In my opinion, community is essential to the success of all courses. This week, the chapter readings and the videos provided very practical information about “building a community” within an online course. However, I do plan to apply some of the concepts and strategies that I learned from Pilar to the f2f medical terminology course that I am currently teaching. The concepts include sharing, feeling safe, and closeness. The strategies include having students invest in what they are learning, using polls, sending “check-in” e-mails, providing personalized feedback to students, and being more of a participant than a facilitator in the role of instructor.

Building a sense of community fits very well with nursing and allied health courses. For example, as nursing students move into the hospital setting to take care of patients, there is so much pertinent information that they can “share” with each other about their experiences in an online environment. With students in the medical terminology course, a sense of community can be facilitated by students speaking to each other using medical terminology.

In moving forward, I realize that building a sense of community in online environment will require the use of technology. So, once I have completed my doctoral dissertation, I am buying myself a new computer. However, before I do so I will be asking the POT facilitators and my fellow POT learners to provide me with input on what “bells and whistles” should come with the computer for the purpose of online teaching.

Oh, before I go…….I have a quick question. I am curious to know how you greet your students (collectively) in both an online and f2f environment. For example, do say “Hello class,” or “Hello everyone?” I get the sense that younger generation students find the term “class” to be too formal.

The focus of this week’s learning activities was setting up an online course. The Ko and Rossen textbook provided some useful recommendations on ways to structure the course. Lisa’s blog also provided very insightful and practical information about online course development that I doubt you can find in a book. Lastly, the manifesto on online training provided “food for thought” regarding all aspects of online instruction.

When considering the structure of the course, I feel that weekly segments will work best. And although I may not have a say on how many students are enrolled in my course, I would prefer not to have more than 25 students. As my favorite teaching strategy is to ask critical thinking questions, I will need to design the course so that there are ample opportunities for me promote critical thinking among students. Lastly. in keeping with Lisa’s statement that a priority of students is learning from the teacher, I really want to ensure that I am more of a teacher than a facilitator in the online course that I develop.

http://youtu.be/oomypi2Hyjo

I was not surprised that I had a low score on the technology quiz. The reason I am attending this academy is to learn more about technology.

In this video, a student is singing a song that includes medical terms. I chose this video because I gave my students an extra credit assignment in which writing a song that includes 20 medical terms was an option. It has been my experience that the song writing is both fun and an effective learning approach. What makes it effective is that the student must put the medical term into context.

There were many great recommendations offered in the videos and in the chapter. The first recommendation that I will most likely follow is to provide very specific language/criteria regarding instructor and student expectations for the course. This will be especially important with regard to course participation and assignments. Among the specifics that I plan to provide are due dates with times/ time zones for assignments and discussion posts. I also will inform the students as to when they can expect instructor feedback and graded assignments.

As a doctoral leaner that recently completed coursework in an online environment, I was frustrated with the established deadlines for assignments/posts and not receiving feedback in a timely manner (or at least what I considered timely). The frustration with the established deadlines was that they were all in central time. As a Westcoaster, I hated not having 2  additional hours in the evening to complete my course work.

Another recommendation that I will follow is providing redundancy. As such, I will ensure that important info is located in more places than the syllabus. Yet another suggestion that I will use is to provide the syllabus as a google doc as well as entering into BlackBoard under content. I personally love having a hard copy of the course schedule………and I like the schedule to be a in a table format.

The most striking difference between the online syllabi and syllabi in the textbook is that the online syllabi are in fact interactive. The hyperlinks in particular make it a living document.