It isn’t always easy to make time for professional development – trust me, I know. But it is one of those activities that – when I make the time for it – really does re-energize me and gives me ideas that I can both use in my own teaching and share with faculty members.
So, now that I’ve facilitated in the lunchtime Online Teaching & Learning brownbag here at CTLT and finished the live wrap-up Elluminate session for the PowerPoint Less: Going Beyond .ppt to Build Effective, Interactive, Online Presentations Sloan-C workshop that I’ve been participating in for the last 10 days, I’m feeling pretty good!
Our Online Teaching & Learning Brownbag today was not attended by as many faculty members as I had hoped it would be (see the acknowledgment above about how difficult it is to make time for professional development), but our discussion was a very good one, the atmosphere friendly and collegial, and the topics relevant. We touched on a great number of issues that we face as online educators – and though we had more questions, at times, than answers, we know we have great traveling companions was we explore this exciting and challenging world of effective online education.
We opened with Stacy Bock and Nikki Michalak, both faculty members in the Special Education Department, leading a discussion about how they had addressed the issue of having to devote an inordinate amount of time (back in their early days of online teaching) to, as they put it, “fighting fires” in the first weeks of an online course: a constant flood of email messages from students who did not seem able to follow the syllabus, navigate Blackboard effectively, or complete required activities by due dates.
Stacy and Nikki’s solutions:
1. Provide a comprehensive and minutely detailed course calendar for their students within their syllabus, with each activity spelled out, to include where in Blackboard they could find the activity. Have students use the (syllabus) calendar as a checklist to insure the completion of all activities each week.
2. Require students to watch a brief (5 minute) “Course Introduction” video that introduces students to the course and to the instructors, followed by a “quiz” over that information. (Students can only progress to the “content” of the course once they have earned 100 percent on the quiz. If you are interested, this involves a Blackboard tool called “Selective Release.”)
3. Provide students a place on the discussion board for asking technology-related questions – so that peers can assist each other with these sorts of issues.
4. Require an individual Skype meeting (brief) at the beginning of the semester with each student. Students sign up for a time over a two day period that works for them. At the time of the meeting, each student is required to have a printed copy of the syllabus IN HAND – yes, all 17 pages of it!
Stacy and Nikki, perhaps unknowingly, captured both of the “essential criteria” of a quality online course as defined by the Quality Matters rubric in General Standard 1 (The overall design of the course is made clear to the student at the beginning of the course): Standard 1.1 “Instructions make it clear how to get started and where to find the various course components”; and Standard 1.2 “A statement introduces the student to the purpose of the course and to its components.”
I haven’t even begun to talk about the great discussion that Cara Rabe-Hemp facilitated, based on a research study that she conducted at Illinois State University with her large lecture and online students which was published in the Quarterly Review of Distance Education: A comparative analysis of student engagement, learning, and satisfaction in lecture hall and online learning settings. But since I’m already well over my 600ish word limit, I’ll follow up on Cara’s presentation in ISUTeach-Online (our online teaching and learning listserv) early next week.
Thank you to both the presenters and participants of this inaugural brownbag meeting. I’m looking forward to “next time” and hope you all can join us on Friday, March 25 at noon in the Resource Commons of CTLT for the next Online Teaching and Learning Brownbag.
For more information about Quality Matters, or to request a full, annotated version of the rubric, please contact Jean-Marie Taylor.
