The beginning of the course has really started me on thinking about community in online learning. Having recently graduated I have the prospective of what I would want as a student still in my mind, and I have recently interacted with other students about online courses. Often what I hear from other students when they have online work is that it all seems to be busy work and there is no real connect to others.
It is sad how often that online courses really are just busy work without that community. Often teachers just assign a bunch of work online and tell the students a due date. The students go through the motions and just get it done. I will admit that I have myself fallen into this situation where I just did what I had to without really caring what everyone else was doing. Students who I talked to would comment that the group discussions were more of an assignment than a real discussion. You would log onto the Moodle course and see the generic posts that everyone did. There was no real conversation, just the desire to get an A in the class and move on. They didn't contribute because they felt involved, but rather they just saw it as another assignment.
Even online group projects have been seen as isolated. Students would often tell me that they just divided the work up and went their separate ways. They would talk at the beginning about who was to do what, then they would come back at the end to put it all in a document. One person would take this jumble of information and streamline it into one document. So their interaction was kept at a minimum versus F2F projects where you meet all the time.
I am hoping that over the next few weeks we will learn more about how to avoid making community feel like just another assignment to quick complete so you can go watch Netflix. I want to figure out how to incorporate things that students enjoy into online community. I hope that I can find a way to involve social media, Google video chat, etc. so that students are more engaged. I want the students to be able to joke around, encourage one another, and even debate like it is a classroom rather than simple sit at their computers spitting out generic answers to get their online work over with.
Alexa, I wish we had a lot more time for OL 101 to really develop some of the things you talk about. We can only scratch the surface. I have found that as the course instructor, I can put guidelines in place for participation, and I can evaluate student participation, but I so far I haven't found a surefire way to ensure that my students are doing more than just going through the motions to fulfill the course requirements. But then how can I do that in a face-to-face course? I don't really know if some students are simply trying to get a good grade or if they are really concerned about learning and developing as a future teacher. Even with OL 101, I can't always tell if my "students" really want to learn how to teach effectively online or if they just want to do what they have to in order to be approved to teach on line at Trinity. I think that like my college students, the OL 101 participants that really want to learn will do just that.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that you want to include various media in online courses. I agree that these do help get students involved and more excited. Hopefully you'll get the chance to use some of these tools during our second module I have seen, however, instances where even text-only interaction was exciting, passionate, and anything but generic.