Were this a F2F course, she would set up office hours – but that’s not an option in an online course, is it? Post your ideas in the what could Trinh do discussion forum.
After much consideration, I think some of the options available for Trinh includes the following:
– Make the case for getting a teaching assistant (or more for each course section) to help her out with managing 150+ students (addressing their course inquiries, providing formative and summative assessments, etc).
– Distinguish what questions can be addressed to the TA and/or instructor to students enrolled in her course.
– Use one designated email for all course communications and let students know to send course-related messages just to this email address (rather than multiple email addresses).
– Clearly let students know when you’re available/not available (for example let students know when she’ll be away for a period of time via announcements, emails, and/or discussion postings so they understand why you may not be able to reply back to them right away).
– Create different types of help sections in the discussion forums so that students can obtain assistance and support from their peers to address their inquiries.
– Use filter/labelling email management strategies to help organize the content of her emails (i.e. if she’s using Gmail’s mail forwarding service then she can also filter out the messages being sent to her designated course email address and put it into a labelled folder to address all course-related inquiries).
– Offer scheduled online chats and/or videoconferencing sessions essentially setting up “virtual” office hours to address students’ questions.
– Build presence by offering YouTube video presentations (that may also address students’ questions and clearly communicate your expectations of them).
– As Anderson (2008) suggests on p.356, the virtual teacher has to set and adhere to appropriate timelines to help student have realistic expectations and relieves the teachers of the unrealistic expectation of providing instantaneous 24/7 feedback.
– Time management is key for Trinh- rather than checking online activities or email constantly.
– Develop and implement an explicit assessment framework for students so they understand what is expected of them throughout the course (i.e. assignments, participation, etc).
– Make assessments a reflective exercise by assigning students the task of using their discussion postings in their blogs to show evidence of their understanding. As Anderson (2008) states, this moves the responsibility from the teacher to the student and can save the teacher time.
– Use student moderators to help lead class discussions and act as peer support (leading to less emails from students for Trinh to manage).
– Provide an archive of the live streaming presentations so students in different time zones that may have missed these sessions can catch up.
– Clearly communicate course expectations, assignment deadlines, weekly readings, etc. from the onset via the course syllabus. Perhaps this information is not clear for students or it’s located in several different sections so she may want to consider amalgamating into one area and letting students know that it’s their responsibility to diarize this information (i.e. assignment deadlines, live presentations, etc).
Reference
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an online learning context. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning, (pp. 343-365). Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008_Anderson-DeliveryQualitySupport.pdf
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