The online human touch

So much of facilitating online learning revolves around making sure humanness permeates the classroom. This is true in preparing students for online learning as well as classroom management. Ko & Rossen emphasize that at the beginning of an online class teachers must “establish presence and rapport . . . that are evident to students as soon as they walk through the classroom door” (p. 192). In addition to such things as obvious organization and preparation, Ko & Rossen emphasize a “welcoming attitude.”

The theme reappears in classroom management. Such patterns as posting regular, encouraging announcements (p. 198) or “dropping in” frequently on discussions (p. 209) convey the sense of a teacher who is present.

Managing problem behaviors likewise requires a human touch. It is neither necessary nor advisable to be brusque. Communications in difficult situations require the humanness that values others – such as helping offenders save face (Ko & Rossen, pp. 231, 236). The examples of diplomatic communications followed by their intended subtexts (pp. 232-233) were more than simply amusing illustrations of teachers meaning more than they say. Such communications are essential in conveying a respectful, caring presence.

Garrison and Cleveland-Innes (2005) wrote an excellent article on presence in the online classroom, which points out that teaching presence is even more important to students than peer presence. An abstract of the article is can be found in AJDE online at www.ajde.com/Abstracts/abs19_3a.htm.

Share and share alike?

Here are a couple of thoughts on the issues of copyright and intellectual property. I’ve always been careful to avoid plagiarism and pirating, and somewhere along the line I became respectful of visual creations – maybe after I created some of my own. But reading Ko & Rossen nevertheless gave me considerable food for thought.

For instance, by the time I read about “fair use,” I had already uploaded an assigned article to the lesson I recently created. I had reasoned it would be all right, since the site was passworded, my student had online library access to the article anyhow, and I was simply making access to it more convenient. After reading Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Media, though, I was less sure. In the future I will instead give directions for students to access such articles themselves.

One big hurdle to creating visually attractive online courses is finding high quality images for online use. Government sources are often recommended, and other free images are also available. My favorite source is morgueFile.com (check its front page for the etymology of the term).

Protecting one’s own original works is of course another problem. Ko & Rossen are quite right to point out that such things as using streaming media or password protecting Acrobat documents is “like building a fence around your fields. It will keep most, although not all, intruders from pillaging your crops" (p. 176). There are applications available specifically for the purpose of unlocking Acrobat files. Perhaps the newest iteration of Acrobat (version 8, due to be released next month) will foil such attempts for at least a little while.

Website Authoring Alternatives

One way a teacher can communicate with students online is through a Web site. Ko & Rossen (2004, ch. 7) recommend several ways for the inexpert to create a site, but I particularly appreciated their repeated references to Netscape Composer, a tool that is also available on a related browser I prefer called SeaMonkey. As a webmaster with nearly 10 years experience, I recommend this tool as superior to many commercial software applications. It generally creates simpler HTML code, which means quicker load times, and its code tends to have fewer glitches. Although saving word processing pages as HTML is easy, it produces extremely complicated (and often buggy) code.

Ko & Rosson offer a number of good ideas for adding multimedia to files. A couple more alternatives to Photoshop are the stripped down versions of Photoshop or similar software often bundled with digital cameras. A sophisticated — and free — alternative is the open source program GIMP, which has many of the same capabilities as Photoshop, including layers.

And here’s one more idea — an alternative to PowerPoint presentations. Apple’s comparable product Keynote can export presentations as QuickTime movies with options as to size, whether they’re self-playing or interactive, and whether or not they include a sound file. I have successfully converted a PowerPoint presentation into Keynote, then exported it as a movie. The advantage of doing this is that movies can be streamed instead of downloaded, which means students don’t have to wait as long to start watching them.

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GIMP sites

• GIMP for Windows
• Gimp for Mac OS X (requires installation of X11 from the OS disk)
• MacGIMP, which can be purchased as a download for $29.95.

Diversity and Diet

This week I was looking at faculty development ideas with some colleagues. One subject that came up was whether to include learning styles in a basic course about teaching online. I was reminded of this while reading Ko & Rossen (p. 102). Learning style theory includes a number of approaches and a plethora of matrices. It hardly seems like an ideal subject to try to cover in a basic methods course. I prefer Ko & Rossen’s strategy: use variety, and that will likely address most learning styles. I’m reminded of my mother’s advice about meal planning. Even though she taught college level nutrition, she said that serving a variety of food types and colors will satisfy most nutritional needs.

So how does one introduce variety? Ko & Rossen itemize a number of activities. Here’s how I implemented a couple in a lesson I created about online discussion.

Web as Resource: One part of the lesson linked to several online discussion boards to illustrate various structures and techniques. I chose only sites I was familiar with that had something applicable to online discussions.

Summaries: Another task required reading a scholarly article and describing points in it that could be used in online teaching or that related to a past experience. Connecting points of the article to existing knowledge draws on cognitive and constructivist learning theory to help students make meaning of new material.

In addition, I augmented my description of grading criteria for discussion posts with a simple rubric (Ko & Rossen, pp. 129-130). Though my first stab at creating a rubric was rough at best, it still did a better job of defining expectations. It also forced me to clarify for myself what should be in the grading criteria.

Deadlines and Duplication

A couple of weeks ago I read two chapters worth of very good advice about putting together a syllabus and creating an online classroom (Ko & Rossen, 2004). Last week I finished a preliminary version of my first online lesson. Odd how quickly new learning fades when it isn’t used (an important reminder in any teaching).

Here is one thing that had completely slipped my mind. Without the rhythm of classroom meetings, time-related requirements need to be clearly spelled out using dated deadlines. As a task list dependent person, I can envision a neat, downloadable checklist for online students to print and use to make sure they are staying up to date. The checklist would be in addition to the dated syllabus.

That’s another important thing to do in online teaching. Be redundant. Instructions about how to contact the instructor, deadline dates, grading criteria are all elements that can be repeated in at least a couple of spots within an online course. Even though students with questions can contact their teacher electronically, for some that will be more intimidating than raising a hand in an on-ground class.

Additional Reading

The following article in the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN) reports the first phase of an ongoing, comprehensive study that relates to the subject of best practices in an online classroom.

Best Online Instructional Practices: Report of Phase I of an Ongoing Study