It is becoming clear there are certain aspects of my face-to-face teaching practices that will translate well in the Open Learning platform. Namely, having students think about a topic from a different perspective. As a scholar of Renaissance/Restoration literature, I have noticed that students often come into these classes with the mindset that the texts are old and no longer relevant to their lives. Often, they are taking the class to fulfill a graduation requirement, or they think they “should” take a class such as Shakespeare’s Tragedies or Milton’s Paradise Lost because these works are part of a very old literary canon. They ARE! However, these texts are still relevant to the world we live in today in many respects.
I think the concept of the “triggering event” is very useful, and it probably works much better in an OL environment since students are not put on the spot in the span of a 75 minute class. There is time to process information and to think critically and thoroughly about it rather than being forced to respond basically on the spot. I had never considered that before. I will probably also incorporate some similar practice in my lectures – leave students with a question to mull over until the next class. We all think we know, and then we find out that there are many different ways of knowing. This integration technique will be useful for teaching literature courses that focus on earlier time-periods and will make the literature more relevant than students initially believe.
My only concern is Collaborative Constructivism. Since I have not started teaching my course (and am in the middle of designing another one for Open Learning), I am unsure how this will work when students will all be at different points in their coursework. I guess that will be worked out.
I was pleased to read about “The Educational Experience” as this is very helpful for course design as well as a basic framework for teaching and learning. It is important to remember that students are people. I think we forget this simple fact sometimes – especially when grading a stack of essays. It is easy to lose sight of this. I imagine that facilitating a course where there is no (or limited) face-to-face communication between faculty members and students means that the FM must remain diligent in recognizing that every name and number on the student list is, in fact, a person with feelings who wants to do the best they can in the course.
– Tara