This POT training has opened my eyes to the many options and possibilities for online teaching. I have to admit that I feel like I started this class as a well-intentioned but naive online instructor, and while I am now intimidated and overwhelmed by the options that I now know are available to me I am also grateful for the education. I now have the tools to step out of my own comfortable little box and provide my students with a more effective and interactive online learning experience.
From our lessons, I’ve been able to evaluate what changes I think will be best for me as an instructor and also for the specific discipline that I teach. I also feel that the age and experience of the students should determine how online classes are constructed. For example, the setup for an online class whose demographic primarily consists of undergraduate students taking an introductory online class might be different from an online class for graduate students just as it is in the face-to-face classroom.
Because I teach undergraduate students, most of whom are between 18-20 years old (and some of whom are taking their first online class ever), I would definitely avoid overcomplicating my online classes and making them appear chaotic to students. Cris Crissman presented the continuum of centralized vs. decentralized online education, and the postulated the idea of online education with no central hub. This seems to me to be a very chaotic approach. But perhaps I don’t yet appreciate the value of the “no hub” online class because I haven’t yet observed an educator who does this, so I don’t really understand how it’s supposed to work. I do know that the Digital Ethnography example only made me more averse to this type of class. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on in there! What were students supposed to be posting and blogging about? What were they supposed to be reading or researching? Going into an online classroom like that would give me a huge headache! I’m assuming that the professor provided some type of instruction that I didn’t find on the website (at least I hope so!).
I feel as though I’ve already expressed this sentiment in my previous blogs, but I still feel strongly that the instructor’s job is not just to get students using all of the latest technology to complete their coursework. The instructor is also responsible for clearly communicating what is expected in the course and how students can meet those expectations. In this regard, I concur with the survey results in the “Using Online Technologies” article. When asked, “What could have been done to make this (open education) course a better experience for you?”, some of the responses referenced students’ uncertainty about how to progress in the course: “The timeline of the course was somewhat confusing,” and “I have lacked information on the progress of the course”.
In summary, I am all for using new and innovative approaches and technologies in online education if they improve the learning and the experience for the student. It’s only when these approaches and technologies confuse or overwhelm students that they’re not appropriate.