Teaching Online “Long-Deserved” Capstone

#LTTO, Online Instruction, online learning, Online Teaching Practices 0 comments

Teaching Online “Long-Deserved” Capstone

The wonders of reflective journaling in online teaching

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano

School of English

Faculty of Social Sciences

Universidad Latina de Costa Rica

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Post 219

Throughout my Online-Hybrid-Blended Education training, I have examined a variety of strategies and tools along with associated benefits and challenges when teaching in online courses. Many of these have been used now that I am an online instructor for Laureate’s Faculty Development’s portal for faculty members of any of the Laureate universities across the world. Additionally, I have started to use them in my blended learning courses at Universidad Latina, a Laureate sister university in Costa Rica, with lots of success and deep learning among my many students.

My progressive training in every single module proposed for the Online, Hybrid, and Blended Education certificate offered by Laureate’s Faculty Development has made me encounter lots of benefits and challenges regarding virtual learning environments. I have come to experience the benefits of the flexibility and availability of creating or finding multimedia, of working conscientiously on instructional design with various models of development, of having to deal with the challenges of technical issues that directly or indirectly affect me as an instructor or my students, and of motivating and engaging learners online to develop real deep learning that can trigger –in them- the development of skills and competences for their jobs.

When I look back in time, in an act of hindsight tinted with mindfulness, I see myself answering these questions and I also invite you to ask yourself:

· While facilitating the first week of your Module, think about your experiences, and if it is what you expected in terms of student interaction and workload.

While facilitating the first week of my first Module as an online instructor, several things whirled around my mind that needed to be written down. On the one hand, in terms of student interaction, and working on this exercise from a metacognitive perspective, it was what I had been expecting to happen. The early birds arrived before the course started to see what needed to be completed, and by mid-week, several of the “owls” were still resting in their “branches.” As an instructor I am not going to criticize this particular behavior, but what needs to be highlighted is that teaching faculty when behaving like students, they embody what we criticize from our learners’ way of conducting their academic studies: a bit of procrastination.

In terms of workload, I can say that it did not differ much from the hybrid courses I had been empirically teaching for the last three years at Universidad Latina in Costa Rica. My whole experience as an instructor in terms of feedback, for instance, was quite similar to what I like to do with my current students: Challenge them a bit more with a “burning question” in regards to what they are sharing and contributing with the course and content, but encourage them to expand their ideas much more to really speak up their minds. But as in my regular hybrid courses in college, my Module students were not exactly that responsive. And with this, I went back to my previous thought: Teaching Faculty do behave like learners when they are the students and replicate the very same behaviors we all instructors complain about in terms of procrastination and course engagement.

Being a bit open-minded with the insights gained so far, I am a defender of blended education as a way to help students acquire and build their knowledge for their current majors and/or future careers. However, the big gap that I still find, even among teaching faculty taking professional development courses, between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Many of these course are taking by teaching professionals out of a “compromise” they have with a higher education institution (extrinsic) rather from the fact that they want to become better at teaching by learning new techniques and sharing their experiences while using those techniques. This is for me what the real challenge is. As an instructor, on a hybrid setting or on a F2F classroom, I always feel excited and find passion for what I like to do, to teach; nevertheless, I do not usually encounter those very same emotions in students or other colleagues.

To sum up, and thinking of questions that assault me in my teaching endeavors, I must pose the following:

a) How can online courses be marketed to have the students who are really interested in learning and developing their potential?

b) How can online instructors motivate their students to go beyond the extra mile and not restrict themselves to the minimum effort?

c) What about teaching assistantship? Should there be some many assistants bombarding learners? Wouldn’t it have been better to just have a couple rather than a whole bunch?

Facilitating an online learning space with highly interested and motivated students is just fun and rewarding, but it all depends on how all factors unfold along the course to see how much fun it can really be.

· Reflect on any insights gained as well as the benefits and challenges that you and your Module participants may have encountered. Be sure to consider achievements and successes that you or your students had during this week.

I can’t really tell how much time should be devoted to one’s online course facilitation but use some sort of a formula, depending on what kind of online task students are to develop: Daily Monitoring + Timely Feedback + Grading + others. Timewise, course facilitation may account for some 10 to 15 minutes per student in class, and this also be affected by the quality of work done by learners: It can be more or luckily less than 10 minutes to really guide your students.

What else would I consider? Though I cannot label myself as a fully-grown and seasoned online professional, the fact is that this dedication of time to one’s online learners is very important. Not that far in time, I started getting emails from some of my students in Asia thanking and encouraging me for my way of facilitating the course. That is, they were grateful for the individualized guidance and comments provided to them, something they had not experienced before. Moreover, they were thankful for having me share my points of view, as another participant, in the forum discussions we had as part of the courses I get to teach. Being a bit mindful, the human connection we can create with online learners is as vital as the one we develop with learners in a F2F teaching environment. For me, this has been one of the best pieces of washback one can get in facilitating an online course.