To Online or Not to Online #3: Getting Started

Before you teach online,here is some advice from an old pro:

1. Understand fully how the system works. What system? First, the pay system, the release time system, the rewards system, etc. at your institution. Second, the learning management system, which leads to . . .

2. Get good tech training. Take advantage of whatever your institution provides. Now, to be honest, I taught myself a lot of what I learned, but I wasted a lot of time doing so.

3. Have a mentor/coach/helper/somebody who can and will patiently answer your questions because you will forget a lot of the tech training from the sessions you attend. We have an awesome instructional technologist at our college. No one else can have her!

4. Look at your class from the end backward, not as a day-to-day experience as you design the online section. And don't even think about teaching a class you haven't taught traditionally. It's possible, and I've done it, but it isn't wise because you have to create even more materials from scratch.

As to this point, Dee Fink's Creating Significant Learning Experiences is a must-read, because it is about backward design, or teaching for outcomes. And that is what you must ask as you design an online course: not, "how can I put what I do in the traditional class on a screen?" but "What is necessary to meet the learning outcomes of the course and how can I best create a learning environment and experiences for it (since you will not be physically present)?" You may find that what you do in the traditional class isn't really meeting learning outcomes either! We do a lot of things in class because we are comfortable with them and have held on to them, way past their usefulness.

This is in no way saying to dumb-down the online version. It is saying that some of your course and teaching will need to be rethought. The online environment is heavily text-oriented, while the traditional class can reach all modalities. Any way you can find to breach the text-only divide will help.

For example, I teach my traditional class in public speaking with a heavy emphasis on group and collaborative learning. I can't do that in the hybrid version. It is not, however, one of the learning outcomes of the class (as decided upon by our departmental faculty).

The next post will continue in this vein.

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