Post 2: Intentionality about Online

I am balanced between f2f and online teaching. I really want my online teaching to be more visible and personal, so I am making a short (3 minute) video to introduce each week. Weekly is really the best; short modules is really the best for online. I finally see that. Giving them freedom is not good, because the day to day sitting in class that gives them rhythm and structure is missing.  Little bits is bigger than huge bites (i.e., short, focused modules are better than longer thematic ones).

 

My online classes are quite different. One is mostly repeaters of a first year experience course, and as of last night ½ of them had not done the first easy assignment (short video intro). They failed the first time, so….many of them had 1.0 or lower (as in .0) gpas last semester. The second is an intuitionally based professional communication course at 3000 level, and the third is a similar course taught for the university system at the 2000 level. I designed the first, not the second; I feel like a hall monitor or restaurant hostess in the second one right now.

 

I keep short tabs on assignments and did post a video for the week last night. Whether they watch it, I’ll see. I’ll keep doing it and try to get some feedback at the end. But intentionality is everything, and I choose to be intentional about my presence in the course, as per Small Teaching Online (Flowers).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflecting on Reflection in Learning

Reflection is the subject of my next couple of presentations, so here are my recent jottings. Hopefully a reader can make some sense of them;however, the whole point of this post is that reflection can follow a structure but will not necessarily create a structured record. The reflection record will need to be reshaped to be palatable for a "judge" or "critic" or "instructor." Reflection tends to be framed negatively. If we dig too deep we will only find bad stuff; if we reflect on teaching practice, we will focus on what failed rather than succeeded. Why? Assessment focuses on finding the nonlearners and changing to get more learners, but it ignores that most of the students did learn, so why were there successes? Leads to burnout. Boud & Walker’s idea of validation not well developed but relevant. It is most close to critical thinking—testing it against other knowledge, theories, internal consistency, other data (other learner’s data) Ref
Read more

The LAST Word on Learning Styles

That title might be extreme, but this article nails it, plus giving some good links to other research. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-learning-styles/ What is mostly important here is that we do know what universally works in learning (time, multiple modalities, application rather than rote, spaced out study) rather than an overfocus on "what makes me special."
Read more

Lessons in Leadership Failure

This is the outline for a presentation I gave at Toastmasters recently. It was to finish a pathway in their curriculum, but it also my life. There is no lack of books, articles, magazines, and speakers about leadership. A quick look on Amazon shows there are X number of books with leadership in the title.  Ive even written one. But I would venture to say all of them have one thing in common: the writer thinks they are a good leaders and have this leadership things figured out. Although my topic today is leadership I don’t think I have it figured out and recently I learned a lot about failure in leaders and in myself as a leader.  I was asked to lead a large part of our accreditation. I’ve spoken on this before that it’s called a Quality Enhancement Plan, whereby the institution has to pick a problem and construct a specific plan to address it.  I’ve had a year not to reflect—or not—on how it went and what I learned about myself.  I could share  lot, but in the time I have
Read more