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Transcripts (teaching staff)

What I like about online teaching (Annette Schneider rsm)

"I’ve been teaching online now for a number of years, and I admit that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoy my face to face teaching.  And I’ve come to realise that the things that I value about face to face classes, such as the interaction with participants, and the personal and the professional networks which are established can also happen in the fully online environment.   I enjoy the challenge of making connections with the participants using discussions and mail and announcements particularly.  It does take time initially, as the numbers in classes are often large, for example, over 50 students.  But I think that if you put in the effort in the first few weeks, then the benefits can be seen as the semester progresses.  The participants become real people and I become a real person for them.

I also enjoy the challenge of designing a fully online unit as I have to think ahead more than in a face to face unit, where things can emerge and you can respond to them accordingly, almost on the spot. Maintaining the balance between long term planning and inbuilt flexibility is hard at first, but it does come more naturally to me now.

I enjoy seeing the links that emerge between participants as they get to know one another and share their experiences.  I work with post graduate students, many of whom are returning to study after a few years, so it’s really rewarding to see their confidence grow, especially as they share their experiences, learn to use the technology and do assignments again.  Perhaps the thing that I value most, though, is the learning which happens for me.  I see myself as a colleague and I learn a great deal.  In my case, that’s about educational leadership because that’s the course in which I’m teaching.  It’s not as if I have all the answers at all.  I see myself as a facilitator of learning, one of many facilitators in fact, within the unit.  And I think we end up developing a real community of enquiry.

Now and again, I know that I’m privileged to be part of someone’s behind-the-scenes story.  For example, in times of difficulty when granting an extension or having a listening online ear can really make the difference between someone withdrawing from the unit or continuing in spite of the difficulties that they’re facing.  I think the use of e-learning in web enhanced classes is also valuable as it enables the contact to be maintained in between the face to face sessions or the intensive workshops that might be part of the course."

 

How to get help (Joe Perry)

"Hi, my name’s Joe Perry, I’m one of the university’s online advisors.  My background is in nursing, I’m a lecturer in the school of nursing and midwifery here at St Pats in Melbourne.  The online advisors are part of the supports that the university has for people who are teaching online.  We run face-to-face workshops.  At those workshops we explore issues such as pedagogy but also the technicalities associated with using the blackboard system.On blackboard is the staff elearning tutorial.  The elearning tutorial helps staff to come to terms with the basics of the blackboard environment, also has a little bit about the pedagogy associated with teaching online and is a great resource for helping staff to become familiar with the different tools that are part of blackboard and how to best use those in their teaching.  It’s a really handy resource to use after the face-to-face workshops to help to reinforce some of the ideas and some of the concepts that you’ve picked up during those workshops.

The role of the online advisors includes things such as the pedagogy of teaching online.  What the online advisors are here for is to help you to work out what’s the best way to use the online environment for the teaching that you’re associated with.  That may include things such as what tools to use, what are the best tools in a given situation, and what are the options that you may want to explore for your particular teaching needs.  If there is an aspect of a tool that we’re not able to help you with, we will put you in touch with the technical support people who will be very able to help you with all of the little nuances of that particular tool and you’ll be sailing through the use of that in no time.

One of the other supports that the online advisors offer is a thing called the bite-size session.  The bite-size session is meant to be an informal gathering where people can bring their online questions so that they can be addressed in a non-threatening environment and amongst friends and colleagues so that we can actually explore some of the issues you may be experiencing as a group.  The online advisors are there to help you come to terms with the issue you may be having but it may be possible that there are other people who have experienced the same problem that you are and either have the same question or have already worked out a way around that and that can be a really handy way of exploring some of the ways that the online environment can be used to its best."

 

Concerns about online teaching (Beatrice Johnson)

"Higher education is really different from what it was twenty-something years ago when I started lecturing and it’s really rare now to see a student who has time to actually study because most of them are working, some of them even full time.  So they just don’t have the time that they need.  And in that context, I’m always trying to get some sort of mechanism to get the students really engaged with their learning, but it’s really hard when they don’t have the time.  When I was a student more than 20 years ago, I had time to philosophise if you like, and now they just don’t have that.  I found using assessable online discussions is a really good technique for getting the students engaged. 

One of the nice things is that they can do it at any time they want, even if it’s 3.00am when I’m well and truly asleep. Sometimes it really works well for the weaker students who in class often wouldn’t get engaged, but in the case of online learning, they have time to think about it, and will actually get active with the learning material.  International students, especially when their English is very weak — online you have time to formulate a decent answer.  We’re always talking about ‘deep learning’ versus ‘surface learning’, and we’re trying to get students to engage with their learning in a much deeper form, and it’s nice to know that blackboard can actually allow us to do that."