ETAP 687 Reflections

Okay, so now we are at the point in the course where we begin to hash out the details of the our online classes and put it all in moodle. Getting used to moodle and how it all works has certainly been the a challenging part of building the course, at the same time it has been fun to ‘play’ with the applicaitons in moodle and use the assignments, quizzes, and forums available for my course.

I have put a lot of thought into how to ‘arrange’ the course material and what is the best way to present the information and activities…making each module as similar as possible so students are not getting ‘lost’ or confused with the layout. Also, I’m continuing to rethink my traditional activities to fit the online class. For example, with my article review assignment I usually bring my students to the library and the research librarian does an excellent presentation on how to use the library’s online database system to search for articles. Now that I am putting this class completely online, I have to rethink that part of the assignment….I think I am going to use jing to show them how to access/use the database system.

Alex (my instructor) has challenged me to really think about my discussion questions as well. I don’t want to use ‘dead’ discussion questions because that will not spark a discussion, so I have rewritten some of my discussion questions to allow for more discourse among students. However, I am still having a difficult time coming up with good questions for discussion. I thought my original discussion questions in my course activities were really good and interesting, but my instructor thought they sounded more like mini-essays or written assignments….so, HELP! I need some suggestions on how to re-write or rethink these discussions (Share Your Thoughts activities in my course).

The feedback from Alex on my course activities draft also helped me think about the evaluation or assessment of the activities and assignments in my course. I have some reading requirements (from the text) and some video lectures that I want students to read and watch. I’m asking them to reference those materials in the discussions, but is that enough of an evaluation? Also, I have some reading response questions…assignments where they answer questions about the reading so I know they have read it; is this too simple? The quizzes also are meant to assess whether or not they have read the chapters. I’m not placing too much weight on the quizzes, assignments and final exam…the biggest portion of their grades comes in their final project submission…this is where I see how much they have learned because they are applying the information to a restaurant concept.

I just had a thought….maybe the best way to engage student discussion would be to have their project parts be the discussion post. Each student posts their part of the project, explains a little behind their thinking and then students respond to their classmates’ work offering praise or suggestions. Is this a better alternative to the essay-like questions? This way, I can see how they are interacting with the material and what thinking was behind their submission. One thing I do not want my discussions to be are ‘flat’.

Jess (3)

This module has been a great way for me to explore what is needed in terms of time commitment from an online instructor. I have learned that, sadly, I am not ready at this point in my life to be an online instructor…simply because I do not feel I have the time available to commit to an online course. I do not think it is fair to my students or my family to embark on an online learning adventure with them and then have to sacrifice time with either of them (because that is what will happen!) Hopefully I will be able to teach online sometime in the near future because I do want to, I just know I can’t do it justice right now.

One study I found compared online teaching to traditional teaching and the results were incredible! No wonder I feel like there needs to be more hours in a day!

During this module, we were asked to begin setting up the activities in our online classes. The most challenging part for me, again, has been the time. Finding the quality and quantity of time needed to spend on this part of the design when I am at home with three children has been extremely difficult! (more difficult than I imagined) I think staying home may be more work than actually working…summer vacation…yeah, right! ;)

However, I was able to hash out more of the details of the assignments and activities I had outlined for my class. I did a lot of re-designing the activities from what they had been in my f2f class to make them more realistic in the online environment. I changed the requirements of my final project…it seems like I made it easeir because I did cut down on some things, but I wanted to give students the opportunity to spend more time making it great and really diving into the project and developing their restaurant/foodservice operation concepts more fully.

Also, I took some of my f2f classroom activities that I usually use as group in-class activities and tweaked them to be discussions in my online class. I was having trouble thinking of discussion topics in addition to activities when I realized that some of the activities were already discussion and cooperatively based…which makes putting them online somewhat easier.

We also looked at the importance of developing teaching presence and how to achieve that in an online class. I think the activities that I have in place will do a good job creating teaching presence. I have established and outlined the schedule, due dates and expectations for each assignment as well as set a good social learning tone for the learning environment.

One thing I would like to explore further is the student contribution to teaching presence and how to achieve this.  I eliminated the idea for group final projects because I decided it was too limiting to my students’ creativity and individuality, so I have yet to think of a good group learning activity. One of the discussions I want to use is of the ‘jigsaw’ nature. The “what’s in a name” discussion will have students research the history of a menu item’s name and share their findings with the class. This becomes a little one-sided so I thought of having two or three students research the same menu item separately and compare their findings with the class….creating more discourse and room for agreement/refutement type discussion with the point of creating consensus among the findings being the final step. I would love to hear what you think of this particular activity and my thinking….or how you are helping students add to the teaching presence of your class.

Jess (4)