Many times students take online classes as a last resort,
only if other sections are full or because the class that they need is only
offered online. At the same time,
instructors often dread online sections because of the poor results, extra
workload, and lost connection with the students. With the current advances in technology,
online classes shouldn’t be dreaded, by either the instructor or the
student. Ideally, professors could
design a class that will become a preferred choice by students, a place where
they could learn even more than in the F2F environment, utilizing tools that
provide multiple ways to learn and benefit all learning styles. A key to this
transformation is fundamental changes in design, developing technological tools
that have built into their design pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK). I think as more of these tools proliferate,
the better the student experience will be for both the student and the teacher.
Even in traditional settings, technology should be
purposely, and thoughtfully used. Just
using the latest and most impressive technology might impress fellow instructors,
but it often only frustrates the students…or in best-case scenarios, the focus
becomes just learning the tool and not actually meeting the learning
objectives. Unless, the learning
objective is to learn that specific technological tool, the technology becomes
a distraction. The key is to use
whatever we use thoughtfully and purposefully.
I think one of the main “tools” that I would want to have,
or design, is a single place to have as a launching place for any and all
technological tools that I use. That way
the student could log into one page, one spot, and go into all the various
tools and platforms that are needed for successful completion of the
assignment/project/class. Even though I “live” with my computers,
tablet, and mobile devices, I find it irritating to try to remember where
various places are that we are supposed to use for a class, what my username
was for that particular class and what the password was. To students, these “minor” irritations become
barriers that hinder them from successfully completing the task of being
participating learners.
Overall, this class has been revolutionary in my
thinking. I came into it after having
many classes online (over 10) and having experiences that ranged from better
than face-to-face (my statistics class- she used multiple videos for lectures
and showing how to solve homework and enter data into the calculators to run
statistical analysis) to horrible (a class about networking- the professor got
married in the second week of a summer class, had a death in the family, just
disappeared for most of the semester and then they lost all of the documents
submitted for the entire semester in a CMS glitch). Overall, my experience has been that most
instructors didn’t really use the medium very well and there seemed to be no apparent
pedagogical reason for how they approached the class. It always felt like it was a face-to-face
class that got thrown into the online environment. In knowing the potential for developing
better tools for online instruction from my background in programming and
computer work, I was constantly frustrated by the programs being developed by
the IT side, they were good for keeping track of students, but horrible for the
teacher and student interactions. My revolutionary
revelation was to see a product like Eli that is being developed BY and FOR
educators. It was like hearing Handel’s
Hallelujah Chorus in the distance. There
is hope.
As more products are developed using TPCK, choosing to teach
in an online environment will someday be the first choice instead of the last
resort. Also, the boundary between online and face-to-face with become less
defined as traditional classes use more Web based tools (such as Eli).
