Yay! Post 5! Integration!
I’ve been worried that my style won’t be appreciated in the online environment but in this course I’ve come to realize that I can make myself accessible and translate what I hope is my approachable style to e-learning. 🙂 I’m looking forward to sharing a little of myself with my students (as I usually do). This normally happens when I teach in face-to-face classes but it tends to be unscripted and spontaneous which seems less likely to happen in the online environment. I think changing my writing style to add some personalization and incorporating videos to introduce myself into the course with some FAQs will be very helpful. I also recognize that there is an opportunity for me to continue to improve my feedback skills. I don’t believe I’m particularly bad at giving feedback but I think a more conscious approach to ensuring the feedback is useful to students and presented in a way that can reach them will be beneficial to both them and me.
As far a a rationale for implementing course facilitation strategies goes, the best rationale I can think of is the encourage the students to engage with the course materials and me and to connect them to the topic in ways that simply reading a text cannot. I believe that the subjects that I teach are important for all business students to understand to make better decisions and by encouraging engagement and retention perhaps that message will come through even better than just by following the course activities. I also know that it can be challenging to work alone on courses for all people. As a result, encouraging connection and engagement with students can help students to stay and finish the course.
In my learning activity, “Guide on the Side,” I mention that students themselves become the moderators of discussions, under my supervision and with my support. I tried this in my face-to-face class that was moved online due to COVID-19 and was happy with the way it worked; I was very impressed with the student output and engagement. I think that encouraging students to take leadership in the discussions does not take the pressure off me but gives the students the opportunity to step up and take control of their learning. Teaching students through discussion after they work on an activity seems like a flipped classroom activity that would be appropriate to encourage engagement.
Specific Goals for creating a good social presence and effective educational media:
- I plan to make an outline for my videos to better ensure that they have the content that I want and include me being casual and talking a little about myself. I hope that by doing this students will feel like they can approach me with issues and questions as they work through the course. This means writing an outline for each video (which I haven’t been doing) and investigating other forms of media recording including simple voice recordings as well as other means of creating a video presence.
- I also need to do a little personal reflection and think about what I really want students to know about me and my interest in the courses I teach. I’ve been working hard for many years now on my education and career and have found that since I’ve been so busy that I have lost sight a little bit of why I do what I do and who I am as an individual. I think we all get a little lost sometimes and need to remind ourselves of who we are and what we want to offer the world. It’s also challenging to remember one’s motivation for teaching when in the think of teaching since there are so many competing demands for my attention and time. I plan to take some time in the next couple of months to clear my head and remember what’s important to me. This will involve some time alone with my thoughts, perhaps some writing, and maybe chatting with friends and colleagues to get their perspectives on working, teaching, and life.
I have so far focused primarily on student engagement and less so on retention. That is where I’d like to go next as far as the topics of this course go. It’s easy to assume that engagement will positively influence retention but I’m interested in understanding the course-related reasons for students dropping the course and what I can do to try to help them finish. There will always be life factors that I may not be able to help with but I hope to be able to encourage course completion. As a academic, my first thought is to head to the SoTL literature to understand why students drop classes in both face-to-face and online formats and then to talk to some of my colleagues who have been teaching online for longer than me to learn.
