According to Elizabeth St. Germain in Faculty Focus, one of the \u201cFive Common Pitfalls of Online Course Design\u201d \u00a0is insistence on being the \u201csage on the stage.\u201d St. Germain writes:<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the old model of education, the instructor stood on the podium and served as the students\u2019 revered and primary access point to the desired knowledge. Today, your students may be Googling your lecture topic while you speak and finding three sources that update or improve upon your presentation. The Web provides instantaneous access to an enormous volume of opinions, commentary, and knowledge related to your topic. As a result, your role is now more of a content curator\u2014the one who prunes and trains the branches that extend from your expertise out into the world. The Web enables interdisciplinary links, associations, relationships, and openness. Your course should be a place where students come to participate in the connections that can be made between your subject and the outside world. Build these bridges into your online course materials, and become a facilitator of these important connections.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I found this comment to be particularly interesting in relation to the hybrid online\/on-site effort in which I\u2019m involved. Our hybrid course is a team process rather than the endeavor of an individual instructor. My role on the team is primarily to find and develop usable content for the course, the subject of which is agricultural biotechnology. So, in that sense, my role is entirely behind the scenes and not as the \u201cface of the course,\u201d so to speak. However, in our team meetings, my colleagues who will be the primary instructors have expressed concern that students somehow get to know who they are, and see their faces from time to time. This makes me aware of the possibility of a kind of identity crisis for instructors of online classes, especially if the class has previously been taught on-site only. Not only is online delivery asynchronous, it is more branched, as St. Germain put it. The delivery itself is from multiple sources, not from the instructor alone. At the same time, the instructor has the power to act as a filter, directing students to particular sources and discouraging others. In the case of a hybrid course, where some students are on-site and others are online, students enrolled in the online version may have an opportunity to see videos of instructors lecturing. In addition, instructors have the ability to give video feedback to individual students. It will be interesting to follow the development of hybrid courses over the next two terms and to observe how various instructors integrate their online and on-site personalities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to Elizabeth St. Germain in Faculty Focus, one of the \u201cFive Common Pitfalls of Online Course Design\u201d \u00a0is insistence on being the \u201csage on the stage.\u201d St. Germain writes: \u201cIn the old model of education, the instructor stood on … Continue reading