So much energy and creativity goes into the development of an online course. I find there are two challenges:
1. Creating the structure around your entire teaching content and learning activities. This area for me is the most creative part. I enjoy organizing and structuring information. I think that is why I chose librarianship as a profession. While listening to the interviews held on course observations by the many faculty who are teaching online, we learned that it can take anywhere from 100 – 300 hours of development time! I think this is true partly because it’s about writing the content down that you normally would just go into the course and speak about. I also think it is due to incorporating all kinds of multi-media into the course structure to make it interesting and to reach individual learning styles.
2. Learning how to use the course management software. Don’t you just want to drive the software when you are ready after spending time thinking and creating how it will look? I said to myself when I first started to fall in love with motorcycling: “Don’t I just want to hop on that beautiful machine and go?” Oh it takes time to learn how to drive, so we have to have the patience. I sometimes find myself having little patience for software that has hang-ups though!
Alex said in her blog, “when designing a course think about:
· how long the course should be
· who the students will be
· what needs to be covered”
I will remember this (how, who, what) as I create my hiking 101 course.
–Geralynn (4)
In module 2 we had the opportunity to observe exemplar courses created in the online environment. Having this opportunity alone seemed to justify why I took this course in the first place. I thought it was an amazing experience and it was the best activity so far! Thank you Alex! How valuable to be able to listen to and review the courses that were in place for some time and to hear the advice from experts in the field! I found myself writing notes while listening to the conversations held during the interviews. I went into the courses and reviewed how the instructors setup and organized their courses. One of the most interesting introductions I found came from Beth Harris at FIT. Her course was History of Western Art and Civilization: Renaissance to Modern Era”. She was speaking about dealing with “strong resistance to technology” among faculty and administration. This made me think long and hard about where I work. Why do we find pockets of resistance to technology? Is it the fear of the implementation costs or is it fear of change? One of Beth’s challenges that I thought about was that this course was required for all students. This means the audience could be made up of people who don’t really want to be there and the only reason they are taking it is because it is required and not because they are interested in the topic. This makes for a tough audience. I get similar students in my online library skills course who are only taking it to get extra credit. I loved the plan that is in place where Beth trains about 15 faculty each year and that there are stipends and laptops built into the faculty contract for this initiative. I felt I connected to Beth Harris’s organizational structure and will most likely use some of her thinking and planning while developing my course structure. I loved that she said she’d been teaching for 4 years and she’s still not finished! This makes me think about my library skills course that I teach online. I need to continue to develop it and after taking this course, I definitely need to look at it with new eyes! Oh, and I did understand the end conversation where Alex and Beth were talking about the alt images tags. It’s proper html etiquette to include the alt image tag just in case your audience can’t bring up the picture that you intended to show. Instead of an ugly red X on their screen, at least they’d get a little tag with your text that would give them a hint as to what you wanted to display.
Here are some other notes about the observations that I had:
Bill Pelz- Developmental Psychology: found a typo on his news flash – check out the word “begim”. I found his course to be well structured and liked his ice breaker activity section. He stressed that he uses the private folder for remarks to the student about individual progress. I like that because it gives the student one place to go for feedback instead of all over the place. Also, I like that it is private between the instructor and student so that all students don’t have to read about what another classmate is discussing with the instructor when the information really pertains to just that student. Also Bill made a great comment about when developing a course online that you’ve taught in the class you really have to “grapple with the content more when you are writing about it vs. talking about it”.
Steven Zucker; Modern Art:– I LOVED listening to him! The only problem I had with this interview was there seemed to be a lot of background talking and laughing. I found his approach to be very friendly, yet strict. He lets the students know exactly what is expected and I liked that he seems to be very structured. He lets students know “who should take the class and who shouldn’t” in his welcome document. He left us with a great comment: “Online teaching forced him to really grow and rethink how he teaches”. He stated, “I’ve become a better professor”. I loved how he had virtual field trips.
John Prusch; Elementary German II – It was fabulous finding out how John infused audio into his online course so that students could listen to the language. In the ice breaker the students had to test out creating sound clips because they were expected to record themselves speaking German and submit it has part of the assignments. Windows sound recorder was used for PC users. His design thoughts were about how to create an interactive course and have it be active so that students could practice speaking, writing, listening, reading and study the culture. McGraw Hill gave full copyright to use any of the information from the text. It is important that you ASK permission first and never assume you can have full copyright. John noted that it would be great if the course management software could have a built in tool for sound recording. Great comments from John to note are: “not every student has the correct perception of what it takes to learn online”. He said while “some are like a fish in water, others will struggle”.
–Geralynn (4)
Welcome to Edublogs.org. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
