Week 4 Reflections

This week's readings in Ko and Rossen are again both instructional, providing new approaches to features that I already use in Blackboard, and reassuring, in that they obviously are very experienced online instructors and their advice and suggestions have considerable credibility. Several "ah hah!'s" came to mind for me, some small, others more important:
1) Make the syllabus easily downloadable and printable, allowing students to have all pertinent material at hand even when not online. This material should include the course calendar, with all due dates for assignments and quizzes.
2) In the introductory e-learning course that I teach, there is a plethora of links provided for outside resources, ranging from profiling software that gives the student a snapshot of their technological abilities and knowledge to learning styles and time management, to netiquette, to website evaluation. Comments from students indicate that there is almost too much opportunity to explore the resources, requiring too much online time on their part.
3) Students frequently have a hard time tracking their progress, despite their access to the Gradebook feature of Blackboard. I also provide a one-page checklist of assignments that they can use to keep track of their progress. This is one item that I need to include in a course FAQ that could be either a supplement to the beginning of course e-mail message sent to all students or incorporated into the first announcement or two.
4) In Chapter 12 of Ko and Rossen, they discuss how to incorporate online elements into a more traditional classroom. With the experience that I've gained from teaching online, I believe that I am well-positioned to do just that, or to help other teachers do that.
5) Also, in Chapter 12, there was some discussion about how much course material to make available online at once. As a student, most of my instructors have followed the one-week-at-a-time approach. In the intro to e-learning class that I teach, the students have a clear preference for having the whole course content available to them. The course doesn't require a lot of collaboration at this level, so synchronizing discussions is not critical. The course essentially becomes self-paced. This 5-week session has seen one student complete all the course requirements in 3 days; another, in 8 days. Typically, these are advanced students who just need one credit to complete other degree requirements and would be bored stiff waiting for weekly assignments. Instead, they complete the one-credit course and turn their attention to other coursework they may have.

In all, Ko and Rossen have provided assurance that their approach is sound and I have been excited to incorporate some of their techniques into my course.

Also, I decided to review an article dealing with the chat feature available in many LMS's and a feature available in Breeze, which we will be using more extensively in EDTECH 582. I have used chat very little, maybe because I associate it with teens endlessly (and mindlessly!) "talking" to one another about inane topics. An article that interested me was found at: http://www.itdl.org/, entitled Faculty Use of Technologies in Online Courses. Chat was one of the three features reviewed in the article. The author's findings are summarized below:

Faculty used chat for two primary reaons: (1) students felt more comfortable since real-time chat was more informal; it brought in some authenticity and helped build a sense of community; and (2) it was efficient to use real-time chat to communicate and give immediate feedback.

Other faculty, who may or may not use chat gave the following reasons: (1) it was difficult to arrange for both instructor and students because students were from different time zones and had different schedules; (2) asynchronous discussion was more important because it forced students to reflect more and provide them more time flexibility; (3) it would take away one of the advantages of taking online courses; and (4) it would be an unreasonable burden for students.
Faculty who used chat used it in the following ways (responses listed in order of frequency from high to low):
1) Had students share their ideas for their own or group project and get feedback from the instructor and peers;
2) Had students visit virtual environment to explore possibilities of use in their [student ]teaching
3) Used Instant Messenger for office hours: Students can “pop in” to ask questions; and see when students are online and remind them of things
4) Used for interaction with a guest speaker;
5) Introduced everyone to each other at the very beginning of semester, and to answer any concerns that have come up in terms of using the tool;
6) Used for unit wrap-ups, discussed the main topics of that week, and clarified assignments;
7) Used for readjust course schedule; and
8) Used for personal communication.

It's clear that chat was used in lieu of other means of communication and seemed to be used when timeliness was not necessarily the most important factor; for instance, numbers 2), 5), 6), and 7) could perhaps be better accomplished by means of Announcements, group e-mails, or even student homepages. Another negative of chat that has bothered me is skill in keyboarding is a requirement for rapid communication and not everyone is skilled and spelling typically suffers, leading to unfortunate and unwarranted judgements of a learner's abilities.