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!).