Nice post and I’d like to amplify some of these points.
Design and Development – or Is it soup yet?
According to what I think I have learned about designing online courses and teaching in general, three types of interaction, student-student, student-teacher, and student-content, are the focal points for developing instruction.
There are actually two more — teacher-environment, and student-environment. We tend to ignore the environmental issues when dealing with the classroom based courses because we’re so famliar with them. Automaticity makes it seem invisible most of the time, but it’s obvious in the beginning of the year or when there have been changes in the building from semester to semester. People are wandering around lost and not knowing what’s going on. The environmental interactions online are more apparent when you move into environments that are not familiar — like a new school, or online. If the affordances of the environment are not the same as what you’re used to, then that interaction becomes visible — largely thru frustration.
And that leads into this part of the post:
Something to bear in mind is students’ level of expertise with technology and specific applications being used for the course. In our textbook, Online Education, Kearsley reminds us that, “Teaching a particular lesson or topic may take longer than in a traditional classroom because some students may take longer on their own to acquire skills or knowledge desired.” Just like in a regular classroom, teachers need to be aware of individual students’ needs.
If the student is “on their own” then the teacher has abrogated responsibility by leaving the student alone. This happens in the classroom as well when the teacher sends the worksheet home and then doesn’t follow up. This seems to be a common misconception about the presence of teacher in an online environment — if it’s online then the teacher isn’t “there.”
While it’s true that you don’t see me once a week in a room for three hours, I defy any of you to assert that I’m not “here” and a constant presence in your educational experience this semester. From the emails, to the postings, to the comments, to the IMs — there is seldom a day when you don’t hear from me somehow and I know that at least once every day one or more of you will talk to me on IM. The simple fact is that there’s nothing inherently isolating about online courses, although they are often designed to isolate students and to minimize teacher-student interaction. That’s a design decision and not an immutable facet of online educational environments.
September 29th, 2007 at 8:21 PM
While taking online classes is new for me and I have been very frustrated with the technology at times, the one thing I haven’t felt is alone. You have been more accessible than any teacher in a classroom setting would be. There are times with regular “meet once a week” classes in which the student is home working on a project with no access to the teacher when problems arise. So as far as student to environment and student to teacher, online classes can be far superior. I have experienced a great deal of support. There are several ways I can talk to you when I need to. As far as individual student involvement, I can see that it can be very similar to regular classroom. For example, I am the type of individual who doesn’t say a whole lot in the classroom. Not that I don’t say anything…I do when I feel the need, but I don’t like to monopolize the discussion. I feel the same is true in this environment. I often see that you are online and I could IM, but I also know you have many students to talk with. However, I know you want us to IM and I enjoy the conversations. Yes, I would have to say that the distance is irrelevant. It’s also as easy to have student to student discussions. There are even a couple of the students that I “know” now because they have answered some questions for me or vice versa.