online learning: a reflection

Classes end tomorrow, and then there is some catch-up grading, and then the posting of final grades.

Online teaching requires a LOT less mental energy than classroom teaching. Once you've prepped the course, you've already developed your expectations about what students will take away from any given reading or assignment. You might make adjustments if student work is not what you expect, but the basic framework is there.

For me, less mental energy means less involvement. During the regular school year, I think about my courses and my students all the time. In the online environment, I mostly think about students only when I am reading their work and figuring out how not to sound snarky in my comments. There's a lot less of ME in all of it - I've already done the interesting work of choosing subject matter and readings and making the assignments. Now it's basically just the assessment of student learning. The involvement in learning that is a normal part of the classroom doesn't really exist online - there is very little access to the "aha" moments that I really treasure in the classroom.

For me, as for the students, less involvement means more freedom, consistent with the "in your pajamas" claim of online education. I did feel tethered to the Internet in some respects; I checked my mail and the discussion boards about 3x every day most days, perhaps less on the weekends, and I was really cross when we were away and unexpectedly couldn't have Internet access (which turned out not to matter in the least). (My students generally did not post on the weekends, up until the last couple of hours on Sunday nights when things were due.)

With everyone only writing, not talking, the "classroom" dynamic is very different. Although I feel readers can know me through my writing, I think that students don't have the same facility or the same nuance when they write, so that it's much harder for me to know them. For a lot of my students, writing in standard English is either not a priority or not a skill they possess. (That's weird too: I proof EVERYTHING I post online multiple times; I reread everything for clarity; I look critically for unintentionally loaded words and replace them.)

If 80% of human communication is non-verbal (dependent on cues received in the face-to-face environment) one can imagine how much is foregone in online education. Yeah. Maybe that last sentence is a summary of my experience the past 4.5 weeks.

Other observations:
1. I do not yet have a good set of strategies for managing discussion. Because I want students to "converse" with one another, I am loathe to jump in too often and insert my opinion. Yet, if I wait until after the deadline for posting has passed, I am afraid that my comments become irrelevant. Do they ever read all the words I've posted this month? (Heh, sort of like this here blog...)

2. The discussion board is a really artificial "conversation." What would make it more "real"?

3. I do agree that online ed requires students to be more self-directed, and more in charge of what they learn, since there is no one at the front of the room lecturing at them or telling them what they need to know, or explaining the tough stuff. However, this alone doesn't mean that more, or better, education is going on. Do students have the tools to learn on their own? Are they effective researchers, paraphrasers, reasoners, thinkers? There is potential here for a new paradigm of learning, but no scaffolding to allow it to be built.