Living far from campus means I have quite a bit of time to think about things when I’m driving to and from work.  On the days when I’m teaching, I often go over what I plan to do in class when I’m driving to campus, and then I go over how I think things went when I’m driving home.

Almost every day this summer, I’ve left campus wishing that things had gone differently in my intermediate statistics course.  I don’t know why, but I often don’t feel I’m doing what I should be doing in that course.  I’ve struggled a lot to find the perfect book (and I’m still searching), and I often think that the activities I use could be improved upon and changed.  I think about different data sets I could be sharing with the class, or data we could be gathering and exploring as a class.  I think about the many activities I use in the introductory course that involve food of some kind (often a hit with the students) and the lack of such activities I have in the intermediate course.  I constantly question the amount of detail we should be going into on different topics, and I wonder if the order of topics is appropriate.  I wonder if there are certain topics (like analysis of covariance and repeated measures ANOVA) that I should omit from the course, and I wonder if there are other topics (like maybe logistic regression) that should be included.  I wonder if SPSS is still the best software to use in the course or if I should begin transitioning to something else, like R.

I find myself feeling filled with a lot of doubt where this course is concerned, and I never know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.  In a way, I suppose it’s good, because my doubts often motivate me to make improvements and “do better” the next time I teach the course.  I never settle for the status quo, and I’m always on the look out for new activity ideas and new ways of explaining things.  I’ve even started bringing in journal articles to the course for students to read and discuss, and I like to think that has added an important element to the course.  I want students to have opportunities to see how the techniques they are learning about are used in real studies and how the authors of these studies present their findings.  I also want my students to have opportunities to question the findings reported in these articles and to apply some of what they are learning in class as they attempt to make sense of the findings.

Although I continue to have my doubts, I noticed something very interesting yesterday when I was driving home:  I actually felt content for the first time in weeks.  I didn’t question what had gone on in class because I felt that overall, things went pretty well.  Prior to that class, I found myself trying to share too much with the students about multiple regression and trying to delve into things that were more advanced and that really went beyond the scope of the class.  There was so much I was excited to share with them and that I wanted them to know and understand, but it was clear that they were getting bombarded with too much information, too quickly.  I knew my students were feeling confused and uncertain, and my resolve, on Monday, was to try to backtrack and ensure they understood the “big ideas.”  We went through a couple of activities together and also talked about a journal article where multiple regression was used.  I felt good about how things went, and I got a lot of good ideas for how I might better structure that unit in the course the next time I teach it.

Of course, I’m very biased here.  Even though I felt class went well, it’s not always easy for me to “read” my students, and I’m not sure if they share my enthusiasm.  I’m hoping they too were feeling good after class, but I suppose only time will tell if the pieces are starting to fall into place for them.

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.