Hybrid Faculty Learning Community

I was spoiled as a young instructor.  I taught a health administration (MSPH) course online to students who had considerable experience in their fields, were often already leaders or tapped to become leaders, and came from an wide range of professional backgrounds (pharmacy, nursing, medicine, business, insurance…).  They learned a ton from one another, often spontaneously at first–I did not have to set up the course specifically to encourage interaction, they just did it because of the type of people they were.  But it helped cement the notion for me that facilitating peer learning can be one of the most important ways to achieve course goals.  (It has the added benefit in a professional program of cementing professional bonds and the culture of the profession.) In that setting, the peer learning arose spontaneously based on shared experiences, and was facilitated by course structure and activities.  I am going to use a similar approach in H100, but clearly the ‘shared experiences’ that will promote peer learning among students will be different.

Most of us were taught to be sages on stages, and the role models who were pointed out to us as paragons of teaching epitomized that model (though the best were much more than that).  I think the ‘sage on stage’ vs ‘curator’ dichotomy is false; it makes for a smug and provocative article, but the best teachers I know have always combined the two functions, imparting knowledge in a personal venue in which the enthusiasm of the instructor was clear, and also providing students with the tools to evaluate data, results, claims, etc, on their own.  Good courses (at least in my field) have always had a strong curatorial component, it is just that the curatorial component is now broader, deeper, and multi-media–harder to manage, certainly, but in principle not that much different.

After reading St. Germain’s pitfalls #3 and #5, I’m left with the same concern. It seems that with each clever teaching innovation comes more work. Being a sage on the stage is comfortable and efficient. I know what I know, I trust the sources of my information, and if I share this information, I know the students are learning good stuff. I don’t know everything there is to know about the subjects I teach, and I definitely don’t have time to research and evaluate all of the web resources that are available on the subjects I teach. I know many teachers just say, “Don’t trust Wikipedia.” and leave it at that. It’s not that simple (nor is Wikipedia a completely unreliable source of information). I give students guidelines for evaluating the quality of websites (though I would love to read through other instructor’s pointers on this…); nevertheless, I always have students citing blogs (Ha!), personal websites, and other non-peer reviewed sources of information.  My approach to this problem is a combination of a) letting students know if they are using incorrect information (if I know they are, which I can’t always know) and b) red-flagging the obviously unreliable sources, regardless of whether the information they provided was correct or not. Many websites and lots of “facts” fall through the cracks of this approach, but, as I said, I don’t have time to do much more.

Student-to-student learning is another time sink that I have not yet figured out how to manage. I used to have students critique each other’s work, but I quickly realized that I was doubling or even tripling my workload in the process. Instead of grading one document, now I was grading the original document and two or three critiques. I addition, I had to come back to the student author and let him or her know which critiques (even which points within each critique) were valuable and which were not. This is not to say that I haven’t seen excellent student-to-student and, for that matter, student-to-teacher information sharing. However, this knowledge sharing has been almost exclusively in fairly open and unstructured discussions and focused on life experiences, both work experiences and regional living experiences.  The online student body is incredibly diverse and rich with experience and knowledge, and I definitely try to tap into this resource in my online courses. The on-campus student body, for the most part, lacks this experience and depth.

I hate to be so bah-humbug about it all. I do want these ideas to work. Perhaps I just haven’t found the right approach. Hopefully, within our little group we can generate some effective and efficient ideas for redesigning the online classroom.