Our theater department is putting on a production of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods. I attended a performance last night-- they put on a great show-- and I woke up with the songs still running through my head. What an apt metaphor for my efforts to revise a familiar face-to-face seminar course for online delivery: I know what I hope to gain, I think I know how to go about getting there, and I strongly suspect that both the journey and the outcome are going to wind up someplace completely unexpected.
I've been teaching a seminar course in Women's Health every regular spring/fall semester for several years now. The course is part of my university's general education program-- a capstone of sorts for the gen ed curriculum. There are a few campus-wide standards for this seminar program in terms of the kinds of writing students should produce, but otherwise content and format are wide open. I teach a course of my own creation, smack in the middle of my own strongest interests, and I get to teach it pretty much however I want. What a treat, eh?
Our student population is primarily 18 to 22 year olds, many of them ostensibly dependent on their upper-middle-class parents, but usually with financial circumstances that make them very cost-conscious. Many of them would like to be able to take one of these seminar courses, which are unique to our institution and not transferable from anyplace else, during the summer. Very few students feel they can afford to spend the summer in our small Midwestern college town, paying rent and not earning wages, in order to take summer classes. Online summer sections of these seminar courses fill quickly.
I'm participating in an in-house online course about teaching online courses, which has pointed me towards some nice resources and given me an opportunity to discuss this process with colleagues. I'm in the process of building my own revised course, working from the current semester's syllabus and re-engineering course elements for the online environment. I'm sure many of you have far more experience with online content delivery than I do, so I'd love whatever feedback you have to offer about what's likely to work.
One thing this faculty development resource has emphasized is the need for tight, well-planned course design. I'm a geek for course design anyway, but this process has me re-thinking how I explain expectations to students. The online format (and the accelerated summer schedule) are not conducive to recursive discussions and repeated attempts; I need to make expectations crystal clear from Day Zero. That means, of course, that I have to let go of my own preference for reading the non-verbal behavior of my students as a group to get a sense of whether the lightbulb has gone on; I have to spell out for myself exactly what I want them to learn and how they will demonstrate it. I know; I know; having planned learning outcomes is not particularly innovative-- but this is not a content-memorization kind of course; it's a Big Ideas kind of course.
I have to ensure that the content delivery and evaluation processes are accessible to students, regardless of where they physically are and what kind of internet connection they have. I have to anticipate what kind of IT hiccups they're likely to encounter and have resources readily available to coach them through.
I have to re-think interactions among students as part of planned learning process. In a Women's Health course, self-disclosure in classroom discussion is almost as important as the assigned readings. I can't (and wouldn't want to) compel any particular self-sharing, but students every semester teach each other far more about the intersection of the personal and political than they derive from reading. My faculty development team has emphasized the importance of a low-stakes introductory assignment to encourage a "community" feel to an online course. I have mixed feelings about the idea, but I'm going to try it.
Students will be responsible for reading the assigned material and developing their own research papers, but they'll also be required to participate in discussion boards about each unit's content. The biggest innovation I'm planning so far is a set of "theme wikis" within the course delivery system. In order to approximate the emergence of themes that usually takes place over the course of the semester in classroom discussion about the readings, I've named the themes (makes me sad; I'd rather the themes emerge in discussion) and organized a rotation that will have every student adding to wikis for each theme at some point in the course. If it goes as planned, they will cross each other's paths repeatedly in the wikis but won't work in the same small group throughout the course.
There's a lot more I'm working on in this course revision process. I'd hoped to provide all of you with a smorgasbord of relevant links to handy resources, but I suspect Daily Kos readers can find online resources for teaching quite well without my hand-holding. I haven't discovered anything so earth-shatteringly useful that it demands inclusion here. If you know of anything handy, please share in the comments. Online education is here to stay-- how will you make the most of it?