Jim’s viewable streams of thought

     First some self disclosure, I’m taking 4 courses this summer in an effort to get a majority of the course work done for my CDIT degree before the fall; taking 2 classes and working fulltime, leaves me no time for my family or any other life sustaining activity and so, the sooner I finish this degree, the easier it will be for everybody.  Though I get praise from colleagues, friends, and strangers, the real workhorse behind the scenes is my wife; she must raise 2 kids by herself and take care of a husband that sits in front of a glowing box, for the short time he is at home. 

      So I think to myself,  why is it so hard?  I’ve worked fulltime before and taken 2 classes in traditional programs, and though difficult, I still felt like I had the resemblance of a life.   4 classes over the summer sounds like alot, but the term is only 2 weeks shorter than the spring or fall semesters and a normal fulltime load is 4 classes.  I took 4 classes and worked halftime when pursuing a graduate degree in psychology; once again, it was difficult but I had a life.  I certainly did not put in a solid 7 hours per day 7 days a week. 

     Now, I figure there are 2 possible major explanations for this, either traditional classes do not actually take the time they say they require, while online classes do.  Or, online classes in general are over compensating for being online, maybe suffering from an inferiority complex.  If we do the math, 4 x (9-12hrs) = 36-48hrs per week, I’m alleging 49.  Ok, that is the maximum hours per class but it is what it says…   So, I guess tradtional classes are not living up to the standard, why is that?  What makes online classes more effective at keeping students on task?  Let’s face it, the current organizational structure of university can’t survive, if all classes were online and designed competently.  What college student is actually going to spend 10 Hard hours (not lounging taking to your friends hours) per day, 6 days a week, for 4 years to complete a bachelors degree (that’s 5 classes per semester x 12 hours)?  Honestly, I just couldn’t and wouldn’t do what I’m doing now as an undergrad; I didn’t have the self discipline.

     So, where do we go from here?  How does this actually affect the design of our online courses?  If we tool down towards the minimum 9 hrs per class, would that make a traditional semester possible for students to handle (just barely, if you do the math).  What about people like me, teaching highschool?  What can high school students handle?  About how much time is reasonable for a highschool class? (remember, in a traditional school with 8-45 minute periods, 6-7 class periods per day is the norm)  

Just some questions…

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One thing I learned while setting up the course documents and furthering my outline for my course is reflected in the title above.  In any class which involves f2f meetings, the teacher has the ability to micromanage content on a daily basis and cover smaller chunks of content area.  Bill Pelz in the example course tours, discussed the difficulty in covering individual chapters of a text in an online course. Personally, I had just done so in a project for another class and was fairly used to doing exactly that in a partially hybrid course.  When setting up my online course into modules, I learned, again the hard way, that I would have to combine material that I used to teach as separate units, into one longer module.  This is going to impact almost every component of the readings, assignments, discussion questions, and projects, that I currently use in my course.

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     One thing I’ve learned through the example of Alex, is the importance of reaching out and engaging students on a personal level.  In Scorza’s article, Do Students Dream of Electric Teachers, the point is made about the distance that naturally occurs through a computer screen and the internet in an online course.  It’s quite easy to be formal and take a formal tone.  The traditional classroom allows for personal contact and the chance for professors and students to interact more personably or at least gauge personalities.  In an online environment, this is much more difficult, all the natural body language, the subtle gestures, and facial expressions that we use to personally interact are gone; all that remains is often the cold hard text.  It’s easy to see into things that aren’t there and to misread comments and suggestions.  The online teacher needs to make a special effect to be personable and reach out to their individual students and find a way to insert connection and communication in personable terms.  Teachers of course must behavior professionally, but our role is different from the accountant.  It’s why I became a teacher;  for me, Teaching  is about interacting, supporting, and caring about other people, while helping them to grow.  The online environment makes it all too easy to turn teaching merely into the process of educating about content.  That would be a great loss because we are engaged in a people business, we don’t push a product, we guide & facilitate.  I didn’t quite understand what Scorza was talking about until few days ago… 

Thanks Alex!

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Up until now, I’ve developed hybrid units for my students in AP psychology.  Though the online assignments ended up being a substantial part of the students grade (about 30-40%), I approached the construction of the assignments from the point of view of the classroom as focal point of learning.  In some ways, hybrid classes offer the best of both worlds, the personalization of the f2f class, thus eliminating the fears expressed by Scorza in Do Online Students Dream of Electric Teachers (pg. 45), as well as the resource rich, convenient, flexibility of the online environment.  I was going to approach the creation of the example course for ETAP 687:Online teaching, in the same way.  Now, having gone through all but one of the example courses, I’m rethinking this idea.  Or rather, discarded it entirely. 

Several times (twice?) during Alex’s interviews in the course observations, she’s rhetorically asked  “if the instructor does all the work, who does all the learning?”  This is a solid constructivist point of view and it becomes a necessity in creating a successful online teaching environment.  Keeping this in mind, I was planning on using Jing to create at least one screencast for my course; now, I’m planning on having the students use Jing as a culminating activity to create a screencast summary of what they think are the most important elements of human psychological development.  This idea is an inspiration from Steven Zucker’s culminating activity in which he has the students create a final exam.  In fact, I had quite a few good ideas from Steven Zucker’s course…

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Several statistics from the Online Student Demographics jumped out at me, at the top of each of these categories: Gender 62% Female, Reason  39% Conflicts with personal schedule, and Distance 45% less than 30 minutes from campus

I’ve noticed that I’m often one of the few males in the online courses.  I think in this class there are only 2 of us.  In the AP psychology class I will teach next year, only 2 out of the 12 students are male; this is from a class of 9 males and 13 females.  All of the “star” pupils in this class are females, and the same can be said for my current year students.  I wish it was just a question of subject area, but for the most part, all of our AP and Honors courses are overwhelmingly female.  Not that the gender composition of my course will affect it’s design, it won’t.  But, why are males not succeeding or taking advantage of education opportunities to the degree females are?  I think it’s an issue we must at least try and address.

The major benefit of online courses for me revolves around the flexible nature of the class time.  That said, I prefer taking f2f classes.  One reason is I find f2f classes far less time consuming and easier to manage.  How long does it take to respond to a discussion in a traditional class?  In an online class, it takes me about a minimum of 15-30 minutes to respond to someone’s post and often over an hour to write a main post.  Reading others responses takes a considerable amount of time as well.  I find instructors in online classes seem to underestimate the amount of time it takes to engage in an online discussion.  And not just in this class, but in several others, I’ve felt the amount of time I spend in the online discussion takes away from my ability to thoroughly read, view, and engage with other assignments and resources.  There is only so much time and they don’t print any more of it!

I have only run about 5 online discussions this year within the classes I teach.  All but the first, I felt were very successful.  As mentioned by Kassop, online discussion offers a platform for safe effective communication where careful thought can be put into an answer.  Students who were more or less silent during class suddenly emerged from the cocoon.  What’s more, discussions and preparation for in class activities improved.  Sound like a contradiction?  Not if we keep in mind our objectives while crafting discussion questions and make sure we gear what the students will discuss directly to the material.  Also, and I think Alex does a great job of this, give feedback often to keep students on track.

Most students like doing work online, DiBlasi’s Did You Know IV, refers to students spending over 2hours on the internet per day.  How can we as educators control this time and direct it in a constructive way?  I think one of the answers lies in online learning.  For an analogy, if you have a group of students just standing around talking or doing nothing, it doesn’t take much to constructively move them to an engaging activity – just throw out a ball or come up with an idea, and I find students willingly engage.  I think of students on the internet in the same way.  We can engage their time that would otherwise be spent chatting online with the same people they saw 5 minutes ago or will text/call in another 5 minutes.

This is one of the reasons I love the idea of a hybrid course using Moodle and a collaborative wiki or student wiki project, we as educators can constructively organize some of students internet time and hopefully show them more productive ways to use it!

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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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