How do you know if a course is working? One measure might depend on the results of your student assessments. If you think your students are learning at least what you want them to learn, then the course is working. Another measure is whether or not the students actually stay with the class. While this is less an issue in pK-12 than higher ed — school kids don’t really have much say in whether or not they go to school — it’s still one measure of success once one starts teaching high school and college. A third has to do with the load on the teacher, that is, are you getting the kinds of outcomes you want based on the amount of work you have to do? You can probably get good results with extensive one-on-one tutoring, but that kind of overhead can exhaust a teacher.
So the obvious next question is, “Is it different at a distance?”
By now you know me well enough to predict my answer will be, “No.”
In our course, I’ve been watching the levels of angst and joy. You all realize now that the course was set up with a very high threshhold in order to break you out of your comfort zones and normal patterns of thinking. It was a risk because some of you may have seen the work load, lacked the confidence, and bailed out. The offsetting potential was that anybody who stuck it out thru the first week would have a solid set of successes to build on and nothing succeeds like success. Along the way, I’ve been watching for the signs and symptoms that you are — as a group — “getting it.” The posts you’re making tell me how you’re processing and what it is you’re doing with the process. I think all of you have grown very much in your relationship to teaching, learning, education, and technology. Ultimately, that relationship is the governing factor in distance delivery.