Next?

So far, it's been a very full week of in-person collaborative work for me on campus -- and I'm also mindful that my out-of-the-country conference travel starts at the end of next week, and I still have research and writing to do before I go!  Suffice it to say I've been feeling pressured....  So I've needed to approach OL101 a bit more sporadically this week, rather than giving it significant amounts of my "prime time" as I  did in weeks 1 and 2.  That said, I think I've done reasonably well at completing all the various tasks in this module.

What I have not done is something I really admire in a fellow participant's course site -- I won't name her here for privacy reasons, but she coordinates internships for a certain urban-studies program....  In that person's sample course, it looks to me like she's been able to really use OL101 not only to learn processes but also to organize and present real-life material in very helpful, usable ways.  By contrast, because the course I will be designing for online instruction is one I have not taught before (and whose organization I have not yet fully worked out -- that's a task for later this summer and fall), I've used the OL 101 experience more to prove (to myself, and I hope to the director of online learning) that I can figure out and make use of the various tools on offer.  The actual items I've placed in the course are admittedly "place-holders."

By my accounting, though, I think I'm nearly "done" with OL 101.  (I'm still waiting for some other participants' quizzes to appear so that I can take them.)  What's next for me?  I think that, prior to designing the online course to be proposed for offering next summer, I will be devoting some attention to learning more about the Moodle gradebook features.  You see, this fall I will have a course with +/- 70 students, meeting on a MWF 50-minute schedule.  I would like to be proficient enough in the grading features of Moodle that I can do all the course assessment through Moodle -- no passing of papers back and forth in class.  For that, I will need to:

  1) become more comfortable navigating the gradebook features (which even our fearless leader calls "clunky"!),

  2)  find out some answers to the question I posted on my discussion forum in the shared OL101 course about grade-input format options (I do not assign grades on a numerical-scores-and-points basis, but input letter grades directly, with relative weights assigned; while I have found that there are Excel-based workbooks that will do this very simply for me, I have not found out how to do it in Moodle.  Help!), and

3)  learn about the "unzip/zip/distribute" mass-file management features in the gradebook that I've heard other colleagues talk about.  Responding more or less efficiently to 70 essays might just be possible if, instead of being tied to one-by-one online responses, I could compose all the responses offline and have them automatically uploaded to the right destinations.  Again, help and advice are most welcome.

Module 2: Flexibility

I'll admit that I don't usually choose to tinker with technological tools and toys; I prefer to play with ideas, words, and people rather than with (physical or virtual) things.  That's probably part of why I don't tend to be an "early adopter" of new technologies -- I prefer to wait until the dust has settled and clear, easy-to-follow guidelines have been established, so that I can fill my time with ideas, words, and people rather than with figuring out a machine.

That said, I've actually set myself an additional tinkering task during this course: besides the required experimentation with the various tools, I'm also (for reasons I won't go into here) using this course to get more familiar with the Apple Macintosh system and operating environment.  That means that some of the step-by-step guides Rick has offered to various tools have not directly applied to me -- I've had to figure out some different ways into things.

The lesson for me in this has been the importance of flexibility.  I've realized that when I get really frustrated with a technological tool I'm learning (ask my office neighbors, who have heard me muttering at the computer and occasionally pounding on my desk), it's usually because I've assumed there's a single right way to go about it, and the way I'm trying is not working -- so I get stuck.  This week has given me opportunities to try out different approaches from the way I think things should work.  Usually, the results have been reasonably successful.

Thoughts on getting started

When OL101 officially opened and launched, I was preoccupied with completing a paper for presentation at a conference, and then attending said conference and presenting the paper (yesterday!).  Therefore I was feeling a little behind getting started on the course, and decided to jump in wholeheartedly today.  I've spent most of my office time today reading and annotating the Module 1 resources, contributing to the "Getting to know each other" fora, and helping my group (go Monkees!) begin to get organized for the group project.  Having given all that attention to the course today, it seems like a good time to post here, to debrief the experience a bit before turning my focus elsewhere for the evening.

When I started looking at the resources for Module 1, I noticed that there were many different texts, and many of them of more or less the same type (short articles posted to Magna Publications' Faculty Focus and similar outlets).  I didn't want to fall into skimming them, so I decided to take a tactile approach, making reading notes on paper for each of the articles/resources.  This turned out to be a good way of slowing down my reading and paying attention.  It also gave me something to do with my hands besides just brushing the trackpad to scroll down the article!

I've heard many colleagues say that taking OL101, aside from preparing them to teach in the online environment, provided them new ways of thinking about (and new resources for) their in-person courses as well.  That's been true so far for me.  One thing I heard coming through in several of the readings was the need to shift the balance and focus of attention before and during the course: since online course needs to be authored ahead of time, the professor's focus during the course is less on preparing material and more on attending to the students' progress.  This matches part of my own desire to develop my own teaching practices for in-person courses: I have never been the sort of professor to plan out the details of an entire course before the term, but I have been moving somewhat in that direction for the past couple of semesters, and my heavier teaching and writing schedule in coming semesters would benefit from even more of this.  I'm hopeful that the practices and approaches I learn in OL101 will help me as I look ahead to my fall-semester in-person courses.

While most of what I found in the resources was mutually reinforcing, I did notice some points of difference, and at least one possible point of contradiction between two of the resources.  In "10 principles of effective online teaching," #8 ("safe and secure") strongly encourages online instructors to channel all of their communication with students through the LMS-embedded tools.  But in "9 tips for creating a sense of community," #3 ("connect to students in multiple ways") implies that professors may do well to observe where students already hang out online and to follow them there.  I'm inclined to follow the former advice rather than the latter, especially given my own policy for social-media use with students (they may connect to me, for example "friend" me on Facebook, but I do not initiate such connections).  I'll be interested to hear what others think about this.