Jim’s viewable streams of thought

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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