I normally teach in the classroom during summer session, but this summer, for a variety of reasons, I decided to try to teach a fully online section of our introductory statistics course.  I’ve taught this online course for years during the regular 16-week semester, so I’m well aware of the workload.  Even during a regular semester, it can be challenging to keep up with everything, and it seems like the online course tends to be more work for students than the face-to-face counterpart simply because of increased reading and writing demands.  I worried a lot about trying to cover so much material–online–during our shorter 8-week summer session, but I knew the time had come to offer an online option for our summer students.  I thought this might end up being more flexible for students, especially since many of the students who tend to take this course live far from the Twin Cities.  It also seemed like the online course would better work with my own summer schedule and the plans I had for travel.

To make the workload manageable in the summer course (for the students and for myself), I ended up making a few changes.  Small group discussion is still a big component of the course, but students now work through six rather than eight group discussion assignments.  Students also have a project they must complete that involves gathering data, exploring that data, and analyzing the data.  That assignment has usually been an individual assignment, but this summer, I decided to give students the option of working on the project in pairs or small groups of three.  Interestingly, most students decided to work on their own, but I do have a handful of small groups, and I’m hoping this will make it easier to grade the projects and get timely feedback to students (especially since I have 40 students and the projects will come trickling in when I am away at a conference).

So far, I feel it’s worked well to have the course online during a summer session, and I’ve definitely learned a lot that I know will help me better structure the online version of the course should we offer it again next summer.  My students are all working hard, and I’m so proud of them.  I appreciate that it’s been challenging for several of them to digest so much material in such a short amount of time, but they continue to amaze me each day with their high levels of participation and the questions they are asking.  We are now just about to end Week 5, and it’s hard to believe we’ll be done soon, especially since there is so much more we still have to cover.

I think the biggest challenge for me has been keeping up with the volume of discussion.  I worried about this, and even though I feel I have a lot of experience now under my belt in terms of handling online discussions, part of me still feels like I could be doing so much better, and that there is an easier way to keep up with it all.  Near the top of this post, I’ve shared a screen shot of the number of posts (2,379) that have already transpired in the course.  This is more than I typically get during a regular semester, and we still have two more discussion assignments on the horizon!  Of course, I don’t generally have this many students, and the students have more time during the regular semester to digest material and reflect on that material (and thus might not have as many questions/concerns as a result).  I love the fact that through discussion, I can interact with each and every student, and I never want to lose that in my online courses.  I just worry a lot about being efficient, and about putting too much pressure on myself to be an online presence for students.  My own posts (404) now constitute a little over 16% of all discussion posts in the course.  Am I being TOO active?  Maybe, but it’s hard for me to imagine running the class any other way.

I sometimes wonder just how many online instructors think carefully–when designing their online courses–about how students with disabilities might interact with their course sites and their online materials.   When I first started to teach online, I’m ashamed to say this was not something I put a lot of thought into, primarily because working in the online environment was so very new to me, and there were so many other challenges competing for my attention.  Even in a face-to-face classroom setting, I worry that I don’t give this the attention it deserves until I’m actually faced with a situation in which a student with a disability registers for my course.  I feel I need to change my way of thinking about this, especially in light of this recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/blind-florida-state-u-students-sue-over-e-learning-systems/32028?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

When I went through training this last fall to become a Quality Matters peer reviewer, I learned more about the kinds of accommodations that online instructors can make for students with disabilities, and this was very helpful in terms of thinking about how I might better structure my own courses.  One part of the Quality Matters rubric deals with the accessibility of the course site and the materials on the course site, and I can’t help but wonder how my own courses might be rated on this portion of rubric.  One thing I realized when I went through this training is that most times, when I thought about the design of my course materials and how accessible they would be, my focus tended to be on students who might be deaf or who might have other hearing disabilities, probably because I’ve had several deaf or hard of hearing students in my courses over the years.  I think this is partly why I’ve steered away from using a lot of video in my online courses.  I just assumed that information in text would be more accommodating and accessible to most students.

It wasn’t until this spring, when some colleagues and I met with Philip Kragnes, an Adaptive Technology Specialist who works with the Computer Accommodations Program at the University of Minnesota, that I started thinking carefully about how I needed to make sure my courses were also accessible to blind students.  Philip is blind, and it was fascinating to talk to him and to see how his screen reader was able to read information for him.  It was also very interesting to hear more about how we–as instructors–can think about the ways we are designing our course sites.  Sometimes, little things that we think might “jazz up” our sites (such as adding different kinds of headings, etc.) will only lead to problems for screen readers.  This never even crossed my mind.

Once again, I find that I still have A LOT to learn.

I finally got my spring course evaluations back today, and I found it interesting to see a comment that I had never seen before from a student.  This student mentioned that he or she had now taken two courses with me but felt that he or she hardly knew me and that I didn’t share enough personal things about myself with the class (e.g., things about my family, or my research interests, or my reasons for teaching statistics, etc.).  It made me think a lot about just how much personal information instructors SHOULD be sharing with their students.  How much is enough, and how much is too much?

I remember some of the most engaging and memorable instructors I had were the ones I felt I really knew, or the ones who seemed like “real people” to me.  They had a knack when it came to sharing personal anecdotes about themselves.  I guess I’ve never felt that I had that knack.  Perhaps it will develop eventually, but I often find it difficult to talk about myself, and I wonder if the students will care that much anyway about my life outside of the classroom.  If it has some relevance to what we’re talking about in class, I’ll certainly share, but I don’t always feel comfortable divulging too much.  As I think more about this, however, I wonder if I could be creating a better learning environment for my students if I did share more.   Will I be seen as more approachable if the students feel like I’m really not that different from them, or if there are things about me that they can relate to? Will they enjoy statistics more if I share how I came to teach statistics and why I love it so much?

After finally getting an eight week online section of Introductory Statistics ready to go, I have been working all weekend on getting things ready for the other course I will be teaching this summer–a hybrid offering of our Intermediate Statistics course.  My course site is now ready, I have online assignments in place that my students will work on for the first week and a half of summer session (while I am in Florida helping to grade AP Statistics exams), and I have made contact with my students to welcome them to the course and provide directions about how to get started with the course.

I realized, as I was putting the syllabus together, that I have not yet seen my course evaluations from spring semester (the last time I taught the Intermediate Statistics course).  I tried some new things that semester that I am planning on repeating this summer, but am I making a mistake by repeating them?  I think they were well-received in the spring, but I was never quite sure what students thought of some of the decisions I made about how to structure the course, and I’m curious about whether they made any comments on their course evaluation forms that might help me improve the course in the future.  For example, were they annoyed by the fact that I supplemented the textbook with my own notes, or that I chose a textbook that did not cover all the topics I wanted them to know about?  Could I have shared more examples in class or delved into certain topics more deeply?  Did they enjoy the journal articles I asked them to read outside of class and then discuss in class?  Did these articles have the impact I hoped they would?  Could I have chosen better, more interesting articles, or could I have asked better questions about the articles?  Were students getting the kind of software instruction and practice using software they wanted to get out of the course?

Perhaps none of these things will be mentioned specifically when I do eventually see my course evaluations, but I can’t help but feel as if having those evaluations in front of me now would have made some kind of impact on the decisions I made with this new section.  I also wonder if other instructors sometimes get frustrated at the turnaround time with course evaluations.   If they are meant to help us learn from our mistakes and make changes in the way we teach, shouldn’t we have access to them very soon after the semester ends so they can be useful as we prepare for the next semester?  Or, is this just a sign that we need to communicate more with our students and get more informal feedback from them about the course throughout the semester?