Ten Years of Teaching Online: Did I Do It Well?
By
Janet Nichols
EDUI 6707
Professor Datta Kaur Khalsa
February 8, 2009
Janet Nichols is currently pursuing a Master’s in Online Teaching and Learning at California State University East Bay. She has been teaching business courses at the college level for 26 years and online for the last 10 years.
Introduction: Did I Create A Community?
I fell into part-time evening college teaching 26 years ago when I moved to the Boston area and was looking for a fulltime job. I enjoyed the experience so much that I continued through several regular jobs and having two children. However, I always felt that I could be a better teacher, but I did not know how to go about it. Finally, my unhappiness with the minimal training I received for teaching online, which stressed technology over pedagogy, ultimately led me to the Online Teaching and Learning (OTL) Master’s program at California State East Bay.
Through a recent course in this program, I have become much more aware of the importance of creating an online learning community within an online course for effective learning. I began to reflect on my past 10 years teaching online. Did I create an online learning community? Did I do it well, poorly or not at all? What can I learn from reviewing my past experiences? This paper is a reflective, but unscientific, look back at my teaching career to determine if I created successful online learning communities in my classes.
Ten Years of Online Teaching
I first began using the Internet in my teaching by web-enhancing my face-to-face courses with simple course management software called Course-in-a -Box about ten years ago. I basically used this class website as a place to post class handouts, for students to post questions to me, and to provide practice multiple choice exams. Students liked the idea of instant access to course materials but there was no online community in these activities.
Because of this experience and my interest in computers, I was selected to teach the first hybrid class in my program using Blackboard, which was then a relatively new system. After the first two weeks in class, we worked online for the next three weeks. I felt like I had walked into a void where I could see and hear nothing – the antithesis of community. Gone were those vital nonverbal, face-to-face cues that had helped me assess how well students were learning and allowed me to make instantaneous adjustments. I saw the few required postings on a discussion board which at least let me know my students were still participating. In this situation, any sense of community had been formed in the classroom, not through the online activities. The activities themselves were often an almost direct extension of what was done in class, for better or worse.
With my hybrid experience, I was selected to pilot the first totally online course. At this early stage, my hybrid and online courses were mostly a reflection of what I had done in my face-to-face classes. Instead of lectures, I posted either PowerPoint slides or notes. I had a few discussion boards with mostly boring questions requiring answers right out of the book. Although I participated on the discussion boards, it was in a very cursory way. I was afraid if I commented too much it would discourage the students from contributing more. I was disappointed that students did not reply to each other unless I specifically required it. There was no spirit of reciprocity or collaboration. Some information was exchanged but it was usually directly related to the assignment. Trust was not an issue because nothing was demanded of the students to engender trust.
I was able to go back and review the course sites for the last four years that I have been teaching online. In 2005 and early 2006, I found that I posted one welcome message on the Introduce Yourself Board in my online classes and did not greet students individually. There was no group work. I did respond occasionally to students on the various discussion boards. I summarized other students’ comments but it was infrequently read.
The effect of my initial coursework in the OTL program starting in January, 2006, was seen in my later 2006 online courses. The first thing I realized was that I needed to model the online behaviors I wanted from my students. I began to greet each student personally on the introductory board and to respond to secondary postings. Suddenly I had much greater student participation. Students were asking each other about or commenting on topics such as where they lived and the program they were enrolled in during the initial week. This sounds like a small thing but as Khalsa and Hildreth (2000) point out, “The Teacher begins to set a tone from the very first words students see …–and the first assignment – an ‘ice breaker’ that gets students using the facilities but more importantly gets them to open up to one another†(Khalsa and Hildreth, Step 1, para. 1). We knew individual things about each other which made the class much more personal and warm. I feel this was my first real step to creating an online community, not just an online class.
In 2007, I designed and implemented a group project in the course. Again, I was surprised and delighted at how involved most of the groups were when given a simple one page assignment. I also saw sharing of individual life circumstances like an impending new baby arrival or significant sickness. This type of conversation, which would have never been posted on a general class discussion board, indicated a sense of trust among participants where they were willing to share personal information when not required. The group project also required a level of cooperation and collaboration which was not required when replying to general class discussion boards.
Next I added personal reflections. I found that this assignment opened up a new direct line of communication between the instructor and the student about what the student was learning. Although I did not have the students share their reflections among each other, I sensed that the students really enjoyed having the instructor’s “focused attention†with these postings. Again I felt like it increased the overall involvement in the class by students and that there was more individual sharing in general class posts.
Perhaps the technique that felt the riskiest for me to try, but which worked beautifully in terms of community building, was using peer review for their final individual papers which I began doing in 2008. I presented guidelines about how to constructively review someone else’s work, assured students I would only read and grade their final version, and gave them a fair amount of points for participating. Students were diplomatic for the most part and although some obviously barely read others’ drafts and quickly said “good jobâ€, many provided valuable, thoughtful suggestions. An added bonus was that the writing level in the final papers was much improved. They had taught each other through reading about and commenting on how to improve their writing skills in ways I simply did not have time to do. Trust was very important to the success of this exercise and I was pleased that many students were willing to take the risk to expose their work to the entire class. Those who did were rewarded with a better final paper and usually a better assignment grade.
Techniques that Produced Community
While it is true that collaborative Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis have only come along in the last few years, I think developing a sense of community is something I could have done very early in my online classes had I known more about how to do it. By actively welcoming and participating frequently in the discussion boards, I was modeling community behavior for the students. Requiring students to respond to each other helped but changing assignments into more open-ended assignments where they could comment and learn from each other did as well. Peer review, which I hesitated to use for a long time, turned out to be a strong trust creator and a significant learning and information sharing opportunity. Students were able to review what others were doing which led to higher quality assignments. The personal reflection assignment gave me a chance to concentrate on one student at a time creating trust that I would listen to them. Team projects gave students a smaller group to work in which led to more collaboration, reciprocity, and sharing of both course material and personal information.
Summary
When compared to those initial courses I taught eight or ten years ago, the most recent courses I have taught are significantly different. The sense of community as determined by trust, reciprocity, information sharing and cooperation or collaboration (Saguaro, 2007) is much more apparent now. The earliest courses were an attempt to replicate a traditional classroom. I now have a very different type of learning space (and hopefully community) with a group project, peer review of the final project, individual welcoming statements, much more active participation from both me and my students, and a just-added wiki assignment which has been well received.
I never set out to create an online learning community in any of my past online teaching. However as I review my experiences, I realize that over time I began to develop community by being more responsive to my students, by helping them collaborate more closely with each other in smaller groups, and by providing the opportunity to share information among themselves to help each other improve their work. I did this because it “felt†right; I could see the increased involvement and learning before my very eyes in the students’ postings. I have also learned that developing a community does not need to involve fancy Web 2.0 tools although they can be very useful when appropriately utilized.
Conclusions
Now that I am aware of how powerful online learning communities are, I will deliberately build them into my future courses with both simple and more sophisticated Web 2.0 techniques as appropriate. This is an area where I will continue to learn and grow as an online instructor. For example, I have recently tried out wikis and am intrigued by their possibilities for further class participation and community building. Another area I have begun exploring is having students respond to each other’s blogs and reflections. I have a feeling this will be my next big “experiment†in my ongoing efforts to create a true online learning community, not just a classroom. In going forward from here, I will provide a better basis for a vibrant online learning community where my students can learn more effectively with each other and with me.
References
Charalambos, V., Michalinos, Z. & Chamberlain, R. (2004). The design of online learning communities: Critical issues. Educational Media International, 41(2), 135-143.
Khalsa, D.K. & Hildreth, S. (2000). Finding a place for everyone: Creating, maintaining, and evolving optimal online learning communities for student in online teaching & learning courses. Retrieved, February 6, 2009, from http://www.khalsamontessorischool.com/placeforeveryone.html
Saguaro Seminar. (2007). Civic Engagement in America. Retrieved January 6, 2009, from http://www.hks.harvard.edu/saguaro/primer.htm