[As the Spring
2017 semester comes to a conclusion, a series of classroom reflections,
this time focused on new things I tried in my courses. I’d love to hear your
Spring reflections in comments!]
On a few
takeaways from my first experience teaching an all-online class.
Like pretty much
every institution
of higher learning in the country and world, Fitchburg State University has
over the last decade or so begun to include online
courses and even program
offerings much more fully than was the case when I arrived in 2005. The
first clause of that sentence makes clear why FSU has to do so, and I’m sure
that for various disciplines online courses and programs can accomplish their
disciplinary objectives perfectly well. But as an English Studies professor, I’ve
always felt that there’s no substitute for in-person classes and conversations,
no way to achieve what we hope to in our courses without that element of
face-to-face work. While I’ve begun
to teach hybrid graduate
courses, classes that meet half in person and half online through
Blackboard discussions and the like, as a way to accommodate the needs of our
grad students, I had remained adamant that I didn’t want to teach an all-online
course of any kind. But this semester one of my colleagues took an unexpected
medical leave and the department needed someone on short notice to teach her
online section of our Short Story literature course, and I decided to give
online teaching a shot for the first time.
As with so many
of the things we fear, the reality of teaching online turned out to be far
smoother and more positive than had been my concerns. The students consistently
rose to the challenge of the weekly Blackboard conversations, both in their own
weekly analytical posts and (especially) in the required responses to at least
one classmate’s post. I hadn’t specified a length or content for those latter
responses, but the students consistently went well beyond “I agree” or “nice
job” or the like, really engaging with each others’ readings and ideas. Because
this course was offered through our Department of Graduate and Continuing
Education (an “evening” rather than “day” course, that is), my guess is that
many of the students had taken other online classes, and thus were a more
experienced cohort, a group more ready to participate online in these full and
meaningful ways, than might be the case for a “day,” regular undergraduate online
class. But whatever the particular factors, there’s no doubt that the class
featured not only impressive individual analyses of our stories, but also and
most importantly multi-vocal conversations about them and many related questions
and issues. Those conversations weren’t and could never be identical to
in-person ones, of course, but they were present and effective nevertheless.
And yet I would
also highlight a couple shortcomings that I believe are endemic to online
teaching. For one thing, I personally hate the fact that I’ve worked with a
group of 28 students for an entire semester and have never met any of them; I
offered them the chance to come chat in office hours, but couldn’t require it
(again, it was a DGCE course and at least some of the students work full-time),
and so they understandably didn’t take me up on that offer. This is certainly a
personal objection, but it’s a very real one, as it limited the human
connections that to my mind are an important part of teaching and learning. And
for another thing, I believe that the most effective literary analyses are
built in multiple stages, with an individual sharing one idea or reading and
then it becoming part of the kind of ongoing, multi-layered, communal
conversation that can happen as a classroom full of students add their voices
and ideas to the mix. As impressive as the students’ Blackboard responses to
each others’ posts were, those are still more individual and isolated than
would be such truly communal conversations—and in their absence, I’m not sure
we developed any sustained analyses of any of the course’s complex short
stories. If I do teach an all-online course again (certainly just an “if” right
now), that’s an area on which I’d have to work much further.
Summer and Fall
preview this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Spring semester reflections you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment