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. \u00a0My 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.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> ideas for redesigning the online classroom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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, … Continue reading