Synchronous Instructional Session built with Collaborate (160MB .mp4 file)
Wiki Project Page (converted to PDF)
This course made me work hard, but I learned a lot about how building a sense of community among online learners can be an effective strategy for teaching online courses. I completed several tasks that were useful for learning how to teach an online course: online discussion board participation, building a wiki page as a team, conducting an online synchronous instruction session, and managing my own small-group discussion boards. I had a little experience with online discussions, but the other tasks were new experiences for me. Because of this class, I have already introduced online discussion boards as a component of several of my classes, and I am pushing my department to develop purely online courses, which I am confident I can teach and manage, with respect to both the technology involved and building an online community.
Who was I as a learner before I entered this course?
At the beginning of the course, I chose “adaptable” to describe myself in one word. I think that I can adapt to a variety of learning environments; however, I generally preferred independent learning before this course. I was neither very familiar nor very comfortable with collaborative learning in an online course.
How did I change?
The most substantial way I changed after this course is that I became much more open to the idea of collaborative learning in general and online collaborative learning in particular. I learned that real work and big projects could get done without any face-to-face meetings, and I became convinced of the usefulness of online collaboration. The course showed me how building online communities can be an effective strategy for online teaching. I came away from the class convinced that this strategy can be effective for teaching many types of online courses.
How did my participation in this course change my learning process?
This class has made me more “process oriented” than “product oriented” when it comes to learning. My professional life, especially my experience in the private sector, has taught me to be very product-focused. I couldn’t take that approach in this class, however. Most of the course involved contributing to discussions and learning from one another. In this environment, a particular post I made would initiate a broader discussion on that topic, and all the class posts produced a larger conversation about the issue. Because I want to learn how to use educational technology effectively, I wanted these course discussions to be thoughtful and productive, so I tried to make my own posts and replies thoughtful and productive. By working to craft thoughtful posts, I learned about a discussion topic. However, by engaging in replies to other posts, I learned even more and got different perspectives on the topic that I might not have considered. In this way, I focused much more on the process of being engaged in a discussion with other students than on the product of knowledge.
Besides learning from one another in discussions, I’ve seen how students can learn from sharing the online learning experience itself. For example, in the SIS and wiki projects, my classmates and I had to communicate extensively, sharing ideas about goals, methods, technology, etc. For the SIS project, I had a practice run with some classmates, and we asked and answered questions as we tested to discover how the technology worked, its limitations, and how we could use it for our lessons. For the wiki project, there was a lot of communication in our group about using Google Drive for our workflow, as some members had never used it before. By sharing ideas, all the team members learned more about how Google Drive and wiki technologies work. Communications like these helped to establish a sense of teamwork and community and drove my personal enthusiasm for class projects. I was not enthusiastic about doing either the SIS or wiki projects, but the sense of belonging, the knowledge sharing, and desire for group success made me much more excited to do good work for these projects.
What else did I gain by participating in this course?
The course has given me confidence that I can competently teach an online course, though I’m far from an expert at this point. Presently, from my previous teaching experience and what I’ve learned in this course, I would give myself an average score of 3.4 on the National Standards for Quality Online Teaching. I will continue to improve my skills and competence.
I gained a much better understanding about how an online class can promote and leverage community building to promote learning. I also learned something about the limits of technology and online courses, from simple delivery and execution problems to the socialization effects involved with teaching online. Being an independent learner, I was a little skeptical of the idea of community building in online courses, but I’ve seen how effective it can be in helping to make students responsible for their own learning. In addition, working on a project with peers having different skills made our interaction the key to success on our assignments. If I hadn’t experienced this dynamic as a student, I would not be confident that it could work when teaching an online course.