Interview with Super Teacher
I had a great conversation with my colleague, Super Teacher (I’m hiding his identity to save him from being overwhelmed with adoring fans). He, like me, teaches classes at the School of Business and Economics at TRU both online and face-to-face. I was lucky to be able to speak to him because he has experience with teaching both paced and continuous entry courses with TRU OL so he was able to articulate the differences in the approaches and his experiences clearly which made for an interesting conversation. By having experience teaching in both formats he was able to share what worked in paced courses and we could discuss whether or not he thought those things would work in continuous entry courses.
He was very clear that it can be very challenging creating community in a continuous entry course since the instructor has no control over the design of the course. In fact, students seem to rarely complete the introduction template they can send to their instructors so the likelihood of them engaging with each other voluntarily seems slim. He told me that he has started to engage more with students at the beginning of the course than he used to by introducing himself to them upon registration so they can at least start to feel a connection with the instructor. He also encourages them to contact him after reading materials if they have questions or problems. I have already been doing this with the students and have had varying levels of response from them. He gave me some ideas for additional content for my email that I may add to what I currently write as well.
His practice has also been to apply face-to-face classroom practices to working with students, e.g. checking in on students who have not been engaging with the course and are behind on their assignments. To do this, he keeps a record of the last contact he has had with each student. By checking in with these students he has had some success with re-engaging them with the course. There are many similarities with face-to-face learning in the approaches and outcome of students from his perspective. Even though he may not have developed the course, he always thinks about how to help students to get the most out of the course. One of the ways he has been able to do this is through the richness of his feedback. His marking includes the use of a rubric which gives an overall grade for each of the parts of the assignment and additional comments that are tailored to the student work. His goal is to use comments that provide guidance, not answers, e.g. “this is what you need to focus on…”. By doing this he hopes that students are able to improve their performance on subsequent assignments and more deeply engage in the inquiry process to improve learning. This also relates to challenges with academic integrity that can occur in the online learning context. He tries to make the feedback process oriented so future students cannot simply resubmit answers written by someone else. I have had to do limited marking so far since the course is a new course but the idea of creating a rubric is a good one that I intend to followup on. I’ve been developing my approach to marking the assignments and following the values assigned by the course designer but am still working on this. This was a gem 
from Super Teacher!!
Some of his biggest struggles are very similar to the face-to-face environment. There are students who may never contact you or respond to your offers of help and perform poorly which is frustrating. There are also students who contact him A LOT which is challenging to manage from a time management standpoint as well as ensuring that the students are actually obtaining clarity when responding by email. There can also be a significant amount of time required to respond to student questions that relate specifically to assignments that were designed and written by someone else. Deep dives into text material are sometimes required to first gain familiarity with the specific material being assessed and then crafting responses that will support the students in their work. Students may be argumentative regarding assignment requirements and if the instructor is not clear on them there can been challenging communications to resolve questions and issues. I already recognize the challenge of clearly communicating via students but this was a reminder to take the time to gain the understanding I need before responding to ensure that I do not create more confusion than I solve!
I think we’re still both working on and thinking about the need for engagement in the inquiry process in online courses. We agreed that it is possible but that it will always be challenging in the specific environment in which we are teaching.
