October 31, 2010
Technologies for Teaching: Strategies and Pitfalls
http://chronicle.com/article/Technologies-for-Teaching/125109/
By Julie Meloni October 31, 2010
It isn't a stretch to say that the definitions of "teaching online" and "teaching with technology" vary across colleges and departments, even from instructor to instructor.
I've learned firsthand that "teaching with technology" can mean using PowerPoint in a lecture, or the distribution of course materials via e-mail, or customized course blogs enabling user-generated content, or the integration of wikified student-edited syllabi.
Similarly, "teaching online" may mean an experience in which the instructor and students communicate from disparate locations solely through a learning-management system such Blackboard or Moodle, or it may mean a course in which the bulk of the content is delivered online but the instructor and students occasionally meet face to face, or it may mean a regular face-to-face classroom experience supplemented by online discussion and accessible writing such as in student blogs.
Whatever the level of technology, and regardless of our comfort level with it, remember that for all that educational technology can offer us through new communication methods and the ability to reach a wider range of students, it is no panacea. An instructor must still deliver relevant material, enable students to achieve the goals of the course, and assess their work. Students must still learn the material, use assignments and discussion opportunities to achieve the course goals, and, ultimately, produce work to be assessed. In this article, I discuss some tools and processes that can help instructors leverage their own pedagogical and content expertise when bringing technology into the classroom or managing a classroom that exists entirely in a virtual space.
Before planning a course that will involve technology—be it entirely online or a hybrid model—we would be wise to heed the words of Karl Stolley, an assistant professor of technical communication at the Illinois Institute of Technology. During the 2009 Computers & Writing Conference, Mr. Stolley took issue with the seemingly innocuous question, "How can I use x, y, or z technology in the classroom?" When the question lacks a final clause, such as "to enhance student engagement" or "to offer opportunities for critical analysis," it becomes "a solution looking for a problem," he argued. And I agree.
So let's look at a few problems and possible technological solutions:
Communication. Many classroom problems fall under the umbrella of "communication," broadly defined. When we teach in the physical classroom, our primary mode of communication is synchronous—we are in the same place with our students, at the same time. But if we teach entirely or partially online, we have the opportunity to employ synchronous models at a distance—same time, different place—or asynchronous models—different time, different place.
If you use the "same time, different place" model, you may encounter such barriers as cost and bandwidth—not only on your end, as the individual instructor or the institution, but also on the students' end. This is especially true with conferencing systems: Web-based videoconferencing requires equipment to receive as well as to deliver. Although the benefits of real-time videoconferencing are clear—it's as near to a physical classroom environment as online education can get—the software, hardware, and bandwidth necessary on both sides can be more cost-prohibitive than actually physically attending a class.
Some learning-management systems have integrated synchronous tools with-in the delivery platform, such as Blackboard's integrated chat and whiteboard features. Although there are still software, hardware, and bandwidth requirements for those tools, the requirements are not as cost-prohibitive as those required for videoconferencing and can be used equally effectively.
•Discussion boards. A core feature of most learning-management systems, and freely available outside such systems (many people use Google Groups), a well-managed discussion board can produce rich conversations.
Do not assume that discussion boards are useful only in the all-online classroom; a discussion board attached to a class that meets face to face can provide opportunities for you to clarify or enhance content discussed, and for expressions of knowledge by students who are perhaps too shy to speak in class (or who, like myself, need to think about their answers before blurting something out).
•Blogs. Speaking of providing additional opportunities for students to exercise their voices, individual blogs are my favorite. Not only do the students discuss content with one another and the instructor, but they learn to write for a wider audience. Blogs aren't just for students: I use a general course blog (to which my students' blogs are linked) to provide wrap-ups after each face-to-face class. This serves both as a teaching journal for me and as a way for students to ask additional questions after our face-to-face time is over.
•Social-networking sites. Facebook and Twitter can play important roles in your asynchronous communications strategy, in both online and hybrid classrooms. Facebook pages can provide up-to-date information about the course, while Twitter and Twitter lists can be useful sites of asynchronous discussion.
•E-mail and e-mail lists: Some people consider electronic mailing lists to be quaint relics of a previous technological age, but it's hard to argue with the fact that they still work. An e-mail-based discussion list provides the ability to carry on threaded discussions in a private environment, yet outside the confines of a managed system. In fact, Google Groups is a threaded discussion board that can also take place via e-mail, putting a different twist on the typical concept of the e-mail list.
Each of those four tools can be used in any online or hybrid classroom model. But regardless of which tools you use, be sure your communication plan is clear to your students. Online communication has rules, just like face-to-face communication does.
Don't throw a lot of different tools at your students all at once (unless it is a class specifically about tools). Remember that you will be the students' first point of contact after their initial foray into the technology, so you should require only as much technology as the course goals justify, and be sure you can support it. Set guidelines as well as expectations, and use only those tools that you have evaluated and that clearly enhance teaching and learning. Again, avoid using technology just for the sake of using technology, tempting though it may be to turn everything over to the machine.
Managing course content. Here are a few important tools for managing, sharing, and backing up your course content—or any documents, in fact. Consider using cloud-based storage systems, in which your data are stored by third-party vendors. One such provider is Dropbox, but there are other cloud-storage vendors you could use as a backup-and-retrieval mechanism. For example, while you might have course presentations stored within a learning-management system and perhaps on your own course Web site, if Blackboard or your Web-hosting provider goes down, where would your students turn? How long would it take you to recreate those systems? If your documents were also stored in a public folder in your cloud-storage account, anyone could access them from any device (including mobile devices), and you would have a backup ready to transfer to another system.
Additionally, reference-management tools such as Zotero and Mendeley allow you to store, manage, and annotate class resources, and to publish these collections as either public or private groups. So, whether you teach entirely online or have simply brought elements of technology into the physical classroom, your students could gain access to these curated collections perhaps more easily than they would if working through a potentially labyrinthine library system (if your university even subscribes to the resources they need).
Collaborating. One of the greatest technologies of all is completely independent of your classroom location. The technology of collaboration is free, with few bandwidth requirements and a low barrier to entry. And the potential payoff is great.
One of the benefits of presenting course material online—on a publicly accessible Web site or blog, rather than within a restricted learning-management system—is that instructors at other institutions can get a sense of what you teach, how you teach it, and how students are engaging with the material (if they are writing public blogs). Such sharing is invaluable, especially for graduate students and junior scholars seeking guidance as they plan their own courses, as well as for any scholars looking for new approaches. Sometimes the free exchange of ideas invites more-formal collaboration in the form of conference-panel invitations or ideas for co-authored papers—both of which have come my way simply because someone in my field happened to see a syllabus I had put online.
Another type of collaboration involves students. The public nature of blogs allows for communication among students at different institutions, or among peers at their own. To cite an example from my own course experience: At the University of Victoria, American-literature students have discussed issues of slavery and abolition with another instructor's Victorian-literature class. The opportunities for collaboration are endless, but begin with exposing course materials online.
Finally, although you are the content expert, there are very likely others at your institution who have completed training and conduct scholarly work in fields, such as information technology, library science, and educational technology, that relate to and can enhance your own. They can help you evaluate and use tools and technologies in your online or face-to-face classrooms, and you can then pass that knowledge on to your colleagues.
Perhaps one day these technologies will become the panacea that some hope.
Julie Meloni is a postdoctoral fellow in information management and digital humanities with the INKE Research Group at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, and a former managing editor of ProfHacker.
I totally agree with you. Online education should be properly design in order to be effective and teachers should have the proper skills to teach the students who Study at home.
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