Jun
22
2009
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.
(2)
Jun
22
2009
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!
(3)
Jun
17
2009
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…
(4)
