I am glad to have had the opportunity to take the bull by the horns and participate in such a fast-paced online course. I have met many new concepts and have had a very short time with them; so as is the case with any good pursuit, I have many more questions than I started out with. I hope to take another online course in the fall so I can be a student once again. I know that learning can take place online, but that both teachers and students will need to learn different tools to be successful in the medium. Teachers will need to rethink how to deliver their curriculum and stay fresh and inspired. Students will need to rethink their idea that an instructor will simply pour knowledge into them. It’s been a real treat to be in this class with other teachers, because a lot of learning took place in the blink of an eye!
This week went by really fast and focused on online group work. We were put into groups of three to four and our task was to create a group project for an online class in a matter of days. What an amazing feat this was, and for me how frustrating, given the lack of time to feel any sort of process or ownership of the project. Within that microcosm we experienced all the fun of group process! Looking back over the week’s discussion board, I saw the director, the encourager, the peace-maker, the negotiator, the facilitator, and the listener and often roles would morph. It was as though we were following an agenda at a meeting, we reiterated goals, did brainstorming, made a fast write, and finally produced an action list. At times I thought we were going with democratic process (majority rule) but in the end it felt more like consensus. Consensus is where everyone’s opinion is valued and heard, but ultimately a decision is reached that fits the need of the group. Consensus decision-making does not mean a unanimous resolution is reached. In fact, any member of the group may agree to a decision that they disagree with, but they give permission for it to pass rather than block it. Rob Sandelin of the Northwest Intentional Communities Association puts it this way: “As people are encouraged to speak their feelings with good intention, the group will likely find much less energy going to false agreements and uncompleted tasks. If you want to create a sense of togetherness, then making space for feelings to be expressed is a key.”
I better understand the quote by N. Maier in the Psychological Review way back in 1967: "Groups can be ineffective decision makers because of group process losses that can outweigh group process gains." I’m not sure we came up with a project that we would have had we: 1) had more time and 2) been in face-to-face conversation, but I think overall the process was a social one even more than a pure academic one and I am glad for the experience.
What I learned as a teacher is what I need to pay attention to:
Patterns of Communication/Coordination – do the students attend sessions regularly and is democratic participation encouraged?
Patterns of Influence - are the students striving towards consensus building and are they open-minded and kind?
Patterns of Dominance – is there shared power - who is leading and who is deferring?
Balance – are the task focus (getting job done) and social focus (taking heed of feelings) balanced?
Effectiveness – what is the level of group success?
Our class’ conversations and readings this week about Facilitating Discussion Board Issues seemed to be the heart and soul of this whole course and could’ve been called Facilitating Learning Online. I thought we were learning online pedagogy, but that is an incorrect term. While even the American Heritage College Dictionary said pedagogy is the art or vocation of teaching, the word’s root meaning is child-centered education. Pedagogy is teacher-led education, whereas the term Andragogy better reflects the online learner’s responsibility, which is self-focused, self-directed learning.
The term Andragogy was popularized by Malcolm Knowles in 1968 to describe the art of education of adults. His beliefs about adult learners were:
1) As a human matures her self-concept moves from being dependent on another to
being self-directed.
2) As a human matures she accumulates a great well of personal experience that
becomes a resource for her learning.
3) As a human matures her duties and life-problems become motivation to learn.
4) As a human matures she worries less about subject matter and desires an immediate
way to apply her knowledge to life and problem-solving.
5) As a human matures her motivation to learn comes from internal desire and
curiosity.
And thus ‘The Art of the Question’ has broader implications, because the student is not answering to prove she knows something, but rather it is used as active inquiry – a way to keep the students inquisitive. I wonder if research has been done about success rates in online classes and age. Certainly it seems to me that based on these implied assumptions about successful online/adult learners it would be difficult for younger students to perform well simply because they lack the ability for self-direction and still need to take cues from an instructor. What might bridge this gap between answer-focused learning and critical thinking that is so important for online student success? Our instructor gave an important answer to this question, “higher level questioning and answering can be taught, and lead to critical thinking.”
In researching andragogy I found that the term may have been used as early as 1926 by Eduard Lindeman a philosopher of adult education and his colleague Martha Anderson. Lindeman said that “adult education is a cooperative venture in non-authoritarian, informal learning – the chief purpose of which is to discover the meaning of experience.”
I’m using a photo of my road to illustrate my work in the Intro to Online Teaching course this week as it seemed apropos. Last week everything was new and exciting and I seemed to breeze through, but this week the going was much harder. I feel like I need to give it a little gas and keep going at a steady pace or I'll never get through. Taking a professional development course like this reminds me how life intervenes and helps me to have empathy for my students.
For some people the term Online Community is an oxymoron. How can we have community when the actual people are not face-to-face and we never hear anyone’s voice? I like the quote by Howard Rheingold who wrote The Virtual Community way back in 1993, “virtual communities are cultural aggregations that emerge when enough people bump into each other often enough in cyberspace.” This same thing happens when people intentionally commit to form a group that communicates online, whether for fun, for political or cultural reasons, or as in our case here, for educational purposes.
Online communication can take various forms. There is Instant Messaging where you can ‘talk’ in real time to another person and Chat Rooms where you can communicate in real time with a group of people. I have found that Instant Messaging is like a phone call and Chat Rooms are like conference calls, and with both you are responsible for typing your thoughts. On discussion boards, a conversation takes place between people who respond to one another's ‘posts.' This seems to be similar to the idea behind a blog (weblog). On a blog you put out a thought or idea and give others the opportunity to reply to it. Discussion Boards and Blogs do not take place in real time. You may have something to say, but you have to wait to see who responds and that might take a bit of time. This is difficult as the idea of conversation takes on a whole new meaning. If you are in a group discussion board such as a virtual classroom, keeping pace with what is going on sometimes feels like you live in a world of sound bytes. It takes a retraining of your brain to hold information and add to several threads each day.
Online communication poses challenges especially because we can not pick up the visual cues that are normal in a face-to-face conversation. We may intend something we write to have intonation, but no tone comes through when someone else reads it. And that means that we must pay attention to what we write and reread it before hitting the 'submit' button. These challenges do not preclude us from forming communities online though. In a virtual classroom for example, the instructor simply needs to be specific about how to communicate online and when assignments are due. Having those guidelines in place will make the student comfortable about expectations. Group building activities at the start of an online class can help foster a sense of shared purpose and have each member understand his or her responsibilty to the community.
I’ve chosen this photo of Trinity Church in Boston to illustrate my first week in Introduction to Online Teaching. (It could just as easily be called Introduction to Online Learning.) It represents the juxtaposition of the old and the new. When I first saw this church from afar, dwarfed by the skyscrapers, I was not impressed by man’s progress. But the closer I got the more beauty I was able to see. That has been my relationship to the technological world, cold and impersonal as I thought it was, the closer I get and the more I understand it, the more inspiring it becomes. Because computers aren’t going away, I can pretend they don’t exist or I can allow a whole new area of learning to occur for myself and embrace the creativity they can offer me and my students. (I’m saying this even though this is the second time I’ve written this post…the first one is somewhere in the ethers, but not on my blog!)
I am very familiar with what it takes to be a successful online student, as the requirements are about the same as the low-residency program I enrolled in to finish my B.A. at Vermont College. Without face-to-face professor contact we had to be self-motivated, disciplined, open-minded, and willing to commit a lot of what was considered our ‘free time’ for the duration. We did not have the auditory or visual clues from a professor in a classroom setting. The learning was accomplished through research, reading and reflection, and we became critical thinkers. The only other thing an e-learner needs is a computer with a modem and the knowledge to use it.
I’ve taken several other online classes. I appreciate that Lisa, our instructor, has been extremely specific about when postings are due, what makes a substantial post, and what quantity of posts she’s looking for. Her expectations have been clear from the start of the course and she’s been thorough about telling us where everything belongs. This has made me feel comfortable in the course on the one hand. On the other hand, Lisa has taken me out of my comfort zone with this whole blog thing! I'm beginning to feel more comfortable about it, however, honestly, several hours ago there were several aaaarrrghs coming from my mouth. Thanks for helping me remember what it’s like to be a student.
Two misconceptions I had about online learning were that:
1) That geographically distant learners made up the majority of online students, when in fact it is traditional undergrads that are taking these courses, and
2) The very things that make online learning attractive: being able to fit it into a busy work schedule, and being able to be available for your family are the very things that often make students drop out of the class.
I do believe that learning can take place in many different settings and that we can learn to integrate what we love about the classroom into the cyberspace arena.
