On Online Teaching, Part I

Starting in January of this year, I’ve been teaching online English composition classes for a technical college (this is my part-time, evenings-and-weekends job. My full-time gig is still software training and consulting, also at a technical college). I have quite a bit of face-to-face teaching experience, in both academic and training environments, including experience using (and building) various web-based systems for supplemental instruction. But I’d never taught an academic course in a fully-online environment before this spring semester. As you might guess, I learned a lot from the experience, so I’ll be blogging a bit about it here.

The summer session is in progress now, and I’m teaching the same online course, but in half the time (just over eight weeks, total). I had a three-week gap between the end of spring and the beginning of summer, which gave me time to revise and rethink some things. During the spring, I was staying just a few steps ahead of the class, as I had to expand my lecture notes into XHTML documents that the students could read online. These “lectures” are the heart of the class. I also have some PowerPoint presentations which I’ve converted to PDF, but those are mostly support materials on various grammar and documentation topics.

This time around, the lectures are already built. I’ve been revising and expanding them, of course. But a lot of the hard work of content development is already done. In a few cases, I’ve included stories or poems that I didn’t teach in the spring, which means new lectures. But having the bulk of the lecture content already built frees up my time to do some other things.

The first of these new things is fostering community in the discussing forums. In the spring, the class felt more like a bunch of concurrent correspondence classes rather than a truly online class. Cross-talk between the students was minimal. Most students, when they had questions, chose email over the forums, despite my advise in the syllabus to the contrary.

This might sound cynical, but one thing I’ve discovered about students in online classes is they generally will not do things online unless those things have points attached to them. I had been warned as much by a colleague, and I found it to be true. In a face-to-face class, you can guilt students into doing things that would be good for them but don’t count for points. That power doesn’t translate to the online environment. People take online courses in their spare time. Many of them have full-time jobs and are trying to finish a degree in what little time they have left over from earing a living and parenting. If it’s not required, it’s not done. Full stop.

In face-to-face classes, I’ve always used reading quizzes, but I tended to use them mostly at the first of the term to get people into good habits. Luckily, the software we use to manage the online classes makes creating quizzes easy and grading them, so long as you stick to multiple-choice or other objective formats, automatic (the score gets written straight into the online grade book). This saves me time, of course, and it also gives the students immediate feedback on their quiz performance. So, during my downtime, I built more quizzes. And, as the course progresses this summer, I’m building even more. Each time I revise the class, I’ll be building more of these assessments into it. Eventually, almost everything I ask students to read will have a quiz attached to it. I started off this summer term with a quiz over the syllabus, one of three quizzes in the first week of class.

Don’t get me wrong. These quizzes are short–generally five questions–and dead easy. They’re reading quizzes, pure and simple. They are only designed to punish people who don’t bother to crack a text book. They are not tricky and they don’t call for intense textual analysis. Most students ace them. And, since they, collectively, count as 15% of their final grade, students who are willing to work are properly rewarded for effort even if their paper scores are not great. Reading quizzes are as much a rhetorical device as an assessment device. They say “I’m not kidding about reading the stuff on the syllabus.”

Starting this summer, I extended this assessment idea to the forums. I’m requiring three “substantive” posts per week. I’m not grading each post individually, I’m just tallying them up and parsing out any obvious “me too!” posts. So far, so good. My forum is hopping. Students are starting their own threads to discuss points and ask questions. More students are communicating with me via the forums than via email. So the advice I give can now benefits the rest of the class as well. This, of course, means I’m spending a lot more time in the forums. And I’ll have to watch that, as I don’t have infinite time to devote to this project and as I want them to be, primarily, student led. When students post questions about the literature, I hold back to see if any of the other students will take a stab at answering, just as I would in a face-to-face class.

In my next post, I”ll have some specifics on my work flow. Right now, I need to stop theorizing and grade some more papers.

[This is the first 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 part two.]