OTL 101 Post 5: Reflections

If I’m honest, I like my first post the best. It’s so rare that I get to just write in a non-field specific way that I enjoyed the freedom that just writing about myself gave me. It stretched a muscle that hasn’t been used for awhile. 🙂 It also gave me time to think about teaching in ways that I don’t usual take time to do and let me admit that I like teaching.

During the course I have enjoyed a number of the ideas presented. One of the most thought provoking ideas for me is the multiple components of good feedback. I know that I am supportive and am very process-oriented in my approach to teaching and student learning and want to continue to be so. Ensuring course objective-assessment alignment is also important and I want to go to all my courses to ensure a higher degree of alignment. I question to what degree I will be able to do so given our department standard course outlines. That will be easy to determine by speaking with my chair.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised to see educators talking about the differences in motivations between students. As a teacher in a business school I know that many students are highly outcome-oriented and the videos included in this course helped me to understand the differences between what I call “stronger” and “weaker” students (not “good” and “bad”) and encouraged me to continue to work towards engaging students who are taking my class as a requirement, not out of curiosity.

I supposed it’s because of my limited online teaching experience that I’m having trouble relating the material to the online learning environment but I’m optimistic that I will be able to start making that connection in the next modules. The starting point of knowledge is of course, usually, our own experiences. I will be developing online courses for my face-to-face students, as a result of the current COVID-19 situation. As a result I want to keep the ideas of triggering and engaging students in-mind as a develop my course(s). Taking this course will help me to understand the perspective of the students. My goal is still to create interesting courses and materials that engage students and encourage them to do good work on the path of learning subjects I am very passionate about.

My questions are still largely tactical about how to engage students and how to really assess what they are learning, given that I will not actually see the students.  I also wonder about making genuine connections with students. One of my greatest strengths is the connection I build with students in the classroom and I want to learn how to translate that into the online environment. I believe this helps encourage cognitive presence. I’m hoping the rest of the course will touch on some of the possibilities for this. Once the course is over, I intend to continue to engage in the SOTL literature regarding online course delivery and speak with some other OL faculty about what they believe  successful strategies are to work with and to engage students.