Of course, we have to be careful in terms of the conclusions we draw from this article (given the small, non-random sample), but I found it very interesting to listen to the things students like and dislike about an instructor’s use of technology in the classroom.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/video-forum-students-assess-their-professors-technology-skills/32750?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

When I first started teaching, I have to admit that I relied way too much on PowerPoint.  I worried a lot that I would forget what I wanted to share with my students, and I thought PowerPoint was the best way to carefully organize my material and present it to the class (let alone providing my students with notes to study from at a later time).  I did a lot more “lecturing” when I first started teaching, and I naively believed that having some fancy slides would make my lectures more tolerable.  Looking back on that time, I don’t think that was the case at all, and I cringe when I think about some of what I did and how I thought it might be helping my students learn.  If anything, it was probably helping to put them to sleep!

I now use PowerPoint rather sparingly.  I may have a handful of slides that cover bigger ideas or take-home messages, but I’d much rather engage students in discussion and activity than to wade through a long PowerPoint presentation.  I’m lucky, however, in that I teach smaller classes and have some flexibility in terms of how I structure those classes.  I know some instructors who teach very large classes where lecture appears to be the norm (or the expectation).  I would need to seriously re-think what I do and how I do it were I to teach a course like that.

For me, one big message that came from this article is the need to have a “Plan B.”  As much as I hate to admit it, I know I am TOO reliant on technology.  I often teach in a computer lab where technology plays a key role in most of our daily class activities.  I still remember a time not long ago when I came to the lab and found that none of the computers were working.  I honestly thought I might have to cancel class because the only activities I had planned involved using the computers, and I couldn’t even project anything from the main instructor computer.  Fortunately, the problem corrected itself shortly before my class started, but it was an important reminder to me that even though technology can be a great friend, it can also be our worst enemy.

I have often thought an interesting conference presentation might involve sharing ways to teach online “on a budget.”  For example, not all online instructors have the funds to purchase software that would allow them to transform their courses by adding things like video or conferencing capabilities.  There is also the issue of time management in online teaching.  How can we “budget” our time and not reinvent the wheel when we don’t have to?

I realized this summer that one thing I need to start doing is using screencasting software to make short videos for my students that demonstrate how to use different applets.  Although I try to put detailed handouts together with instructions for students, it became clear to me, when meeting with some students over the summer, that these resources were not always as clear as they could have been.  Working through an example or two myself, and recording my screen, might go a long way in terms of helping students feel more comfortable using applets and other online tools.  Not all instructors have access to screencasting software, but my friend Cathy Swift shared a site with  me today that provides links to 18 free screencasting tools.  I look forward to checking these out!

http://missnoor.visibli.com/share/xd8cMY

One thing I haven’t done a lot in my own courses is hold online office hours or video conferences with students.  I’ve tried in the past to use chat rooms to hold office hours, but few students have taken advantage of this.  This too is something I’d like to explore more, and I know there are others who have interests in software that might allow them to connect with their students using video and/or audio.  Here are some free options that I know about:

http://www.seabreezecomputers.com/tips/videochat.htm

Cathy also shared another neat site with me that includes the “35 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools.”  I’m especially intrigued by Tagxedo (which allows you to create Wordles that resemble larger images) and Bitstrips (which allows you to make and share comic strips).  I’m already thinking about how I might incorporate these things into course assignments, or how I might use them to improve upon the materials I present to students.  Not all of the tools on this site are free, but many of them do have free demos that you can use.

http://edudemic.com/2010/07/the-35-best-web-2-0-classroom-tools-chosen-by-you/

One thing I realize more and more is that not everyone knows how many great teaching resources are freely available to everyone.  While at JSM, I led a roundtable titled “Becoming a Teacher of Statistics,” and nobody at my table had ever heard about CAUSE.  I also talked to a group of faculty in my college not long ago who were developing hybrid courses, and many of them had never heard about MERLOT.  If you are an instructor and time is a precious commodity, why not use materials that others have graciously shared?

Of course, there are probably quite a few other neat tools out there that I don’t know about but would find very useful.  Have you found any great free options for online instructors that you’d like to recommend? 

A column is now appearing each week in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” in which an instructor–Jason Jones–is chronicling his first online teaching experience.  It’s been fascinating to read this and to think about how many of Jason’s experiences mirror my own experiences.

This week, the focus of the column is on differences between grading students in a face-to-face classroom and students in an online classroom.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/my-online-summer-grading/34157?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

When describing grading his classroom-based students, Jason notes that:

“Lots of times I’ll find myself torn between my sense of how the student’s doing in class (from participation and other cues) and the quality of the work submitted. All of those things make grading far more stressful and time-consuming than it need be.”

In contrast, when grading his online students, Jason says:

“Because I don’t have *any* connection with these students beyond the work they’ve submitted, it’s harder to get distracted by connected, but ultimately irrelevant, memories or thoughts. Likewise, rather than replaying whole events in my head, I can just link to information or instructions the student missed, add a short gloss clarifying the point, and move on. It’s much more tolerable. And while at first I thought that this was a sign of lack of engagement on my part, or some such, I now believe that it is the reverse: greater engagement with the work itself, and less focus on extraneous mental static.”

Does this means that classroom grading might be more subjective than online grading?  Do we let too many “extraneous factors” come into play when we grade our classroom-based students that might somehow make the grading process less fair than what we do in the online environment?  Or, are we being less fair to our online students if we don’t get to know them in the same way we might be able to in the classroom?

Until now, I hadn’t really thought about it this way, but this column, coupled with my experiences grading AP Statistics exams last week, has now made me question a lot of my own grading practices.  Am I being as objective as I could be, or as I should be?  When I create grading rubrics am I applying them in a consistent way?  Am I as engaged as I should be with all of my students?

I will be the first to admit that I do not have everything all figured out at this point when it comes to online teaching.  One thing I have probably struggled the most with is assessment.  I have written about this before on my blog because I do not use proctored exams in my online courses, and I am not altogether convinced that proctored exams are the way to go.  I can certainly see why others feel they are necessary, and I definitely feel we need to do what we can in order to quash the opinions that some people hold about the quality of online courses.  Most of all, I think when you teach online, you have to carefully re-evaluate your thoughts about assessment.  I’m still very much in that re-evaluation stage.

Perhaps it is because of my own beliefs and my own uncertainty that the following article from The Chronicle of Higher Education got me so riled up this week.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-courses-should-always-include-proctored-finals-economist-warns/31287

The headline for this article is “Online courses should always include proctored finals, economist warns.”  To me, this is a very strong statement, and I feel it is rather misleading, especially given how the study described in the article was conducted and how the online courses in question were actually structured.  Basically, it was observed that online students who took proctored final exams in particular economics courses performed worse than their classroom counterparts (and also worse than online students who took non-proctored exams).  The exams appeared to consist entirely of items from the test banks of textbooks.  Further, from an examination of the actual study, it sounds like the online courses were self-paced and that students could finish assignments at any time, as long as they completed everything by the end of the term.  The author of the study–Cheryl Wachenheim–noted that many online students completed a large number of chapter exams (which they needed to complete after reading each chapter in their textbook) during the LAST WEEK OF CLASS.  No wonder they did not do so well on a proctored final exam, especially if their classroom counterparts were completing similar assignments in a more timely manner throughout the term.

I have always felt it was important to provide students in the online course with some flexibility while still ensuring that all students move through the course at a similar pace.  For my courses, this is especially important since students complete many discussion assignments along the way and have to be prepared to talk with their peers.  From what I have read about this study, it doesn’t sound like there was much–if any–peer-to-peer interaction in the online economics courses.  Instead, students simply worked through chapter exams and homework assignments, and then completed a comprehensive final exam.

Before we jump to the conclusion that students in the online course are more prone to cheat and we need to make sure ALL exams are proctored in the online environment, why not see if others can replicate these findings in different contexts?  For example, I would love to see a study where the online course is much more structured AND the exams are not simply a random selection of questions from a test bank.  Would cheating be less likely in a situation where a student has to carefully explain his or her reasoning on an exam?  Would students be less apt to even try to cheat in an online course if they knew that the instructor could easily review many other samples of their written work (e.g., from discussion assignments) in order to better determine if the responses they give on exams are actually in their OWN words?

Do you ever sometimes wonder how your life might have been different if the technologies we have now had been around when you were growing up?  I do.  In some ways, I’m very thankful that Facebook and Twitter were NOT around when I was younger because I think they would have taken too much attention away from my studies.  However, upon reading the following article from The New York Times, I find myself intrigued by the power of social media and the possible ways it can be used in educational settings.  In particular, I like the thought of giving a voice to students who don’t always feel they have a voice in the classroom.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/education/13social.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=speaking+up+in+class&st=cse

I was one of those students who never felt comfortable speaking up in class, and I often think that I didn’t find my “voice” until well into graduate school.  I was very shy growing up, and even today, I still struggle when it comes to knowing just when to speak up.  Sometimes, it’s just a matter of not having much to say, or not being able to think quickly on my feet, but other times, I think I worry too much that my own ideas and opinions won’t be shared or valued by others.  I admire those people who can easily speak their minds and who don’t seem to care what others think of what they have to say.

Now that I’m a teacher, I think a lot about the students in my classes who have so much to contribute but who don’t always feel confident enough to share their thoughts and ideas with their peers.  It excites me to think that social media might give these students a platform to participate more fully in classroom discourse and to ensure that their voices are heard.  As the above article states:

“…social media, once kept outside the school door, can entice students who rarely raise a hand to express themselves via a medium they find as natural as breathing.”

I have been thinking a lot lately about giving my online courses a make-over, and one thing I’ve thought about is adding more audio and video to the courses.  I would not go as far as to video tape what I do in the classroom (mostly because I think that would be challenging since I’m not “lecturing” the whole time when I meet with my students), but I’ve thought about adding more personal touches, like a video introduction, or short video demonstrations, to accompany certain activities and assignments.

After reading this, however, I’m re-thinking things:

http://chronicle.com/article/Videos-Ripped-From/127319/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

How can we best ensure that if we create videos for our courses (or if students record US in the classroom), those videos or audio recordings will not end up being used for purposes we did not intend?

Those who know me well know that it has been a busy and challenging year for me, primarily because of my tendency to say “yes” a bit too much.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain, however, because I definitely learned a very big lesson this past year about my limitations and my priorities, and this is a good thing.

I have to admit though that I do sometimes feel like I’m teetering on being “burned out,” and it bothers me to feel that way because I still have so much more work left to do!  I guess I’m not alone, according to a report in Inside Higher Ed about a newly published study (led by Noelle Robertson) about academic burnout.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/14/research_analyzes_burnout_of_faculty_members_all_over_the_world

What especially caught my attention was one particular sentence in this article.

“Robertson also suggested that distance and e-learning might be more stressful than face-to-face teaching, pointing out that ‘being at the end of an email chain might be less satisfying than reciprocal interaction.’”

I don’t think I like the sound of that!