This past week I spent time responding to everyone's initial introductory videos and performing housekeeping tasks. While this was time consuming, my goal is to model best practice so I wanted to be sure I answered every participant. An instructor visited me in my office this morning and asked how he could possibly do this with 40+ students. A valid concern -- I told him I would divide those 40 students up into smaller groups of ten each, give them their own discussion boards, allow them to post their introductions, then ask their 9 group members to respond. Another option would be to have everyone post their introduction and require students to respond to 3 other posts with the caveat that if someone didn't have any responses, they should be replied to first. As the instructor I would watch each of the videos, but only comment by making four video responses (one for each group in the first option) or one video response directed at the entire course. Either of these two options would contribute to a sense of community, instructor-student and student-student.
As I'm going through and marking their work as "complete" or "incomplete" I'm struck by how much faculty students are like our student students! I have those who are quick to get their work done, some who visit my in-person office every day, some who still haven't logged in, and others who have done some of the assignments, but not all. One that particularly was eye opening: I asked for ways in which instructors have tried to build a sense of community in their online courses. A handful of them who had never taught online stated that, and left it at that -- no attempt to imagine what they could do or no attempt to find an article or a blog post and offer that.
I created a Google Form and asked the group to read through the form which was essentially the contract of what they would do for the course and what the University would offer as way of a stipend, then click the "I agree" button. Well, when I went to view the responses I saw this image to the left.As you can see I forgot to include a field for the name of the person completing the form. Lesson learned. I had to ask everyone to do this again. This was something I didn't require of the pilot group, so unfortunately this wasn't an issue that could have been realized before this group began.
Something that surprised me and delighted me -- a faculty member asked if we could have a synchronous meeting so they could see what it was like and so I could give some pointers. I was floored someone had requested something extra! I'm going to create a Doodle poll and find a date and time that works for most people and open it up to everyone in the certification and not just the third of the group to which this person belonged.
Overall, I've had a great learning experience with this practicum. I continue to reflect and make notes as I hope to get an article and some conference presentations out of my experience researching, designing, and carrying out this online training.
