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| Image Source: http://nabeeloo.com/2013/02/teaching-problems-teaching-online-is-different/ |
Now that I have finished the development phase of Online Rome and have entered into the far more complicated process of implementing a course that, by design, I am not teaching, I am encountering numerous obstacles. Lack of infrastructure and policies is the most significant obstacle. A complete ignorance of online pedagogy--and, especially, the time it takes to instruct a successful online course--is running a close second. I am stunned at the number of "deciders" who assume that online=automated. There is a clear assumption that, somehow, teaching online requires none of the intensive work (and then some) that teaching f2f does. Partly in an effort to address this assumption, I asked the instructor of the Online Rome course to write up a post about his experience of teaching the course. I asked him to approach it as "a day in the life," to give both administrators and potential online course instructors a sense of what it takes to teach online. It is my hope that, at some point, enough people will have experience with online instruction that these ridiculous assumptions about it will fade away. Until then, however, it is important for everyone to understand the tremendous amount of time and effort it takes to manage an online class, work with students at a distance, and keep the technology running. What follows is a post by Dr. Steve Lundy:
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By
way of introduction, I didn't come to this course as a specialist in
online teaching. My initiation into online course development was a
happy accident of my growing dissatisfaction with the conventional
academic career path, and contributing to the Online Rome project
provided the perfect alt-ac opportunity which has continued to return
high yields as intellectual endeavor and professional trajectory. I
started work on Introduction to Ancient Rome Online in summer 2014 as a
developer, but by the end of the summer I had acquired a good
understanding of the course and its mechanics, and made the transition
to instructing the course in its first iteration. As with all pilot
courses, online or otherwise, much of that semester was a crash-course
for us in identifying what worked and what didn't; for Spring 2015, we
refined our model, eliminated elements that distracted students from
more important course goals, and made key additions (like short essays).
We also made the decision to cap the course at a much more manageable
figure, which allowed us to focus more on student experience and
student-teacher interactions.
By
the end of the academic year we had developed a strong course design
which, we felt, was ready to be reiterated with new instructors at the
helm. A successful transition of this sort includes being able to
anticipate many of the major challenges and opportunities of online
instruction. With the work we have done this year, we're in a good
position to do this. After the frenetic first semester, I found that my
work week gradually settled into a satisfying and challenging routine,
with structured opportunities for interacting with students and moving
them efficiently through the work. Beyond office hours and emails, there
are a few ways to communicate with students: through Canvas
announcements, which I sent about three times a week; through Piazza,
the online discussion board; and through an f2f review held once a week,
which was also live-streamed and archived on the course website. The
last of these was a new addition to the Spring iteration, and was
successful enough to be continued and expanded for future iterations:
although a solid core of around 10% of students showed up in person
week-on-week, about a third of the class watched online regularly, with
spikes around major assignments and exams. I'd like to see this kind of
work be developed even further, with different kinds of f2f groups
appearing, like instructor-led reading groups and instructor-less study
groups -- the more participation the groups include, however, the harder
it becomes to make sure online students have equal opportunities to
attend and take part.
The
largest part of my teaching time was taken up with grading student
essays. In the first semester of the course, we designed discussion
groups to be moderated in Piazza, but it was difficult to encourage
students to take these interactive exercises seriously. In the Spring,
these were replaced with essays, which students had to write for every
other module, based on randomly allocated sections; this meant that
around 50 out of 100 students were submitting essays every 10 days or
so. Especially compared to the Piazza-based discussions in the Fall, I
was consistently impressed with the quality of these submissions, which
demonstrated a good amount of care and comprehension. Since I wasn't
preparing and giving lectures, I also felt like I had more time to give
substantial feedback than I have done in many of my f2f classes,
offering detailed comments to students on matters of both content and
style. The technology assisted this work, and the "Speedgrader" function
on Canvas quickly became my favorite feature. Speedgrader allows for
various kinds of interlinear comments on the paper, as well as overall
comments, which function itself could become the basis for a
conversation with the student. Over the course of the semester, I got
pretty good mileage out of this.
The
other major part of my work was ongoing development. Although I had
drafted and implemented around a third of the course material over the
preceding summer, this work needed to be revised and refined as we
worked through both semesters. When the final drafts were produced, I
took on the role of copy-editor, including checking for consistency and
accuracy in multiple choice and short answer questions. The other major
part of this ongoing development was maintaining our archive of
podcasts, both writing scripts and recording them at the Liberal Arts IT
Services (LAITS) studio. This proved a tremendously enjoyable part ofmy
work week, in no small part because of the outstanding staff, sound
engineers, and student assistants who work at LAITS. Podcasts feature
prominently in our course design, because they are a simple and
cost-effective way to convey complex information efficiently and in an
attractive way.
There are several challenges ahead, as we transition the course out of its initial development phase and into a regularly offered course with a rotating instructional team. I will continue to work with this team in a developmental capacity, but I will not be leading a course myself. This may make it more difficult to experience how evolutions of the course design are felt on the ground, and we do not plan to make too many changes in the first post-development year. That said, the course is designed to be continuously evolving to accommodate instructors' personalities and student needs; I'm keen to see how we might reincorporate peer-to-peer interactions in the mode of the old Piazza discussion boards, since in the current model there is no strong (i.e. graded) basis for student collaboration.
That said, even contemplating that kind of evolution feels unusual: in the past, when I have finished work on a course one semester, I don't have much input into how it is run subsequently; here, it feels like we're in continuous development, building in the cumulative experiences of teachers and students as an integral part of the model. This is certainly a concept I'm keen to carry forward into any f2f teaching I'm doing, as well as my new role in the development of UT's Online Latin program.
