[This is the first in a series of posts about teaching a fully-online course for the first time. -- @jbj]
This summer, I’m teaching a world lit survey class entirely online. I’ve taught the course several times as a face-to-face course, both in the summer and during the regular semester, and so I’m pretty comfortable with the material. This, however, will be the first time I’ve taught a class entirely online. Moreover, for complicated reasons, I’ve agreed to teach the class entirely–or to the greatest extent possible–using the baked-in tools in Blackboard Vista, rather than kludging together something with a wiki or WordPress, as would normally be my wont.
Combining those two sources of (personal) novelty seemed like a natural for ProfHacker, and so for the next seven weeks (the five weeks of the course, plus this preview post and a post-mortem), I’ll sort out how the course is going, what I’m doing wrong, and what kinds of things we’re doing well. These posts should blend workflow and pedagogy considerations, but won’t go too deep into the weeds of specific course content.
One week out, the predominant challenge is stress. This mainly arises from two different sources:
1) The online bit: I’m not terribly concerned about re-creating the course content online, including reconceiving face-to-face discussion prompts as online activities. The part about online teaching that’s stressful is figuring out how to migrate one’s ethos online. In person, after all, it’s easy to convey the extent to which your recommendation of Ricky Gervais’s careful unpacking (NSFW, I guess) of “Humpty Dumpty” as a methodological exemplar is ironic. Online, not so much. More important, nothing points up how much of your teaching persona is time-based (classes take X number of minutes, Y days per week) like moving to an entirely asynchronous environment. I don’t *so* much care whether the students like me, as whether they’re engaged in the course.
2) The LMS bit. I’ll just say that no part of this screen–which is what you see until you’ve started to populate your class–fills my teaching heart with joy:
Click for full-size.
What I particularly admire about this screen is how little help it gives you. Not even a pop-up example of what these various tools might look like (is “Syllabus” just a place to upload a file, or something for me to fill out?), much less a clear explanation of how an “Assessment,” which might include self-tests and surveys, is different from “Discussions,” or why “Goals” are in “Student Learning Activities” rather than “Organizational Tools.” (I’m not pretending that these choices are indefensible, nor even that there’s not a kind of logic to them. This is all about first reactions.) The shifting back and forth between the language of teaching (“Create assignments for Students to submit”) and that of general software (in addition to the Germanically-capitalized “Students,” we’ve also got “users” and “course members”) is also a little jarring. This is probably most visible, actually, in the fact that the screen breaks parallelism: there are “organizational tools,” “communication tools,” “contact tools,” “student tools,” and “student learning activities.” There’s also a tick box for “select all tools,” which presumably incorporates the student learning activities, as well, even though they are not called tools.
Normally, one of my favorite parts of the semester is getting the new wiki and blog stuff set up. This . . . just makes me sad and stressed. (And I don’t think it’s because I still haven’t finished grades from the spring yet!)
Contributing to the stress in a lower-key, if ubiquitous, way is the fact that my favorite parts of my classes are somewhat improvisational. We’ll see how that works in an asynchronous format–although, as Conan O’Brien recently observed, successful improv is always rooted in obsessive preparation anyway.
The best part of teaching online, though, is not having to see some students’ dejection on learning that we’ll be reading the Iliad. I can just delude myself imagine that everyone is super-excited to plow through an epic–and other reading!–in a 5-week course!
How about you? If you have taught online before, what concerns did you have before starting? Do you have favorite resources? If you have not taught online, are you interested in doing so? Why or why not? Let us know in comments!
Photo by Flickr user seantoyer / Creative Commons licensed
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