Context: I am analyzing this video that I have made to introduce my course to explain how I see theory meeting practice. I am looking for what I did right, what I did wrong, and the improvements for the future. I am using the articles by Cleary, Rice, Zemliansky, St. Amant, & Borgman (2019), Witte (2018), and Rendahl & Breuch (2013) to highlight how I have met some of the best practices they list and where I have not and should revise my teaching material. In so doing, I am showing where I have met the affordances of online teaching and where I have not.
This video goes over the syllabus and the LMS, and it is the first video students watch when they start the course. This was supposed to be a hybrid Business Writing course. Because of Covid, I taught it as an online, asynchronous class.
Following advice from “perspectives on teaching writing online” (Cleary, Rice, Zemliansky, St.Amant, & Borgman, 2019), I am using different modalities to introduce students to the course: a video and a syllabus. In the video, I go over both the full text of the syllabus just like I would do in a f2f course, and I go over the homepage of the LMS, showing students how it will be used and where they can find what they need.
Following Witte (2018) in "‘Why won’t Moodle. . .?’" I am showing how the LMS works and I am trying to be explicit about it.
I show and tell students:
Everything they need is linked on the homepage, so that they do not need to go hunting for stuff. All the prompts are linked, as well as the office hours and the Zoom link.
There is a page that contains all the instructional videos that are scattered throughout the different activities, so students can find a specific video fast.
There is a repeat of the assignments: they are linked on the homepage and they are listed on the syllabus too (but they should be linked there as well!).
The calendar has all the due dates, and I show it to them to make it clear that this class is a lot of work and that they have to be able to put in the work to do well.
The very first homework:
Since I communicate a lot through submission comments, I tell them to make sure their notifications are set so that they are notified right away when I leave a comment. The how-to page to change notifications is linked, and I also show how to do it in the video.
How to submit work: students have different ways they can submit work.
The discussion boards are not visible to students yet, but I show them in the video so that they know that we will be using them in the future.
I end with telling them how to reach me: either by email or through the LMS.
As Rendahl & Breuch (2013) show in "Toward a complexity of online learning," student behaviors and habits in online instruction are the greatest marker of their success. Therefore, I use the video to inspire them to pick up a few good habits:
I show them that the schedule is predictable so that they can create their own timing for completing the work.
I tell them to read the syllabus as it is the smart thing to do as a student to be successful in class.
I tell them that the class is a lot of work, to make sure that they have enough time to dedicate to complete it successfully.
I tell them to stop the video and read the prerequisites, thus showing them a good strategy for all the videos in this course: you can stop them!
I point them towards the list of free resources, which are linked in the syllabus.
I tell them to come see me at office hours.
I give them tips for success, warning them that keeping up with the work is the most important aspect of success for this class.
I warn them that I send out an announcement every Friday, reminding them to read them and to make sure to change their notifications to be notified when they are sent out.
Going over this video now, there are many changes that I would make. The three most urgent ones are:
When we go over the LMS in a video, we should make sure that we are in “student view.” The LMS does not appear to the instructor in the same way as it appears to the students, so I am showing things on the video that may not appear on the student side.
Because I am not a phone person, I always forget this part: use your phone to check how the LMS appears in that format. A lot of our students will access the LMS through their phones, so we need to make sure that they are usable tools for learning.
Instead of going over the full text of the syllabus, which makes it impossible to read and creates a boring background to the video, I should use a PowerPoint presentation to highlight the most important points from the syllabus. Going over the full text might give the impression to students that they have “read” the syllabus when they really have not. This is a remnant of f2f instruction where the students are following the syllabus on paper with me.
Cleary, Y., Rice, R., Zemliansky, P., St.Amant, K., & Borgman, J. C. (2019). Perspectives on teaching writing online in global contexts: Ideas, insights, and projections. ROLE: Research in Online Literacy Education, 2(1), http://www.roleolor.org/perspectives-on-teaching-writing-online.html
Rendahl, M., & Breuch, L.-A. K. (2013). Toward a complexity of online learning: Learners in online first-year writing. Computers and Composition, 30, 297-314.
Witte, A. (2018). ‘Why won’t Moodle. . .?’: Using genre studies to understand students’ approaches to interacting with user-interfaces. Computers & Composition, 49, 48-60. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2018.05.004