Do Unto Others As You Would Want Done Unto You
Eva LaMar
Edui 6707
April 2006
I’ve had a long day at work and breathe out a gentle sign of relief as I started up my car and initiate my drive home. After I cook dinner, get my preschooler fed, bathed and in bed I start a load of laundry while my laptop fires up. As I ease into my chair and ponder the assignment and the discussion board postings related to it, I enter the online Blackboard classroom at California State University East Bay. I start right in on this week’s assignments with relish. I understand the purpose of the assignment and see connections to my own work and life. With this in mind, I quickly connect with my collaborative group at our agreed upon time and virtual place and we start a discussion in the chat room. I am the typical adult online learner: I have a full life and need to have 24/7 access to my advanced classes so that I can work when I have time.
Does this type of learning sound ideal? It is both realistic and ideal when instructors understand how to design engaging and interesting curriculum that meets the needs of the learners! I am a busy person who values learning; don’t give me busy work or mundane tasks! Please create assignments that challenge me to think, to collaborate with my online class, and to see the connections between the assignment, class objectives and my work and life. Now, as an online instructor myself, I monitor the lessons I assign by asking myself if I would find them engaging! I evaluate the assignment’s smaller pieces as well as in the impact of the course as a whole. I would not want to be in a class where I was completing assignments just to get credit, just to jump through hoops! That is not why I pursue higher education at all! Thus, I do unto others, my online students, as I would want them to do unto me: I challenge them with engaging, exciting, and relevant assignments that encourage collaboration.
What does it mean to be engaged with an assignment?
Since online learners tend to be products of a fast moving society who value time, productivity and measurable results, offering engaging curriculum becomes imperative (Gibbons & Wentworth, 2001). The approach to working with adult learners and has been discussed in many articles (Conner, 2002; Gibbons & Wentworth, 2001; LeBaron & Santos, 2005; Tekinarslan, 2004). There is agreement by many that adult learners prosper when curriculum is designed as inquiry-based learning, the background of the learners is important to the learning process, collaborating with other adult learners is encouraged, and the activity has a direct value to the learners (Bullen, 1995; Foreman, 2003; Gibbons & Wentworth, 2001; Marzano, 2002). Bullen (2002) adds to this when he clarifies that adult learners learn more efficiently and engage with the curriculum when they focus on problem solving learning activities instead of memorizing activities. Through engaging problem-solving activities collaboration becomes meaningful and part of the learning process. The collaboration can be done through chat rooms, discussion boards, e-mail and other electronic means. Engagement in the online learning community means that there is purposeful, frequent communication between students and student groups as well as with the instructor (LeBaron & Santos, 2005). As listed by Schlechty (2002), I found two types of engagement, “authentic” and “ritual”, to be pertinent to our online community development and engagement with the curriculum.
The term “authentic engagement” means one is authentically involved in their curriculum where the assigned task is associated with an outcome that has a clear meaning and value to the student (LeBaron & Santos, 2005; Schlechty, 2002). In a nutshell it means that the learner has intrinsic motivation to work on an assignment. Personally I feel that I see that the goal of online learning to should include aim for as many authentic assignments, so that students are consistently as engaged as possible with authentic learning. to authentically engage students in the learning process. Students who are authentically engaged in a collaborative assignment are more likely to to collaborate on the given assignment (LeBaron & Santos, 2005).
In one of my classes I had to create a mock online class that fit my professional needs as a staff development specialist. I was immediately engaged with the assignment as I had options within the assignment, could apply it instantly to my work environment, and understood the importance of working with others as I worked on my project. As I worked with other staff development specialists also taking the class, we built an amazing online course shell. I was clearly improving my own understanding of effective course design; I was intrinsically motivated to learn the topic and complete the project! Collaborating with others became an important function of the learning process! We valued the assignment, the project outcome, and the process of learning through each other.
On the other hand, assignments that are not ‘authentically engaging” are those perceived as “jumping through the hoops”; the learning activity is ritual in nature. Ritual engagement applies to assignment(s) where the work has little or no direct value other than the extrinsic reward of a grade (Schlechty, 2002). An online class that only counts the quantity of discussion board postings and not the content or quality of the posting(s) is are creating a ritual assignment(s) where the motivation to post is to earn a point per posting, not per quality message. Such ritual assignments can lead to discouragement.
As an online instructor my goal is to facilitate the learning process for my students – to create and maintain a meaningful curriculum and fostering collaboration and social capital as part of the learning process. I want my online students to authentically engaged in the curriculum the same way I desire to be engaged in the classes I am taking. It is through this authentic engagement in project-based relevant work that true collaboration will blossom and grow, thus fully utilizing the online learning experience at a high level.
What is the connection between assignments and online collaboration?
Students who see the value of an assignment are more likely to fully engage with that assignment. As online collaboration is a key component of effective online education, developing an online community not only engages the students, but helps them practice authentic and essential communication and collaboration processes. Quality online collaboration as part of the learning process takes an investment of time to develop and grow (Curtis & Lawson, 2001), utilizing learning activities that engages students in authentic discussion and collaboration is part of the investment (LeBaron & Santos, 2005). Online learners want to learn and be challenged; they also know busy work when they see it.
A great example of this was one of my online classes where I was assigned a list of vocabulary words to complete. The assignment was tedious and of little value to me. Most of the students were already familiar with the vocabulary words and would have mastered them without completing meaningless paperwork. This busywork did have student groups collaborating as we split up the list and each completed part of the assignment. Online collaboration is not utilized very well if students are just dividing up work and combining the results into a single document. Where was the learning from each other? Where was the building on each other’s experiences? Our class was dying to ask the professor if he would find intrinsic value in the assignment if he were a class member rather than a class instructor. We suspected that he would not. The instructor needed to consider the saying, “Do unto others as you would want done unto you!”
Summary
As you design your online classes, maintain an ongoing class, and reflect upon past classes it is important to consider the old saying, “Do unto others as you would want done unto you!”. Would you, as a learner in the class, be motivated, excited, and see the value in the learning experience and assignments of that class? Do the assignments authentically engage the students? Are the assignments encouraging students to use their vast backgrounds to help build a collaborative new understanding of the material? If the answer is no, then it is time to revisit the curriculum and course design with the real learning in mind. Consider all of the learners in your class and build from there. The students want to learn and build a new understanding that allows them to advance in life and their professional world. We also want our online students to return for more online classes and to pass on the good word about our online learning programs! We need to do unto others as we would want done unto us!
Works Cited:
Bullen, M. (1995). Andragogy and university distance education Retrieved April 12, 2006, 2006, from http://www2.cstudies.ubc.ca/~bullen/bullen1.html
Conner, M. (2002). Andragogy + Pedagogy. Retrieved April 12, 2006, 2006, from http://agelesslearner.com/intros/andagogy.html
Curtis, D., & Lawson, M. (2001). Exploring collaborative online learning [Electronic Version]. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 5. Retrieved June 2001 from http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v5n1/v5n1_curtis.asp.
Foreman, J. (2003). Educational technology verses the lecture [Electronic Version]. EDUCASE Review, 38, 12-22. Retrieved July/August 2002 from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0340.pdf.
Gibbons, H., & Wentworth, G. (2001). Andrological and pedagogical training differences for online instructors [Electronic Version]. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 4. Retrieved Fall 2001 from http://www.westa.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall43/gibbons_wentworth43.html.
LeBaron, J., & Santos, I. (2005). Authentic engagement of adult learners in online learning [Electronic Version]. Mountain rise: an electronic journal dedicated to the scholarship of teaching and learning, 2. Retrieved Fall 2005 from http://facctr.wcu.edu/mountainrise/archive/vol2no1/html/authentic_engagement.html.
Marzano, R. (2002). What works in schools: Translating research into action. Alexandria, Virginia: ASCD.
Schlechty, P. (2002). Making Engagement Central. Retrieved April 14, 2006, 2006, from http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/55/07879616/0787961655.pdf
Tekinarslan, E. (2004). Project-based distributed learning and adult learners [Electronic Version]. Turkish online journal of distance learning, 5. Retrieved April 2004 from http://tojde.anadolu.edu.tr/tojde14/articles/tekinarslan.htm.