Musing on Museology

Case Study

Trinh is an associate professor in museum studies at a comprehensive university. She has delivered an innovative introductory online course on museology; in fact, students enrolled at universities in New Zealand, South Africa, and Finland all take her course. The course is delivered via Blackboard, features a range of multimedia educational artifacts, and guest lectures delivered via live streaming. Although participating in some of these activities is challenging for students in other time zones, they understand these are required activities and full participation is a condition of enrollment.

Trinh’s committed to delivering learner-centred courses, whether taught F2F, online or blended. But this course – and its over 150 student enrollments – is challenging for her to manage. Email in particular can be onerous: on some mornings she finds dozens of messages. Some of these come to her university email address; others to her Blackboard email. She even gets student questions as comments to her blog!

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.

Response

Trinh’s main issue with course management appear to highlight the need for her to make adjustments in the area of teaching presence as outlined in the Community of Inquiry Model (CIM) presented in Teaching in an Online Learning Context (Anderson, 2008). Specifically, she could examine her use of synchronous and asynchronous tools with intent to make minor adjustments to increase effectiveness.

Trinh has, intentionally or not, provided students with multiple means to communicate with her such as responding to her blog posts, emailing her via a work account or through the course email system. I would also assume, Trinh uses forums and this would be another avenue for students to communicate with her as well. Although this does present her as a connected and approachable instructor, Trinh is finding it difficult not only to keep up with the amount of communication but where it is coming form as well.

Although Trinh’s issues with management might extend to areas like evaluation and assessment, my suggestions in this posts are specific to possible changes she could make to her communication policy.  Traditional office hours are not really appropriate given that Trinh is delivering an online course, using BlackBoard CMS, to a multinational and multi-timezone group of learners. However, the concept could be modified along with the addition of some other management strategies to provide her with a less overwhelming experience but still hold true to her learner-centered values.

Trinh is aware that asynchronous communication between instructor and learner is an important factor for involvement and motivation and one of the tenants of the Seven Principles (Chickering, Ehrmann, 1996) but it“should not be a life-consuming one!” (Anderson, 2008). With the exception of emergencies, she should inform students they are only to contact her regarding course questions using the BlackBoard messaging system and then only after reviewing course forums. Additional threads could be added to the forum on topics such as frequently asked questions and technical issues/solutions. By doing this, she could leverage the knowledge base of students in answering some of their peers questions and by adding content once to address multiple emails asking the same question. This supports the learner’s’ cognitive process development and adds to both parties a social presence within the community of inquiry.

Students should be made aware that all attempts will be made to answer questions in a timely manner and is dependent on instructional realities so response time may vary. Trinh could let students know when she believes there might be periods where response times might be longer than normal as to foster understanding. Also, she could develop or change personal habits such as constantly checking emails and adopt daily routines and set periods to deal just with that type of communication.

In addition to leveraging procedures with asynchronous communication tools, she could look to synchronous tools like video conferencing. Although best used sparingly with learning demographics such as she is dealing with, she could offer clarification and address multiple questions during these conferences. These conferences could be recorded for those who can not attend and to develop a bank of videos which then can be edited and used in areas of the course. Students could be promoted to save questions until these sessions, if not deemed urgent, instead of emailing. It is possible, that Trinh is not being clear enough within the course documentation on expectations, policy, procedures and this is the base for learners’ questions. If so, by taking the time to reflect and edit content she may save herself time in the long run especially with future offerings of the course. Providing students with the opportunity to give evaluations of the instructor and or course might also be a good source of information on where clarity needs to be provided. Without making changes, Trinh’s future experiences will most likely remain as frustrating as they are now.

References

Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an Online Learning Context. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University. Accessed online 3 March 2009 http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Chickering, A.W. & Ehrmann, S.C. (1996). Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3-6. http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples.htm

Museologist. (n.d). The Free Dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/museologist

Museology. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museology