There are many different methods of teaching students, and as teachers we are all not good at all methods. The point that you make about the large lecture halls is an illustration of this idea. One teacher can be very dynamic and engaging in a 300 student lecture hall, another can be very boring. A good teacher after every class critically reflects on what they did in the classroom and how they can improve their teaching, hopefully with the goal of engaging as many students as possible in the learning experience.
Thanks for your post Adele. You made some very good points!
Convenience--wins hands down. I've had many students who are military and on deployment around the world. I think it is great that they can use their time to work on their degree as a way of fulfilling various career aspirations. Without this option, earning a degree the traditional way would simply be impossible in some cases.
Thanks,
Rodney
Hi Rodney, we also have many military students in our courses and it's exciting to think that they can be earning a degree while they are deployed around the world! It does require us to have flexibility because these learners can go on missions which take them away from the course for several weeks at a time. Tina
I wonder if students feel that another student is getting favoritism, or more attention, if the instructor calls some students but not others. I assume students don't know about instructor contacts with other students who have issues that require direct contact? I know that the rule of on-line instruction is to have a quality and consistent presence in each student's learning experience. I guess that doesn't mean identical numbers and methods of contact (?)
Hi Julia, at the end of last quarter a learner stated that exact thing. When I discussed this with the instructor, he told me that he would call out learners who had great discussion posts, so that was probably what the learner was talking about. I recommended to him that instead of calling out a specific learner's response to a discussion that he reply to the main thread and call out the response and what was especially good about it without referring to a specific learner.
I work on a regular basis with faculty on how to develop presence in the course. If an instructor posts to 50% of the learners in a discussion that means that 50% of the learners did not receive any response from the instructor. As an alternative, I encourage instructors to go into the discussions and monitor all discussions to ensure that there are no behavioral issues or learners who are struggling. For struggling learners, I ask instructors to interact with them privately. I then ask them to post to the discussions at least three times during the week and summarize the different points of view that learners have on the topic and use weaving techniques to compare/contrast the views, re-direct the discussion if it is off topic, or interject an alternative viewpoint to help learners understand multiple perspectives on the topic. This builds presence in the discussions and the interaction is with every learner. Tina
One of the things that I have particularly liked about online teaching is that it seems so much more organized than teaching in a physical classroom, particularly where evaluating and grading assignments is concerned. On a physical campus, I always seemed to be schlepping papers all over the place. With online analysis of students’ assignments, I think more time can be spent actually analyzing the assignments instead of shuffling papers.
