Jun 05 2009
A busy first week, student stress, the benefits of online vs. teaching in person, and the emerging ideas for my online course
I feel fairly comfortable about beginning to build my online course. What I feel nervous about is differentiating it from previous projects and challenging my comfort zone. One thing I really want to build into my online course is a group collaboration wiki. I’m not so impressed with the wiki embedded into Moodle so I signed up at wikispaces for a free wiki offered to all k-12 teachers and am beginning to explore the possibilities. It offers a great control panel.
This week has been a whirlwind between grading, preparing exams, preparing final documentation for college entrance, helping with our senior graduation ceremony, and finishing up work for 2 committee’s I head: Curriculum and Instruction and the peace committee (anti-bullying). Sometimes I think the world has become way to busy and I wonder do we need all these fillers? As I walk the halls of the school, I encounter sleep deprived students on the verge of mental collapse. Last semester, I did a wiki project entitled “Reducing Student Stress Through Instructional Practice” to try and wrap my head around a path to deal with the problem constructively. In Asia, we have a big problem with overstudy and instructors slowly but surely lose perspective with class requirements and assignments, since students tend to do whatever you throw at them. If you visit the page please disregard the many typo’s and grammar errors!
It is partly due to this, that I try to conform to standards, constructivism, and mastery learning – these approaches require organization and clarity to be successful, and that in turn relieves much of the pressure within the classroom. Within the online format, I attempt to take myself out of the picture as much as possible and create a truly learning centered environment – where it’s just the students and the material to be mastered. This is in stark contrast to my non-virtual personality and presence in a traditional classroom. In class, I love engaging activities and being part of them, interacting up close and personal with students is the reason I became an educator! I love tangents and teachable moments and will push the class to follow the little red thread to wherever it takes us…
This is perhaps my greatest conflict in terms of online education. Kassop notes in Ten Ways Online Education Matches, or Surpasses, Face-to-Face Learning that it’s not suited to all learners. However, so far I do find it a superior way to educate students in terms of content and skills. But, is that all that students need to learn?
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One Response to “A busy first week, student stress, the benefits of online vs. teaching in person, and the emerging ideas for my online course”
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great first reflection Jim!
wikispaces is great! much better than anything in any of the CMSs. Love that you chose on your own to go outside the CMS box to find the best tool for the job!
here are my thoughts on teaching outside the CMS box fyi: http://etap687.edublogs.org/2008/06/26/the-cms-is-a-dinosaur-and-you-know-what-happend-to-them/
so to improve your reflections, add more links… e.g., constructivism… dig deeper, explain more – teach us something with your post.
So my questions for you are:
how will you/can you capture and infuse the essence that is “you” to express yourself as yourself in your online classroom?
how will you design your online course so that you can also engage, interact, be personal, have tangents and teachable moments… so that it is a rich and satisfying experience for you too?
in other words, i challenge your thinking that to be truly learner-centered you must loose yourself. What if it were possible to do both? How would you do that?
: ) me