Ed in ETEC

Some Easy Parameters for Trinh

From reading the description of Trinh’s challenges, and having felt that disconnectedness in taking an online course, I think there are a couple of relative simple solutions for Trinh:

E-mail: Because Trinh is delivering her museumology course via Vista, and Vista offers a “mail” feature for instructors, all Trinh needs to do is to make a public announcements to students that course-related comments and questions would only be answered if they are made through the mail feature used in Vista. This announcement should have been made at the beginning of the course, or explained in the course outline, etc., but from my experience with online learning, students do understand the need for adjustments throughout the course and would compile to the change.

In light of the fact that Vista offers a good discussion forum feature and live chat rooms/forums, Trinh should also take a proactive approach in encouraging her students to engage in collaborative discussions on the discussion boards, and participate in live chat rooms and forums to exchange ideas with other fellow students. This, combined with the above-mentioned method, should help re-direct some of the traffic that Trinh need not handle directly.

Office Hours: While live chat rooms and live forums can both be used as a virtual office hour period for Trinh, the biggest challenge she faces is that many students are taking the course from different time zones, making it almost impossible to engage everybody at the same time. However, I think 100% engagement in every opportunity is not even necessary. Even for students who are living and working in the same place, it is often difficult for the instructor to expect all of them to be present at the same time. The best I think Trinh can do is to offer different times to be present in live chat rooms/live forums (e.g. Tuesday mornings, Thursday evenings) to accommodate students with different schedules. Another thing she can do is to produce a text transcript of the live forum sessions for students to download. This is a feature that I am seeing in ETEC 531. The transcript would allow students who are not able to attend the synchronous communication channels to at least “stay tuned” to what is happening. As for general enquires that sometimes take place during a regular f2f office hour, I believe most of these questions can be answered through e-mails.