Effective Online Teaching Podcast

Being Intentional Again

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Bachert) — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 20:01:00 -0700

So in a previous post I talked about being intentional. I have found that just like before this keeps coming to mind. For example as part of my web class that I am taking this semester I needed to experiment with flickr and the photos I decided to share, which I will embed below are pictures from a previous time in my life when I lived in New Mexico. It just reminded me to take the time, stop and watch the sunset or rise; just be present in the moment. I hope you too enjoy these photos, but I want them to remind you to stop take some time to just reflect on what you are doing. Are you being intentional with your online teaching? Are you being intentional with taking care of your self so that you can be in the moment with your online students? I realized today that I am not always in the right mind set and need to make some adjustments. I hope they do the same for you and remember until next time be effective!

RSS Assignment

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Bachert) — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 21:10:00 -0700

So I started this blog as part of a class and one of my assignments is to discuss how businesses can use RSS. Really Simply Syndication or Rich Site Summary is a way to provide a way for people to opt-in and be able to keep track for when a website, podcast, or blog has changed content. This allows for people to stay up to date with what is going on around a particular topic. The biggest thing is that it moves away from forcing readers to keep checking to see if new content has changed or "pulling" them to your site a publisher of content is now able to "push" new content to a reader.

This functionality can be used by a business internally to provide information around what is going on within the company and employees would always get pushed the new information as soon as it is published. No more having to send out emails to remind people to view a new policy or procedure is published. As soon as the policy or procedure is published everyone who has opted-in to receive updates for that information would see it in their RSS reader.

The same could be done in an online program at a college or university. Many times communication from upper levels down to everyone within the college is difficult especially if there is a lot going on and many people don't have time to read every committees meeting minutes, but if each of the minutes are posted to a committee's blog a interested faculty or staff member could subscribe to that committee and then anytime the minutes are updated that interested employee would be updated on what is going on with that committee.

All in all this is one simple way to help employees stay informed with what is going on at a company or college. For more information check out:
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/rss-101-useful-links

First Episode and Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Bachert) — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 20:46:00 -0700

This is the first episode of the Effective Online Teaching podcast where I introduce myself and provide a little background.

Download the episode

Being Intentional

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Bachert) — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 05:22:00 -0700

Something that has been surfacing a lot lately in what I have been reading, listening too, and just in general and that is the idea of being intentional. Being intentional with your finances, your health, your job, and your faith. This ideal impacts every aspect of your life and impacts the way you teach, especially, online.

Over the last decade of teaching online I have learned that I have to be intentional if I am going to impact my students success. There are two areas where intention is a big deal. The first is in how you facilitate the online class. I will admit that hasn't been the case in every semester I have taught. I have got behind in grading, following up with students, and just keeping up with the class. The best semesters have been those where I have logged in everyday, spent 30+ minutes grading, responding to messages, and looking through interaction logs for my students. Those intentional moments have gone a long way to helping my students succeed. This semester has probably been the best so far and I think it is because I have put in the time to stay caught up on grading and have reached out on a regular basis to the students who are struggling with the course. I only have a few students who aren't doing very well, but the majority of the class is passing. This isn't usually the case.

The second area is in the design of the course. I have met and worked with many faculty who seem to put the course together as they go and to students these are the hardest to follow. A student should log in on a regular basis to be able to keep up with the course, but they also need to be able to know what to expect and have an idea of what is required of them from the beginning of the course. That is why I am intentional not only in how I design each module, but why I list out all assignments the student will need to complete in the getting started module. A student in my class has an idea of the entire course schedule the first week of the class. They know they will have two homework assignments for each chapter, 1-2 labs per unit, and a unit exam. Every unit has the same setup. Every unit is 2-3 weeks long. Every assignment is due the last day of the unit and it is the same day of the week. Nothing is inconsistent and students know what to expect. In a future post I will go into more detail, but the intentionality of design also pertains to building the course around a set of learning objectives. This means there isn't any content, technology, or assignment that isn't based on the learning objectives of the course.

Whether you are trying to lose weight, get out of debt, or be an effective online teacher you need to be intentional. You need to log in every day and interact with your students, grading assignments, answering questions, and being available to help them. You also need to provide them with a consistent design from the beginning of the semester. They have to know what to expect.

Until next time ... be an effective online teacher!

Working on my first podcast

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Bachert) — Mon, 6 Mar 2017 05:17:00 -0800

Like I said in my initial post I have been thinking about this blog/podcast for quite awhile and want to provide value to those who follow it. So many of my initial posts on this blog will be my thoughts as I develop the first episode of my blog. Any feedback would be appreciated.

So for the first podcast episode I want to cover several things; the first of which is to introduce myself, not only who I am, why I feel "qualified" to do the podcast, but also to just explain where I come from. I think my first blog post provides some of that information, but will want to enhance it so that it flows better - more presentation like.

My intent is for each episode to be about 30 minutes long; long enough to provide value, but not so long that people don't want to finish. The intro probably will only take 5 or so minutes so I will also cover a topic that I have shared with lots of faculty over the years... and would be my first Sam's Soapbox segment.

Cue some sort of music intro...

In my years of teaching I have discovered there are three types of students in every online class. The first type are those that you love to have in the class and I call them the Over Achiever. Now it sounds like I am putting them down; I am not. These students have probably contacted you before the class began asking questions about the course, they logged in the first day and completed all of the first week assignments, found any and all mistakes in your welcome module, and have started on the homework that isn't due for a couple weeks. Of course because they are so active in the course they keep you on your toes not only answering their questions, but trying to keep up with the grading, and believe me they will follow up on every assignment and exam question.

The second type of student is the exact opposite. These I call the Procrastinators. I hold these students close to my heart because I am very much like them and have to work really hard not to get behind in my own courses as a student or teacher. These students will typically log in the first day to find out the deadlines of the assignments and you may see from them again a couple times over the unit, but most likely they will be submitting everything on the due day - most right up to the due time as well. Many of these students have been able to function in their previous classes at this level and no matter of coaxing to get them to work on assignments early seems to work. They are also the ones who will have a life event happen and then get behind in the course. I try to be flexible for all students because I know where they come from, but I wish they would take my advice and log in and work on the course everyday. I am sure you feel the same.

So I used to tell faculty at this point that the third type of student is Everyone Else. And typically that is the case. The rest of your class will be a mixture of the first two types; they don't necessarily log in the very first day, but they do get in early on the first week, get things done on time sometimes a day or so early and generally just work through the course like they are supposed to. They ask questions when needed, are a great group of students, and are typically the majority of your class. In fact if you were to break it down by percentages you would have like 80% Everyone Else, 10-15% Procrastinators, and then 5-9% Over Achievers. At this point you may say but Sam you don't exactly add up to 100% and that is because I have had to tweak this topic to add a fourth student that seems to show up 1-2% of the time.

This type of student is why I call this segment: Sam's Soapbox because typically 1-3 students in your class pretty much just never show. And they are the most frustrating type of student. They may log in once or twice and with the new federal aide laws in place that require them to submit an assignment will do that, but then they never come back. You don't know they are going to be what I call the "never show up'er" until a couple weeks in to the class have passed. So you email them several times through out the first week, they submit an assignment so you stop bugging them a bit, and then the due date for the first unit starts to loom and they haven't been logging in so you are emailing them even more. I try to reach out to all students who haven't logged into the course for 3-4 days so that in hopes to pull them back in and get them to participate. The "never show up'ers" tend to just drain you and many don't ever drop.

This semester I have just 1 "never show up'er" and I have given up. I have emailed him probably 10 times, I have submitted a notice to the student achievement center at the school I teach at, and nothing. I want to see all of my students succeed and I am guessing that many of the faculty who are listening or reading this feel the same way. And the most frustrating thing is that I don't think there is anything you can do for this type of student because they don't want to complete the course. They signed up for the class for a different reason.

Okay time to get off the soap box...

In the end and the reason I keep teaching online is that the majority of your students will complete the course - the Over Achievers will knock it out and if you let them a week or two early, the Procrastinators will finish at the very last minute, and Everyone Else will be done at some point in between. As this podcast and blog develop I will provide techniques that I have learned over the years to help each type of student be successful in an online class.

Until next time....be an effective online teacher!

And so it begins...

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Bachert) — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 19:37:00 -0800

Today is the day. I have been thinking about this for many months. This has been an idea I have been toying with for awhile and it is finally coming to fruition. I have been in the online learning field for a long time; pretty much since 1999. I was only a work study at that time, but I got my start supporting the learning academy that San Juan College was running that summer. We had a set of faculty who were learning about what it was going to mean to teach online for the first time. I think at that time a lot of us were kinda running by the seat of our pants and since that time I have learned quite a bit about what it means to teach online. Fast forward several years to 2006 - that was the first year that I taught my first fully online class. It was an introduction to biology course and it included the lab component online as well. During those first semesters I spent time "defending" the techniques, the learning the students were doing, and so on. It has now been over 10 years since that first semester and I have taught 1-2 sections every semester usually with 24+ students per section. The class has morphed over time, I have learned several strategies on how to engage my students, tactics to keep them moving through the course, and just delivering content. It isn't perfect and it never will.

But since that time I wasn't just teaching online. I have also been in the online learning industry supporting faculty who teach online. Up until the end of April of 2016 I was the Director of Academic Technology at San Juan College and I managed the team that not only administrated the learning management system, but also supported students and faculty who taught online. During that time I helped transition Learning Management Systems (twice, WebCT-ANGEL and ANGEL-Canvas), and worked to systematize online learning at San Juan College. In May of last year my career shifted and I now am the Director of Academic Technology at College of Southern Nevada and I really don't work with online faculty anymore. :( My teams support the website, the computer labs, the smart classrooms, and students using Canvas. I love my new job, but I still miss spending those hours one-on-one with an online faculty trying to figure out the best way to tweak an assignment to make it work or more strategies to engage a group of students who are just not spending enough time in the class or those monthly coffee and conversations discussing what works (or what doesn't) online and helping each other improve.

And that is why I have decided to start this blog and a podcast to go along with it. I want to help faculty become more effective online teachers. I want to help them engage their students and in turn successfully complete their courses. This post, I hope, is the first of many that will inspire and create debate, conversation, and dialogue around the topic of online teaching. My focus is on higher education faculty, but I think the principles and concepts will apply to teaching online in the K-12 environment. So here we go; let me know what you think, what topics you want me to discuss, and how I can improve this blog. I am excited to see where this ends up.