics was significant as I moved from handling graduate to undergraduate students.…