Developing an Online Course

In doing the webquest for this week, a fact became clear to me that I hadn’t considered before, and I must say I was very pleased to learn it. I am working on a literature course at the 300 level, which would normally have an audience of people majoring or minoring in German. What I found in my searches, however, is that on the native speaker side of the equation, the audience may be considerably younger, as in equivalent of our middle or lower high school ages.
The upshot of this is that there are websites with wonderful activities for many of the texts that I am using, including games (see my forum post for the week), webquests and instructions for interactive group work. Below is a link to the site for the book I am using for the workshop. It is in German, but the layout is still clear, I believe:

Tags: materials, school, wheel

I’ve taught a number of courses on campus (on and off for the last 13 years), and only 2 ecampus courses, and until recently, I would have absolutely agreed that discussions in online campus were much less stimulating than in-person discussions. However, recent experiences in two on-campus classes have changed my mind.

In these two courses, both of them upper division writing courses, I’ve treated the discussion like a hybrid event, requiring them to post ideas and responses to a given article on discussion board before we discuss it in class. The idea there is to jump start the conversation ahead of time, to require them to put some thoughts into words before we start class. My hope was to avoid the “warm-up” period in discussions, when students are trying to formulate thoughts and even remember what the reading was about (if they even did it). I didn’t expect this process to create instant magic, but I expected it add a little life and energy to our sometimes lackluster discussions.

What I found, instead, was that the online discussions were really quite good. I set word limits and point values, and students stepped up to the plate. (Can you tell I spent the evening at the little league fields?) Because it was a defined assignment with a grade attached, they put real thought into it and I was excited by what I saw happening on discussion board. However, when they came into the class, they were hesitant or even resistant to expand on their ideas, and to respond to each other in person. I even went so far as to make notes about who said what on discussion board, and then call on them in class to expound, and most of the time they wouldn’t even say as much as the original post. In other words, they did better in the virtual world.

I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, since they also spend a majority (?) of their social time in the digital world as well. I’ve just been pondering the implications of these two classes. Have students become just too uncomfortable with spontaneous F2F interactions?

My husband also teaches both F2F and online, and seconds my findings that students online often get much better discussions off the ground. I think this might say something scary about us, but as online instructors, we can surely use this to our advantage.

Tags: discussion board, graded discussion, online discussion vs. F2F

A number of folks have touched upon this issue, but I think one of the challenges of the online class environment compared to a F2F class is that it is more difficult to gauge your students’ understanding and abilities as you deliver the course.  Because the content is put together before the start of the term, there is less flexibility to customize the course in real time compared to the F2F environment.  When I’ve taught brick and mortar classes, I can expand on a topic that students are having trouble with, or can add in some content if there is a topic that they are really excited about.  Although I understand the rationale for full course delivery before the start of the term (and I think it will be a relief to have everything ready to go ahead of time!), I have a harder time conceptualizing how I can customize the class in response to the abilities and interests of the students.

In the course I am currently developing, the major project and assessment tool will be a independent research paper that will go through an peer review process and lead to a final paper and presentation.  Because each student can choose a topic of interest, I think this will be a good way to get students engaged in an area they are really excited about.  Asking detailed questions at the final course evaluation should provide insight into topics that students found challenging, so that I can modify or add course materials before the next offering.  Incidentally, will be learn about the process for course revision (adding materials that need copyright clearance, etc) in this development workshop?

Tags: course planning, F2F vs online education, student communication

I have yet to experience teaching an online course, so comparing traditional lecture to an online course is beyond my experience.  For both venues I imagine one of the first priorities is to spark student interest and clearly define activities that encourage the student to engage the course content.  I like to believe that my own enthusiasm when describing the biological context (I teach biology courses) of a given subject, and how that subject relates to the student perspective, is one of the most significant ingredients to sparking student interest.  Given the tools available for inserting audio and video into presentations, I should be able to convey online, as I do during face-to-face interactions, my enthusiasm for the subject.

Writing activities that are clearly defined seems independent of the course venue, but providing feedback to students whom are struggling with a given activity seems to me to possibly be the most difficult without face to face interaction.  I find face to face interaction helpful in working through a problem with a student and in trying to understand what concept a student is missing, or how a student is thinking.  Google-hangout or skype might help with face-to-face, online interaction, so this may not be an issue.  Thus, I imagine that the main ingredients of a good course, sparking interest and clearly defined activities, can be achieved equally well for both online and a traditional lecture.Sp

Tags: F2F vs online education

I have only taught online courses, so it is hard for me compare and contrast F2F and Online Teaching and Learning. One thing I have been wondering about is Teaching and Learning during Office Hours.

I do not offer traditional office hours for my online courses. Instead I respond to students’ questions through emails within 24 hours. This seems to work out well for most of my online GIScience students as they tend to be independent and comfortable with technology.

But in some cases, on-campus students who self-identify as doing better in a F2F learning environment end up taking my online courses because of their schedules. These students would probably benefit from more than just email interaction.

If the student struggles with email interaction due to poor writing skills, should I encourage them to improve their writing skills?

Learning how to write a good email is a good career skill. For an example, students could learn that to help write a good email they could:

“Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.” – The Email Charter (http://www.emailcharter.org/)

Are there other reasons why a student would struggle with email interaction versus F2F interaction for Office Hours? Could they be more visual and want to see things drawn out/shown? What other technologies would be useful for that? For example, with GIS software, would it be better to create a nice video to step them through a series of actions they would need to take to install the GIS software, rather than providing a list of steps?

[I think so, as I have enjoyed the tutorial videos for the "Developing an online class" course.]

Tags: education, f2f, online

The course I am revising is a course I am currently teaching on campus. I often find myself thinking about how to best replicate my on-campus instruction and assessment in the online environment. However, as I am learning more and more through this course more I am seeing that they really are separate environments. While the course objectives and student learning outcomes may be the same I think I need to think less about replicating the on-campus experience and thinking more about how I can work within the online environment given the tools and resources provided to meet the objectives and learning outcomes specified.

The greatest challenge for me, as some of you have already mentioned, is having to have all 10 weeks ready to go before the term starts. With my on-campus classes I of course have a course outline that I follow, but I am constantly fine tuning as I go. The thought of not being able to do that is somewhat daunting. In one sense having a whole course planned out and set to go from day one sounds ideal, but on the other hand I find myself often wondering if once I put the course in place am I going to think of a better way I should have implemented something?

Connecting with the students is both different and similar. Email is a primary means of communication between an instructor and student both online and with F2F education and it certainly has its pros and cons. It can be quick and convenient for addressing something and a lot less efficient for other things. In some ways I feel like I get to know online students more through their written communication. Although F2F contact tends to help me to make stronger connections with students. I like the idea of Skype office hours and Google groups for F2F contact within the online environment.

Tags: course planning, F2F vs online education, student communication

Three of the differences that I perceive between e-campus and brick-and-mortar campus teaching are the testing environments, the more limited ability to offer additional clarifying information informally in e-campus, and the greater need for up-front course development.  I wish that the support for developing distance programs was offered to on-campus instructors, as the rich bag of tricks offered by e-campus offers a lot of value to traditional teaching environments as well.  Traditional testing is better suited to a brick-and-mortar situation, where the instructor can act as proctor, or answer questions in real time.  E-campus has a variety of tools to help prevent academic dishonesty, but these may require more time to arrange and to determine which is most appropriate for the particular situation.  I have found that I frequently use the first few minutes of a brick-and-mortar class to explain assignments, clarify expectations, or evaluate student comprehension of previous material.  This spontaneity is much more difficult to achieve online, and more work is necessary up-front to ensure that assignments are as clear as possible.  Exercises to evaluate student mastery of material need to be built in so they occur frequently enough that changes in course pace can occur before any train wrecks.  Finally, having often been just two lectures ahead of my students and presented lab exercises that I proofed that morning, having all of the materials all ready to go weeks in advance will be very different.  I’ll be glad to be out of the pressure cooker, but I’m wondering how I will find the loss of flexibility to bend the syllabus a bit to respond to either recent events, a sudden spark of interest in a topic from my students, or other such teachable moments.

Jen

(developing online graduate-level vertebrate population ecology)

Tags: assessment, course design, formative exercises

Currently,  I am translating my on-campus version of FW315 (Ichthyology) for online delivery, and am certainly running into some challenges!  Chief among these is the fact that by necessity, this course is information-dense, and requires students to comprehend a set of foundational information that they need to succeed into subsequent courses in the curriculum, such as fish ecology, fish physiology, or my own 400/500-level Advanced Ichthyology course.   While this doesn’t prevent me from including some degree of synthesis and analysis in my course, it does mean that some of the learning objectives focus on lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy . . . if a student fails to comprehend the basic mechanisms of respiration and buoyancy in fishes in FW315, they’re going to struggle when they reach the 400-level physiology courses and need to apply that knowledge!

The necessary information-density of the course presents something of a problem for online delivery, because I find that the online format supports analytical and evaluative goals and assessments (discussions, projects and so forth) better than it does lower-level information delivery.  I am working to include a variety of discussion-board topics and activities that will help students engage with the information presented in the course, such as an opportunity to place fishes that live near them geographically in the context of the evolutionary family-tree of all fishes.   This is a good application/analysis-level assessment that provides some reward for digesting and comprehending a set of information-dense lectures on fish classification.    Even so, it doesn’t circumvent the need to present a ton of data and facts to the students that they’ll need to understand and apply in this and subsequent courses.

Even in my on-campus course, I sometimes feel like I’m turning a firehose of information on my students . . . . we cover evolution, ecology, behavior, physiology, reproduction, anatomy, conservation and other topics all within a single quarter’s course, with a taxonomic scope spanning more than 30,000 species!    I am hoping that I’ll still be able to teach this information effectively in an online format, but doing so still a involves a lot of reading assignments and recording of lectures, neither of which really play to the strengths of the online format (such as facilitating interactions between students).   Hopefully the course will still meet its objectives and prepare the students for higher-level classes that more closely target the pinnacle of Bloom’s pyramid!

For me, one of the biggest differences in taking part in Foreign Language Learning (FLL) online vs. F2F is really the move that the instructor must make from “sage on the stage” in F2F to “guide on the side” (a quote from one of my grad school profs). In my view, my job is to provide students with the tools necessary to build knowledge and solve issues on their own, rather than simply conveying information to them. This is a helpful exercise for any FLL instructor, as it becomes more an more the model that students need to be able to develop skills on their own in any classroom setting.
Thus, to me, F2F and online classrooms should not be that different. Ideally, for a foreign language instructor, experience in both settings should inform teaching and materials development in such a way that brings the best of both worlds to all students. Here are some priorities that I have tried to follow:
1) Online and on-campus FLL courses should function in parallel.
2) Online students should be provided with enough contact to supplement time spent in class for live use of the target language.
3) All students should be able to use technology to reach out to the target community in a way that is useful and enjoyable for the student.
What this ends up meaning is that my courses should be similar in everything but physical setting, and that students should be able to move seamlessly from on-campus to Ecampus and back. For the instructor, it means innovating in the realm of online tools as well as in developing contacts within the target community that the students can access. On a more complicated note, it is also important for the instructor to be aware of laws and regulations regarding student privacy (e.g. FERPA), so that the students’ online experiences are both engaging and safe.

Tags: Foreign Language, Guide, Parallel

When writing the lectures and assignments for a new online course  it is very hard to judge how much  information to include in one lesson.  I have the outline of the course.  The course is broken into 2 lessons per week,  so it all has to fit into 10 weeks.  What I don’t know is if the pace of the course is balanced from week to week.

Students are very different in their work rate and their complaint rate.  I am reluctant to have the pace of the course open for discussion during the course and am inclined to save the question for the student evaluation.

In the classroom it is easier to judge the pace because students ask for guidance when needed.  Sometimes you just don’t get to the end of the lecture.  There is an option to be flexible and go over information in more detail when it is needed.

The class I am developing this term is at a higher level than the classes I have taught previously.  The students have been accepted into the professional program and have  completed a prerequisite course as a junior.

How do you judge the pace of the course when you are working towards the end goal?

Tags: getting started, new course, student evaluation