In our course book for Essentials of eLearning we read Boettcher and Conrad’s, The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips. It was a great resource for understanding how a course will play out in the weeks after it has been designed. Also, we had available to us the course site of Judith V. Boettcher. She wrote on her site Designing for learning:
This Designing for Learning site features a collection of publications and articles from over 25 years while I have been working with faculty, consulting and writing in the area of online and distance learning and faculty development and the future of teaching and learning.
Boettcher’s book and website offers the reader a variety of tips for guiding online or blended courses. She is a knowledgeable online course designer. It seems fitting that one would refer to her knowledge and guidance when trying to put together a blog on the dynamics of online teaching. In the authors’ ten best practices (Boettcher & Conrad 2010), they write being present on the course site in the beginning weeks of the course is the best practice for community building and learning.
In the instructor’s course to date, I have read over one hundred introductory posts encouraged by the course instructor. The age range on the students in this class is 17 to circa 52 years of age. They are a highly diverse group of people. Yet their bonds were being developed and were made clear in the postings the students made in the first week of the class. After reading the emails and introductions it became equally as clear that the instructor was helping these students form the learning bonds they would need in the future. He/she continued to nature and coax the students to bond throughout the first week and into the second. The only thing I would do differently is to establish a student lounge where the students could go to one another to get help with any difficulties they might be experiencing in the course.
It is very clear to me the instructor was building trust in his/her course from the very beginning and was actively present on the course site. He/she began to provide the basis for a community of trust and understanding among his/her students when stating the course objectives and giving his/her ideas on how they should manage their time each week. He/she provided positive reinforcement and encouraged the students to participate in the discussions and among themselves in his/her postings and emails to them. When viewing the course as it began to unfold, I had a feeling the instructor was presence even when he/she was not visble in his/her virtual course. Also, the instructor made it very clear what the expectations were and what the students were there to accomplish.
In fact while the workload seemed rather heavy (I read and viewed most of what the students were reading and viewing in the first actual course module), it also seemed to be a bit more fun than work because of the social community aspect. Everyone was facing the same course work challenges with each other. The students’ respect for the instructor was stated in their introductory posts and this seemed to contribute to the willingness of the students to get down to the matter of learning with each other. It remains to be seen if this continues, however.
There was a few troubling features of this online course. I wondered why a highly educated, world practiced professional would not use the many Web 2.0 features and tools available to his/her in this course. At our last class meeting, Jen our Essentials of eLearning instructor told use that Bellevue College doesn’t want these tools used due to the possibility of legal liability. My first reaction was, the students are missing some of the tools and techniques online learning allows them and the research has shown helps improve their learning. I know as a student at BC, I was allowed this experience; but since then they have cracked down and told their teachers it is not a practice the college endorses. With this in mind, I would have second thoughts about taking another online course at BC.
In conclusion, the course is progressing through phase one rather nicely and efficiently.The Learning Management System is archaic and likened to an old dinosaur hardly able to move. So the quality of the class can be studied and questioned as to just how effective it is under these circumstances. One of the instructor’s course experiments could easily be used in this study. I personally find it rather sad that the powers that be at BC do not fully understand how they may be giving their students less of an online experience than they could get in another more up-to-date online course, at about the same cost or less.
JOYSTECHTOOL 