Part One: A brief update on the events of your internship that week. What is happening? How are you feeling? What are you learning? What questions do you have?
The first week of class for my oral/interpersonal communication course was Jan. 12-18, 2015. The first week of classes was very busy, but my online class did exceptionally well during week 1! All of the students who logged on the first week were able to create and post their blog URL’s without any assistance by the due date! Yahoo! Over the past three years, I have always had a few students who submitted their blog address past the deadline and needed to be reminded to complete the assignment. This week I kept up with grading student assignments, but next week, I will receive 60 email assignments I will need to grade for Written Communication. I will also hear and grade 25 storytelling speeches in my face-to-face courses (50 storytelling speeches the week after). Next week I will begin the true time management test.
My first week of my internship and practicum have been busy, but I think I am doing well by breaking the work into small pieces and doing some work each day, so that it doesn’t become overwhelming (I am finally taking the advice I give students. Ha ha!). Surprisingly, my biggest struggle this week has been trying to figure out what to say on the introduction discussion board. Frankly, I am a bit shocked that this has been a struggle for me! Usually, this is not an issue. As our reading point out this week, sometimes it takes awhile to connect with others and build a learning community. Finally, I have been trying to work ahead on my e-folio and the tasks I have agreed to work on in my oral/interpersonal course, so that when my schedule does get busier in February I will be able to mitigate the chaos.
Part Two: The bigger picture. Seek out the reflections you wrote in all of the classes you've taken to get here. Consider what you knew then vs what is alive in your mind now. What do you now understand more deeply from your current perspective?
I think when I began teaching and taking online classes, I made the assumption that undergraduates would want to be fully engaged in discussion of course material with their classmates. Clearly, I had on my rose colored glasses! I think I believed this because I discovered that I really enjoyed the fruitful discussions in my online graduate class. Although I enjoyed discussing theories face-to-face in my graduate communication courses, I think I now prefer to discuss theories and graduate course material using discussion boards. This allows participants time to reflect, to re-read material, and to conduct some outside research before replying to others. Why wouldn’t undergraduates want to do the same? Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot! I have a captive audience whose interests might not include communication. Furthermore, many students don’t enjoy the process of reflecting, conducting research, or writing responses. Students act in a similar fashion in the face-to-face classroom therefore; I shouldn’t have assumed my online students would be different. Yet, in order for me to increase student’s critical think abilities, I need them to experience the exact thing they might not like.
One of my goals this semester is to increase discussion board participation. Last semester the discussion board participating was waning, I sent out an announcement to the class providing suggestion for improvement, which did increase the quality and timeliness of discussion. When students posted earlier, I noticed a significant increase in the number of responses and the quality of responses. Thus, I know that better discussions are possible from my students. Now that I also have a better understanding of the grading center and group assignment tools, I am will be breaking the class into two smaller groups to discuss questions to increase student accountability. Finally, I will have more discussion extenders prepared in advance to help me continue to stimulate deeper discussion and sharpen students’ critical thinking skills.
I believe that during the progression of my certificate courses, I have learned to be more realistic about my expectations of student learning in the online environment. I am confident that had a similar learning curve experience when I first started teaching face-to-face courses a decade ago. As humans, we tend to forget these experiences and by reflecting on the subject, I now see the similarities between my past and present learning curves.
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