What should Trinh do? A Case Study…
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?
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Trinh could….
-set up study groups- smaller versions of her larger ‘community of learners’. The ‘See 3 B4 Me’ approach could easily be applied here. If learners are set up into groups of 4-5 then they would only need to communicate with her if nobody in the group can figure it out. She could even appoint one person in each group as the ‘Trinh communicator’ although this may be a little extreme!
-create a Q/A forum where she posted these real ‘canundrums’ others could benefit from her expert responses without having to directly contact her
-have all of her emails redirected to the same place so she only has to communicate from one eLocation
-hire a personal assistant to check her emails
-use student experts to tutor others
-make an email limit (and/or categorize the emails)