M3 – L7 – My Post – What should Trinh do? June 22/2010
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 option in an online course, is it? Post your ideas in the what could Trinh do discussion forum.
Poor Trinh! She’s overwhelmed and I’m sure we can all relate to that from time to time. I think, as many have mentioned, she has a few options to help decrease her stress.
• I would suggest that she set specific office hours specific to her time zone – students in other time zones would just have to make it work! In setting these office hours, she needs to be strict with herself that she only work within these office hours or she will ‘over work’ as we all tend to do.
• She should also set aside a specific location where she will respond to posts/emails there and only there so there’s less anxiety checking multiple places.
• She could also set up a few different discussion forums much like what we have here in 565 that are organized and specific. For example she could use specific forums for: general course Q & A, tool kit questions, assignment questions, etc. These discussion forums would allow the students in the class answer each others’ questions as well to help lighten her response load. She would have to monitor the conversations to ensure correct information was being relayed.
• She could look at the budget and see if there’s allowances to hire an assistant to help respond to general course questions.
• She could also have her synchronous stuff transcribed and have those transcripts available to those who can’t make the synchronous times due to time zone differences – or put these on video available for asynchronous viewing. This could help reduce the amount of questions she may receive.
Primarily though, she needs to outline these communication expectations at the beginning of her course and have it clearly outlined in her syllabus and online including the expected response time for questions/posts to prevent this overwhelming feeling of disorganization. It all starts with being organized in the beginning!