Jun
20
What could Trinh do?
Posted by: Thomas Kritikos | June 20, 2009 | Comments Off on What could Trinh do?
Trinh is an associate professor in museum studies at a comprehensive university. She has delivered an innovative introductory online course on museumology; in fact, students enrolled at universities in New Zealand, South Africa, and Finland all take her course. The course is delivered via Vista, 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 Vista 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 office in an online course, is it? What could Trinh do?
Trinh presents her course using Vista, so she has available the tools to create a comprehensive site that students will be able to use across several time zones. I wonder if Trinh has set up an area on her Vista course site where students can observe all relevant course information. For starters, her students would benefit from knowing on weekly basis what the required readings were, the activities, and the due dates for these assignments. Providing students with a course map may prevent some of these emails that she gets quite frequently. Anderson (2003) states that it’s extremely important that online teachers foster trust and safety within the learning community. I may be off on this, however, if students feel that Trinh is having difficulty managing the course (students appear confused, ie: posting messages in several areas for her) then they may not be as motivated to fully participate in all the activities that she has scheduled for them.
With respect to Trinh’s lessons being synchronously delivered through live streaming, having them archived would support students who are unable to view them live due to differing time zones. Trinh could attach discussion forums like in 565a to different modules, and to her live lectures so students could asynchronously discuss and reflect on the content presented. Trinh could also develop her lectures using audio/video, archive them, and then have them time released in different modules for students. This would allow all students to view the content at their own time and pace. Trinh could also synchronously use Wimba to demonstrate/teach students, then archive the presentation for asynchronous viewing. Students living in different time zones would benefit by having wiki’s in place for collaborative learning sessions. Students could build their knowledge by accessing the work at their own pace, and a time of their choosing.
It may be wise for Trinh to utilize her teaching assistants (if she has them) to support her and the students enrolled in the course. She could divide her students equally among the different assistants and they could communicate with the T.A.’s on a wide array of topics. To help support student communication within the course, Trinh could specify in the course map what a teaching assistant should be contacted for, and what she should be contacted for. Perhaps with this distinction, students would be able to navigate the course more efficiently.
To further streamline the communication between Trinh and her students, she could post her virtual office hours on the course outline. She could utilize the ‘popup’ announcement feature through Vista to alert her students when there is a change to these hours. This feature could also be used for any emergent information that she wants students to know when they next login.
Having student moderators lead discussion groups can help increase student participation and motivation throughout the course (Rourke & Anderson, 2002). The side effect is that students receive a richer experience with respect to their learning. Also, students helping students would be advantageous to Trinh in that she may receive fewer inquiries for information due to increased student involvement. This in no way diminishes Trinh’s role within her course, it just adds another support and resource for her students.
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_Anderson-DeliveryQualitySupport.pdf
Rourke, L., & Anderson, T. (2002). Using peer teams to lead online discussions. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, Retrieved August 27, 2007, from http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2002/1/