I remember as a child playing on one of those round, revolving platforms at a local park. The idea was to run as fast as you could, jump on, and then enjoy the ride. Eventually, though, I became dizzy and, jumping from the platform before it completely stopped, I ended by doing a face dive back onto the solid ground below. I could not keep my balance - there was too much momentum. I feel something akin to that again as I reflect on my experiences and learning in this course.
In the months ahead, as I dust myself off and regain my inertia, I will be able to more clearly see what has been accomplished this semester. For now, though, I can surely recognize some of the key experiences during what has been a very rewarding ride.
The literature reviews allowed me to delve more deeply into pivitol aspects of online teaching and the blogs provided a framework for reflection and application. Through synthesizing a fairly broad range of articles, I was able to discern themes and apply those to online teacing. The GoogleDoc was very helpful in this respect, as I found the columns to be useful in focusing and sorting. This part of the class contributed to the acquisition of techniques and applications based on current research - the first of the course objectives.
Further objectives were addressed in the work that we did in teams to actually "teach" a book that we had read to the class. Interaction and coordination with my classmates as well as with the professor encompassed many of the tools that we studied during the semester. While we were allowed a fair amount of freedom, guidelines and expectations were clear, and a rubric (developed by the class) detailed what standards we would be held to. Even though I was in an excellent and patient group, I found this endeavor to be much harder than I expected. Had the professor not been so willing to handle many of the technical aspects of our module, I wonder how successful we would have been. As I look toward implementing what I learned in my own online teaching, I see areas that I need to focus on for those times when I will not have someone else to set things up for me.
I found the video and telegami feedback from the professor to be extremely rewarding. This investment in time helped to establish the kind of "instructor presence" that my literature review clearly identified as crucial for the success of online instruction. I confess that I need to do the same thing in my own classes. I have thus far resisted because I do not like cameras, as they tend to be much less kind and forgiving than my professor for this course. I recognize that I need to "get over it" and simply do it. The professor modeled how this video feedback can provide specific feedback on course work rather than simply supplying vague and empty praise. As many studies have shown, feedback only achieves lasting effect if the student knows what in particular was "good", "interesting", "weak", etc. The video feedback was supplemented by written critiques in the form of responses to blog posts and other communications. I came away with a much clearer sense of what "instructor presence" truly means.
The webex class meetings enabled me to share ideas with my classmates and the professor. It seemed that our class included a range of experiences, personalities, and approaches to teaching. Some were teachers and some were not. This made our conversations even more enlightening and useful. As with the group work, we connected using the very tools we were studying, and thus saw how important hands-on, experiential learning is.
As I shared during meetings and in some of my writing, when it comes to taking formal classes, I learn best when there are regular class meetings and the teacher presents a fair amount of the content. I do not favor packaged, module-driven courses in which the teacher has little or no contact with the class, and I also dislike completely teacher-centered pedagogy in which the students sit passively and have very little role in constructing knowledge. Somewhere in the middle is optimal for me - somewhere around a 60/40 split - in which the teacher still provides most of the content but there is still ample opportunity for students to engage the content and each other. I realize that this is the model that works best for me, and that it is by no means universal.
The blended learning model that I studied in this course holds great promise for my own teaching at Lenoir-Rhyne. As my responsibilities change, I will likely transition back from entirely online teaching to primarily face-to-face. My goal is to incorporate the tools and approaches that I have learned into a blended or even flipped classroom, As I progress through the online teaching program I feel more confident in my ability to do this. At my core, I still remain bookish and antiquated in many ways, but I feel that I have progressed at an above average rate in the objectives for this course and the program as a whole. The full effect of my learning will not be felt until I have the time to "play" with the tools I have assembled.
For now, I remain quite dizzy indeed.
