But I’m also already missing the provocative discussions, the different ways that members of the class thought about and understood Canadian defence and foreign policy, and the intellectual breakthroughs that took place for nearly every student at various times.

Online or in person, a positive learning experience creates a rush that is hard to match. And while I still prefer to teach students face to face, I’ve come to appreciate the opportunities presented by, at the very least, blended learning (a combination of online and in-person), and perhaps also by distance education.

Given that all of my posts to this point have come from the position of the instructor, I thought it would be worthwhile to finish with some comments from my students.

A couple of weeks ago, I invited those who were interested to provide some advice to future online instructors. Here are two of them:

1. “I cannot over-emphasize the importance of an instructor’s ability to write in an online course. I think that a well-organized course is [still] nonsense if the writing is incoherent and superfluous.”
2. “The real questions to ask are the ones we should ask in any course. Has the course been well-structured? Does it offer sufficient background material? Does it explore concepts and ideas that will challenge the student? Are the intellectual demands sufficiently rigorous? There’s a long list of such questions, all of which can be answered without regard to the method of delivery. At the heart of an online course, as for any course, is the professor. The classroom may well be the best vehicle to transmit a professor’s passion and discipline, and the student’s curiosity and enthusiasm, but if the supporting technology is capable enough to transmit those same qualities, then all else is in the detail.”

I thank you all for following this blog and for your comments. Hopefully, I will be able to meet some of you in late May at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in New Brunswick where I’ll be speaking about my online teaching experience as part of Career Corner.

If you enjoy teaching because it engages your interpersonal communication skills, you will likely find that the online environment does not provide the same sort of rush that you can get from the regular classroom.

I get excited in my online course when I read a series of good posts on the discussion board, or when I mark a particularly brilliant paper, but I never get that same feeling that I’d had following a great question and answer period in a lecture hall, or after a provocative face-to-face seminar discussion.

Ironically, given that the distance learning environment typically provides instructors with greater opportunities to read their students’ written work, I also think that it’s harder to detect learning disabilities online.

Between the fact that it takes longer to establish the relationship of trust that might allow students to open up, and because (at least in an asynchronous environment) students can spend infinite amounts of time editing their every post, instructors seem to have fewer tools, and access to fewer indicators, that might alert them that a student could be struggling for reasons that have nothing to do with lack of effort or time.

Finally, given that we tend to remember things better when we sense them in a variety of ways, and the vast majority of an instructor’s access to distance learning students is through text, I’m concerned that it will be harder for me to write strong letters of reference for my online students.

Certainly, because I’ve read so much of their work, I know them quite well as writers, but I don’t have a sense of their body language, I don’t have quite the same sense of their enthusiasm and passions, and in many cases I’ve never heard their voices.

In my experience, these things allow me to paint a longer-lasting picture of a student in my mind, and make it easier to write a letter that feels real.

It’s clear to me, then, that a student taking an online degree has to go the extra mile to ensure quality letters of reference.

I’ll cover the benefits of online teaching this week, and then follow up next time with the drawbacks.

If you write well yourself, and you are committed to helping your students improve their written communication skills, then the online environment creates great opportunities.

First, assuming that you have limited time (and perhaps bandwidth) for video communication, you will be doing a lot of writing when you teach online, which means that you can model effective writing on a regular basis.

Also, because of your likely emphasis on text-based assignments (there are typically fewer oral presentations online, although I’m sure there are ways around this), you will have more opportunities to provide feedback.

Students in my course have received far more feedback on their writing than have typical students in my previous courses, regardless of whether they’ve taken advantage of my willingness to read drafts.

Second, I’ve also found it much easier to be firm in response to extension requests online.

When a student asks for an extension by e-mail, I can express my reasons for the course’s late paper policy slowly, rationally, and at a time of my choosing. As a result, I’m less prone to make emotional decisions, and more comfortable letting the policy speak for itself.

I haven’t given a single extension during my course, and I’m confident that my students – on the whole – respect me more for that.

Finally, introverted instructors – and I don’t necessarily mean shy people, but rather instructors who prefer to process information on their own – will appreciate the online environment because of the opportunities it presents to ‘hide.’

After I lecture or participate in a live seminar, my instinct is to go to my office (or the washroom), shut the door, and say nothing to anyone until I’ve ‘come down.’ But because people can see me, and know where my office is, that isn’t always possible.

On the other hand, after sending out a 2,000 word response to the weekly online seminar, I can shut down my email and walk away. For an introvert, this is a real treat.

• get in touch with each student personally right away
• establish a routine
• consider a video introduction
• develop a system to evaluate online discussions, etc

Now that I’m almost through DM 529, I’d like to add three more:

1. It’s critical to find out how much bandwidth you are working with.

I don’t actually understand how bandwidth is measured, so if I were inquiring about it, I would ask something along the lines of: can I post videos to the website? And if so, how long can they be and how easy will it be for students to download them?

Video, even a little bit of it, seems to make a difference to students’ distance learning experiences, and if I can create one (admittedly with help), anyone can.

Some instructors will be comfortable uploading their video comments to YouTube, making bandwidth less crucial, but if you plan to re-use a particular lesson in a future course, it might be helpful to find a way to keep the viewership of your videos limited.

2. It’s worth learning about your institution’s emergency management policy.

In other words, what happens if the technology goes down? What’s missing from my syllabus this year is detailed directions for my students in the case that the RMC or DNDLearn websites become inaccessible for an extended period.

While most instructors will manage to ad-lib their way through the problem, peace of mind is critical to good teaching, and having an emergency management policy in place would certainly eliminate some unnecessary stressors.

3. It’s important to understand whether you are allowed to schedule synchronous discussions.

My students come from all over the country, and it is not uncommon for RMC students to take online courses while posted in Europe or elsewhere.

As a result, the culture in the RMC distance learning program seems to discourage instructors from mandating that all students log on at a set time. And that is certainly understandable.

But not every distance learning program includes quite so many ‘distance learners.’ And real-time conversations can promote learning. To provide just two examples, they allow you to give advice on an assignment to the group as a whole and to take questions immediately, and they allow you to vary the structure of class discussions to keep students engaged.

If I were teaching online for the first time, I’d certainly want to ask about my institution’s policy on synchronous learning, as well as about the online cultural environment more generally.

After more than 7 weeks without a significant technological glitch, DNDLearn – the learning management system for my course – went down this past weekend for about 24 hours.

What’s worse, because I’m only online once per day on the weekend, I was virtually oblivious to the problem, and non-responsive to many of the students who e-mailed me in a panic on Sunday afternoon.

Monday morning was not fun and, looking back, although I think I handled things well enough, I certainly could have done better.

My first priority was dealing with the fact that more than half of the students failed to post their contributions to our discussion on time: in short, I had to calm their anxieties and come up with a fair policy to handle the unexpected situation.

I quickly decided to

• extend the deadline for posting until 7 a.m. the following morning and
• offer any student who couldn’t post during that period the option of accepting their average grade for previous discussions as their grade for this one as well.

Although my response was not ideal – both for the students, who were already working towards our next session on Wednesday, and for me, who had set aside time to comment on the posts Monday morning and had to quickly rearrange things – it felt like a reasonable response to an awkward challenge.

I’m less pleased with how I communicated my initial reaction. I was overly defensive about my unresponsiveness on the Sunday (my communications policy in the course outline is clear that I only check e-mail once per day on the weekend) and I was also unnecessarily critical of RMC, particularly when it turns out that the problem had nothing to do with the college.

After I e-mailed the class, I got in touch with my technology liaison at RMC who referred me to the trouble-shooters at DNDLearn. They explained that the server had gone down unexpectedly. In a follow up e-mail I asked about how such situations were typically communicated to instructors and almost immediately received a satisfactory answer. I forwarded a record of this conversation to my students, and the crisis was over.

Hopefully, there won’t be a next time. If there is, a bit more caution about jumping to conclusions about my employer, not to mention a bit less defensiveness, and I should be fine.

I don’t think I know anyone who’s been teaching for more than a few years who genuinely loves to grade, and I’m no different.

I did, however, see these papers coming, and I know how critical it is to return assignments promptly so that my students have time to apply the comments to their next assignment.

I provide a lot of feedback, but I read and type quickly, so marking with speed wasn’t the biggest challenge. I also learned that many of my standard grading strategies remain relevant online:

• I still made a list of common problems and emailed them to the group;
• I still enforced a 24 hour rule, meaning that I asked students to wait at least 24 hours after they received their graded papers to email me about them. This provides time for them to digest the comments and deal with their emotional reactions before we talk;
• I still looked for (and in this case found) a particularly good paper and sought permission to use it as an example for other students in the future.

The unexpected problem, that in retrospect I should have seen coming, was the burn-out factor.

In a traditional class, I can break up the marking with (face-to-face) class time and discussions during office hours. In the online environment, a break from marking meant staying exactly where I was: alone, in front of the computer.

New instructors who want to avoid the feeling of being trapped at the screen might consider deliberately scheduling (shorter) meetings (with real people) during their busy online marking periods.

Sure, this will slow you down a bit, but it might also keep you fresh. I’ll certainly be doing this in my future heavy marking weeks.

After well over 10 years of teaching face-to-face, I seem to have developed a fairly good sense of when I can publicly acknowledge the work, or thoughts, of a particular student and when it might be more appropriate to just send someone a private note.

My judgment, I think, comes from my perception of body language, individual mannerisms, and from my sense of the classroom dynamics as a whole.

I feel much less confident about all of these things when I teach online. Perhaps this is because of inexperience, but I think it might be more than that.

There are fewer cues online to indicate whether individual students would benefit from, or would be embarrassed by, public praise. It’s equally hard to judge whether such praise could breed resentment among those who are not acknowledged.

Thus far, I have sent positive messages to individual students via e-mail, but I have not explicitly recognized individuals in my responses to the group.

The farthest I have gone in this direction is to occasionally make reference to a point brought up by only one student. Even in these instances, however, I don’t draw attention to the inventor of the idea, nor do I even suggest that the idea was particularly brilliant.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this approach because I know how helpful positive reinforcement can be and how much certain students benefit from even the smallest bit of recognition.

That said, I am very pleased with the group dynamic that has been established in DM 529, and do not want to risk it in order to try out a strategy that may or may not further the course objectives.

I’m curious about what others think of this dilemma…Thoughts?

Monday

RMC distance learning courses begin on Monday. For me, that’s my busiest ‘teaching’ day of the week. I probably spend three to four hours reading and assessing my students’ responses to the three to five selected posts for discussion and then organizing, typing, and distributing my (2500-3500 word) remarks.

In the midst of this process, I’ll likely receive three to five student emails (representing about 25% of the class) asking for help, advice, or comments on a draft of the next’s week’s preliminary posting. Most of these responses don’t take very long (maybe 30 minutes for all of them together), but it can be mentally taxing to work through a draft after having read and commented on course material all morning.

For those who wonder how to keep their own research going through all of this, I make sure to spend my first hour in the office on Mondays working for me, because there is no guarantee that I’ll have the energy and focus to do serious research towards the end of the day.

Tuesday

On Tuesday I do the weekly readings and respond to emails. Most weeks, this only takes between 90 minutes and two hours because I’m already familiar with the material.

Wednesday

Wednesdays are less intense. Thirty minutes of email is usually it, but as papers come due, I can see the time it takes me to respond to drafts increasing.

Thursday

The other heavy teaching day for me is Thursday. The preliminary student posts must be in by Wednesday night, and since I’m committed to responding to at least six of them every week, I spend over an hour every Thursday morning drafting feedback. I typically pass another hour and a half grading the rest of the posts. And then there is the regular 30 minutes of email dialogue.

There’s more work in the afternoon, when I use the students’ votes to help me identify which posts will serve as the basis for our discussion for the rest of the week.

The key to this 30-45 minute job is making sure that I have a balance in terms of subject matter, individual perspectives, fresh and returning voices, and that I respect the students’ selections. It’s without question my least favourite weekly activity and one that I hope to find a way to avoid in future years.

Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays are typically no different from Wednesdays.

Lesson#4: The faster you (at least) acknowledge e-mails, the better the rapport you have with your students.

Until I started to receive unsolicited positive feedback about my responsiveness, I didn’t realize how critical even the shortest acknowledgment of an e-mail can be to establishing an open, dynamic instructor-student online relationship.

That said, I understand that spending too much time on e-mail can sap a professor’s productivity.

In the DM 529 course outline, I tell my students that I can be reached, by e-mail or by phone, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday to Friday (and that I will check my e-mail once per day on the weekend, but I cannot promise when).

My hours resemble business hours deliberately, and send a message to my younger students that I’m not online in the middle of the night. Because I am generally in the office between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m., I’ve also given myself buffer time.

Between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., I try to acknowledge e-mails as I receive them. If I can deal with a concern quickly, I do so. Otherwise, I tell the student when I expect to respond in full, always leaving myself more time than I’ll need.

Lesson #5: It’s a good idea to log on to the course website daily.

Before DM 529, I had a rather skewed conception of how the website would work. I thought that students would go there to post and read posts, and that would be it.

And I’m sure that for some of my students, that’s exactly what happens.

But for others, the website is also a message board, where they can share suggestions about sources, or ask for help if a link to a reading seems to be broken.

As I will explain in my next post, while I provide ongoing feedback to individual students, I only engage in commentary with the whole class at the end of each week, so at first it didn’t cross my mind to visit the website except when I needed to.

A few weeks ago, however, after I posted a message to the news page, I checked in on the discussion and noticed that a student was struggling to access one the readings.

I quickly verified that the link was not broken (the problem is still a mystery), and then followed up by sending the student a copy of the reading myself.

The entire process hardly took me a minute, and it allowed me to develop a stronger relationship with one of the members of the class.

Lesson #1: As much as I’d like to, I cannot respond to 19 posts (individually) each week.

I did this in week 1 to make sure that everyone was on track, but it’s both exhausting and also not necessarily the most efficient way to promote student learning.

For one, students provide feedback to one another through our discussions, and they can only take in so much. Providing individualized feedback each time could also serve as a disincentive for students to reflect on their own comments critically.

My solution is to comment on at least 1/3 of the posts (6 or 7 out of 19 students) each week. This means that everyone will receive feedback at least 5 times (in a 13 week course), and I should avoid complete burn-out.

Lesson #2: Nineteen student posts is too many if you wish to encourage dynamic, yet focused discussions.

My original plan was to let the students respond to any of the initial 19 posts each week. But just days before we started, I realized that

1. 19 threads would be too many for anyone to follow;
2. 19 threads would work against real depth; and
3. some students’ posts would be completely ignored.

My solution, which is not perfect, is as follows: the preliminary posts from all 19 students are still due on Wednesday. The students then have until Thursday at 3 p.m. (Eastern) to vote for up to 3 posts that they’d like to serve as the basis of our discussion.

At 3 p.m. I add up the votes and use them as a guide to select 3-5 posts that we use for the rest of the week. I email the results to the students by 5 p.m.

I diverge from the student poll when

• the choices are too similar in terms of content,
• the same student’s submissions are nominated in consecutive weeks, or
• I see something in an unselected post that I think is critical to the discussion going forward.

We have a focused discussion on the smaller number of posts until Sunday evening.

Lesson #3: I must post the text of all of my group emails to the website’s news page.

In the first couple of weeks, I did my best to ensure that everyone was receiving my personal and group emails, but I eventually learned that at least one student was not getting them.

By copying the same text to the news page of the website, I have increased the accessibility of my comments.

Stayed tuned for more lessons learned next week…..