A Better Course for Trinh and her Students

If you look at how Trinh runs her course it is important to note a couple of things.  Yes, one of her issues is that she is having trouble managing the communication channels for her students to connect with her.  The second are the issues around the timing of communications and materials for both her and her students.

For the most part, the case study is presented as the problems Trinh is facing, but in order to solve Trinh’s problem, I think she has to take a step back and decide what values the entire learning community needs to live by. I think this may help to at least establish some boundaries for her students.   The case study seems to suggest that Trinh sees setting office hours as a possible solution.  This along with the fact that she is requiring students from various time zones to participate in synchronous activities creates a sense that Trinh might not be considering the needs of her students as much as she thinks she is.  The fact that there is an expectation for students to accommodate live synchronous events creates a sense that the course operates in this manner.  This raises the expectations not only for the students but for the instructor interaction as well.  If Trinh isn’t willing to adjust her schedule I’m not sure it’s fair that she’s asking her students to do the same by instituting office hours. This may mean that she needs to adjust how the course is offered by recording guest lectures with questions submitted in advance, or as a follow-up.  It also may mean presenting the material that would be covered in a guest lecture in a different way that is equally fair to all students.  This would create an atmosphere where the expectation is the course is offered asynchronously, including communication.  Granted, this does come with some drawbacks, but it allows Trinh some breathing room when it comes to expectations in responding to student inquiries.

Now with her other problem, she is losing control of the open channels of communication between her and the students.  It is good to make yourself accessible to students, but as we can see with Trinh’s case if you make yourself too available you can quickly become overwhelmed, and perhaps paralyzed to the point of ineffectiveness.  Trinh needs to take this back to managing students expectations, and creating a clear concept of how the questions in the course will be addressed.  She could attempt to do this through office hours in a chat function but even recorded there could be issues around the repetition of questions or Trinh waiting for hours for people to show up.  Another issue would be if she did not hold sessions at different times of the day or week she would only be making any sessions only available to some of her students.  Likely, the best solution for Trinh is to create an expectation similar to what exists in our current course.  Questions can be answered on a discussion board that can be subscribed to by all students.

There are several reasons why this makes sense.   The first is that it allows Trinh to keep her students questions within one medium of communication, cutting down on her communication overload. She could even have canned responses indicating this to her students that contact her through other methods.  This method will also allow students to see each other’s inquiries which will hopefully eliminate duplicate questions, and benefit those students who prefer not to ask but want to be kept in the loop.  This also provides a record of Trinh’s answers so that she is sending the same message to all students.

Overall, if Trinh takes a step back to examine the environment she is creating she will be able to create a dialogue for her course that will benefit her students, and herself.