Reviewing your previous blog posts, what, if anything, has changed in your attitude toward online schools and online schooling over the past 15 weeks?

For some time before the first day of this course, I've thought that education would soon change largely due to the affordances of the Internet. I believed that the Internet could improve education in so many ways in many cases, and in others, completely change it. With this interest, I thought that I was ahead of the game.
Two weeks into the course, I was so surprised by the many online schools and online schooling already available. I found out that I am not ahead of the game! Research has been going on for some years already. Online models have been tested and changed over time, and continues to be tested and improved upon.
For the next few weeks, I was amazed at how awesome online schooling would be and was eager to learn more about it.
In the recent weeks, however, I've learned that online schools, along with its benefits, also have their disadvantages. What interests me now are the different ways we can improve the current online schooling system, especially in the areas of virtual science labs and foreign language teaching.
This course was definitely a lot of work, but I learned that much more. I'm not even sure if this course was a required one or an elective for me, but I'm glad I took it.

What was the most difficult aspect of researching this topic?

For my final project, I researched how foreign languages are taught online. The most difficult aspect about this research was going more in depth of how languages, especially of different alphabetical systems, are taught specific to a country's or region's culture and usage. Research data was lacking in more detailed areas of teaching a foreign language, such as the sequence of strokes required to write a non-roman alphabet in an online environment. If a foreign language class takes place online, are students required to learn the foreign language's keyboarding as well? Other than that, there were an abundance of articles and demo lessons available to get a general idea of what an online foreign language course is like. It makes me wonder... the online approach makes sense, and for-profit companies certainly make it sound easy, but will it really work, or is it a lot of marketing? I'll give it a shot one of these days.