week 6: trinh case study (aka “sanity, where art thou, sanity?”)
While it is admirable that Trinh prefers to foster a learner-centred class environment, the reality is that working with 150 students across various time zones in an online environment provides many logistical challenges, depending on the type of learner-centred teaching techniques employed. The fact that Trinh receives emails on four (!) different platforms tells me that she is not explicit enough in her instructions. Perhaps she is trying to offer choice to her students in a learner-centred environment; however, with a class as large as this, there needs to be set guidelines in place to maintain order and organization. This will more likely benefit the students rather than the offer of choice. The instructor could set up separate discussions in the Discussions tool where students could post questions. An explicit instruction could be posted where students are required to check through the forum first to determine if their question is already posed.
The professor, the students, as well as the universities involved are all stakeholders in this case. The “host” university that employs Trinh should not allow an online course to have 150 participants. I can’t imagine that the student feedback would be favorable at the end of the course, as there simply would not be enough time for the instructor to give individual attention to all 150 students. This would not only reflect on Trinh, but her employer as well. This could affect future enrolment in this particular course. Any professor with a learner-centred philosophy would struggle with this arrangement. In order for Trinh to remain true to her teaching philosophy, she would need to make significant sacrifices in the interests of saving time (and maintaining her sanity!). More importantly, it would affect the quality of her student-centred teaching, as there would likely be more of a push towards group work and less emphasis on the individual student. The students appreciate the live guest experts brought in by the professor in a video-conferencing format; however, not all sessions are at opportune times, depending on the time zone. The students do take the initiative to record the sessions to watch at their leisure, which suggests that they are self-motivated.
The use of self and peer assessments, and the use of a holistic grading system as opposed to rubric grading would be ideal in an environment with many students, as this would work better with time constraints. However; using rubrics is arguably more learner-centred in that it provides individual, explicit feedback to each student from the teacher.
Trinh could potentially hold virtual office hours via Blackboard Collaborate. However, due to the large number of students, this may not prove feasible. An alternative to this could be making students representatives “moderators” in their own virtual office hours, and the student representatives would gather questions from their group, email them to the teacher or post to a designated thread in the discussion forums, and the teacher would then check the questions for duplicates and respond publicly. If there are still discrepancies, hopefully there will be a smaller, more manageable number of students and the teacher can set up virtual office hours to satisfy the small group. By and large, students would need to self-govern on discussion forums due to the sheer number of participants. This actually keeps to the idea of learner-centred environments, as student-led discussions and summaries are two types of learner-centred teaching techniques.