I’ve started revising my courses for the spring semester. And I’m trying to expand everything in a few different directions. On the technical side, I’ve tweaked the CSS a bit for better online reading. I’ve been squashing non-semantic elements in my markup. And I discovered a great little JavaScript trick that makes it easy to create footnotes that auto-number and insert themselves at the bottom of the page.
On the content side, I’m expanding beyond text and adding images, where appropriate, to the lectures. This generally means an author pic on the top-right of each lecture. And it’s surprising to me how much that simple addition adds to the page. Besides the notes section, I’ve been adding sections titled “Learn More” and “Interact” at the bottom of each lecture. The “Learn More” section is just a bulleted list of resources where the more adventurous students can dig in for extended study. It lets me pass on some of the useful things I find when I’m researching that don’t necessarily fit into the flow of the lecture itself, but are worth checking out. The “Interact” section is one more effort to encourage students to take part in the forums, often be providing a specific task or topic.
I’ve also been infusing the lectures with secondary sources. Some of them have this already, by many don’t. Adding in critical voices is handy for many reasons. They make the lectures richer and allow me to demonstrate how to incorporate (and document) other voices. They also give the kids a head jump on articles that might be worth studying as they research for their own essays.
As I work through these lectures, beefing them up and expanding them, they start to resemble my own private Wikipedia entries in the walled garden of the college’s LMS. That forces me to consider what I’m adding that a simple link to Wikipedia wouldn’t accomplish more easily. And, I suppose, the only answer there is this: my voice. Encyclopedia entries strive for objectivity. My own lectures are a mix of objective facts and my own inferences. They are a blend of the objective landscape of an author’s life and works and the subjective landscape of my own engagement with the texts and the critical literature related to them.
That may sound self-aggrandizing and hopelessly modernist. It’s popular in educational discourse to jettison the “sage on the stage” in favor of the “guide on the side.” But that’s a hopelessly false dichotomy. Any good teacher (and any good teaching) is a mix of both. The freshman students in my classes don’t know much about literature or writing. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t try to fill in the gaps. At the same time, writing is something one only learns by doing. So I step to the sidelines and offer advice and encouragement on the particular techniques that have worked for me, as a reader and a writer.
But back to the topic of content, I can imagine some more efficient ways of making that happen. Some schools have an “academic commons,” a pool of lectures and other educational resources that teachers share. That’s not a bad idea, especially for new teachers making the transition from face-to-face to online teaching. Creative commons licensing provides a useful way to share while still attributing sources. An academic commons could create a rich pool of content, though still one walled off from the rest of the world. It might make more sense, taking a longer view of things, for administrations to encourage (or even require) teachers to become Wikipedia editors, increasing the value of that publicly available resource with an influx of specialized knowledge. It would still be no place for original research and opinion, but it might help with factual problems, vandalism, and other inconstancies.
[This is the fourth installment in an ongoing series of posts about my experiences teaching in an online environment after years of experience teaching face to face. You might also be interested in parts one, two, and three.]