For the emergent sessions, I joined the one on Blended & Distance Learning to hear about what the rest of the class thought or wondered about the topic. Some of the highlights & questions that interested me were and wanted to answer from my perspective as a DL teacher.
- Students not exhibiting same behavior online compared to in-class:
- In my experience there are several reasons for this behavior. First of all is that if the discussion was to be assessed, such as a debate or feedback, students would treat it as a “formal assignment” and restrict themselves from letting their personality show through. They’ve understood the difference between academic and informal writing, so are exercising it here given that it’s being moderated by the teacher. The second reason could be that they’re simply too shy or overly conscious of how they will be judged if they put themselves out there. In-class, they may have some safety in the belief that not everyone is paying attention to their conversation, whereas it’s the opposite in a forum discussion where everyone can view it repeatedly. Lastly, students have their own preferred methods of back-channel discussions that teachers are simply unaware of. It’s their “private space” where they feel comfortable discussing with each other, where they could be a bit goofy or mean-spirited with one another.
- Applying synchronous meetings in high school online courses:
- Great idea, except for the fact that we cannot “require” students attend meetings given the nature of the online course. There’s also the issue of when the meetings would take place. Students generally choose online courses because regular school hours do not work for them, or they are cross-enrolled to take multiple courses. Afternoon and evenings are also suspect as 1) teachers have their own lives, 2) students have their own lives, and 3) they may not have access / permission to attend synchronous meetings (ie. FOIPPA, or just personal shyness). In addition, not all students would progress through the course at the same pace. Some would work well ahead, some on pace, and some who will never touch the course until the last week. Unlike our own M.Ed sessions, these students would not have the same understanding required to have a meaningful discussion together.
- The idea that online courses should require students take a course on communication – a sort of “netiquette” course.
- This would be a boon to students and society overall as most students (and adults) seem to be unaware of how to separate private / public image, or acceptable / unacceptable comments. At our school, we do offer these type of “soft skills” lessons during our Flex blocks to Blended students, but we have not tried it with fully online students. The idea of making it “mandatory” and assigning a credit to it would perhaps cross some red tape in terms of school transcripts and curricular outcomes.