Module 3: Useful Steps

Module three proved useful and practical. I'm afraid this post won't be very colorful because the module was quite businesslike for me. I now feel comfortable doing many basic things in moodle, and I am confident I can figure the rest of it out without too much trouble. During module two, I played with the applications to which Rick drew our attention. In module three, I decided to start putting together a real course – or at least real elements of a course I might teach. Specifically, I acted as though my module three work was an attempt to try to adapt the beginning of a history course I taught last summer to the online environment. I redid some stuff from module 2 to make it work in the new course and shifted things around accordingly.

I think I can imagine a basic rhythm for a history course centered around readings and students posing discussion questions and responding to discussion questions on forums. I would grade and comment on their posts. Then they would read additional, more specialized readings, or watch part of a film or documentary, or view a piece of art or a photograph and work in groups to produce interpretations of these materials – possibly as group wikis. At the end of each module, students would then upload responses in short-answer form (a couple paragraphs) to a paper prompt. The last would allow them to work on marshaling evidence and writing formally. In the online environment (though also in F2F settings too), I would like to dispense with big exams. I would like to replace these with some sort of comprehensive group project. I think such a project needs to be there in order to allow students to take advantage of their online community (our readings seem to emphasize the importance of this) and learn from each other. But I am mulling over what this project should be. This is as far as I have gotten at this point.

I think I am at the point that I need to see some other examples of good online courses in the field of history (or the humanities broadly). I need some fresh ideas. I fear I am too bound up in “adapting” what I have done before. And then, I know that I will need some outside critique of what I do before I launch it. All in all, I feel like I am progressing but I am missing some pieces still.

 On Tools and Collaborative Projects

I am getting back to this blog later than I should have, but other work leapt into its place. Even though my work for it was strung out a bit, this module proved quite useful as I now have a number of alternative ways of communicating with students in an online course. All these tools function basically the same way: you download the software, create an account, create the file, and then link to your file with a url. My daughter thought Voki was especially entertaining. I feel confident that I can use all these tools, for they are all quite simple. I think I could introduce any of these tools to students during a course and get them to use them, since a four-minute video tutorial seems sufficient. What to use these tools for is another question and I need to start thinking this through more seriously.

I think our group project went okay. We got going on it early and we discussed each other’s work, but we discussed that work within the collaborative document and this seemed to make the document a bit of a mess. So when it came time to hand in our evaluation, I think it required a lot from the people whose job it was to winnow the paper down to size and make it coherent. It seems to me that one of two things need to occur when working on such a document: we either needed two documents – a rough, messy, discussion document, and then a cleaner version in which the contributors only try to write narrative that advances toward the final document. Or, perhaps there is the collaborative document that everyone works on, but discussions about it occur in a forum.

On a final note, I find it a bit awkward to record myself (either my image or voice) and use it. I wonder if you just get used it to it, or if there is some etiquette or protocol to doing these things (rules of production?, tips?) that would make me feel better in what I am doing?

Online Teaching: The Very Idea!

Reading through the various things we were to read for the first module, I was struck by how much opportunity teaching through a(n) LMS provides for getting students to buy in, make the course material their own, and interact with each other. Though, as this point, I am rather hazy about how precisely to set up my online course, I am excited about the potential of online teaching for engaging students in a more student-oriented experience. I teach in an old discipline where pedagogy is too often an afterthought. Sad but true. As a result, I have a feeling that students sometimes come into a F2F classroom in my field expecting to be passive participants and moreover, feeling passively indifferent toward the material. But it appears that in an online course more onus is on the students to get to the material, think about it, participate with each other, and generate course content based on their engagement with the material. Of course, there is also a greater onus on the instructor to unfurl a well-planned structure that will allow students to do this. But I feel like the online and hybrid formats would allow me to push my students and myself in directions I have been trying to push them (and myself) in recent years anyway. I thus feel that learning about online learning like we are in this class moves me in the right direction as a teacher. In some small way, it also nudges my discipline down the path. 

According to our readings, an online instructor needs to be present in the class so as to encourage participation, to direct students, to answer students questions, and to police bad behavior. Though none of the readings claimed that the instructor needs to be constantly present -- indeed, quite the opposite -- I am a little worried and a little uncertain about how present the instructor needs to be in the online classroom. In my F2F experience, I feel I spend a lot of time outside of class encouraging student participation, sending out reminders, singling out students for (light) prodding or congratulations, asking about missing assignments, etc., and I feel like there is no end to this sort of activity despite the fact that I see the typical F2F student in the flesh 1-3 times a week. I wonder whether the online environment encourages student absenteeism and irresponsibility and will demand much more of me in the way of trying to locate and engage students one by one, or whether online learning actually discourages students from not showing up, not doing their work, and leaving things in a state of ambiguity.

(On a side note: I wonder how you identify and get to know a student in an online environment who is going through something that transcends academics and might need help (family problems, health problems, etc.))


I am highly interested in those parts of LMSs which will allow me to quickly monitor student activity performance. I am not excited about this because I am at all interested in tracking my students. Freedom is key. But I hope that if students know that I can see what and how they are doing at a glance, perhaps they will not so readily engage in cat and mouse games with me.

I am excited by the possibilities of asynchronous communication (e.g., in a forum) as a teaching tool. I do a lot of teaching through email communication between F2F meetings, but that is usually 1-to-1 and thus a secret so far as the rest of the class is concerned. Asynchronous communication will allow whatever insights are generated in these interactions to be broadcast to everyone with opportunities for further development/questioning. I also love the idea of requiring and grading forum posts. The whole genre, it seems to me, is geared toward writing purposefully and concisely, and we could all use more of that from our students (and from ourselves!).