Web Teaching Journal (Week 8): From Multiple Choice to Short Essay

This is the eighth in a fifteen part, weekly journal on my experience teaching a web class. Each post explores how things are going in the current week and ideas for future revisions of the course. For my archive of previous posts in this series, click here.

I started mixing things up. I changed a recent quiz from multiple choice to short essay. I also set the quiz so that students could repeatedly open and close it and return to it as needed. I thoroughly enjoyed reading and manually grading the student responses because I was able to gauge what readings and topics were having the most impact and sparking the most interest. What’s hard is getting students to understand what is expected of them in a short essay, so I went easy on them this first time around, but after the closing of the quiz I posted my favorite responses on the course message board. Now, for the next quiz, they know how expansive they need to be.

I had an interesting problem while grading, though. I felt better about grading the answers per question, as opposed as to doing each student quiz separately. Half-way through the process, I got upset emails from students complaining about their low scores (because they had only received credit for the answers I had graded). I have not yet figured out how to do the grading in such a way so that students do not get a partial tally of their grade before I have graded all of their responses.

Web Teaching Journal (Week 6): Screencasting Burnout?

This is the sixth in a fifteen part, weekly journal on my experience teaching a web class. Each post explores how things are going in the current week and ideas for future revisions of the course. For my first post, see Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries and Drops). For my second post, see Week 2: Failures in Communication. For my third post, see Week 3: A comedy of Errors and a Silver Lining? My fourth post is titled Week 4: Cut and Paste. The fifth is Week 5: Grooving on Good Content. To see entries posted after this one you’re reading now, you can also just pull down the categories menu on the right and select the Web Teaching Journals category.

I had to record some screencasts this week for next week’s unit and, as always, it was a hassle. Don’t get me wrong. I like the program I’m using: IshowU. It is inexpensive and it works well. I am not qualified to judge it in comparison to other programs I have not used, and which may very well be better. But it’s a hassle to bring all the elements together: the power point, the written-out script and then the actual performance. I find that reading scripts can deaden one’s inflection, so I strive to be an animated “reader” of my own scripts. You may be asking: Why do I use scripts as opposed to just bullet points to guide me through my spiels? I do it just in case I ever have a hearing impaired student in my class that I need to accomodate. Anyway, as I was saying, as easy it is for me to screencast, it’s still annoying to bring all the elements together. For example, searching for images for my powerpoint is not always fun. Re-recording a film because I skipped a slide makes me crazy. Etcetera.

Anyway, this is where all of this is going: I am not very crazy about my films for week 8 and had thought I would re-record them to make them better. However, considering all of the above, I’ve decided to only write a script and present it as a webpage instead. I’m taking a break from screencasting! I’ve also decided to try to schedule a group meeting with as many of my students as possible, for a class excursion related to the class. At best, I expect to get 5 or 6 takers out of 30. We’ll see. I’ll report back here.

Screencasting is a valuable tool, no doubt, one that is central to my web teaching. Screencasting can also be invaluable to live teaching, as attested by my friend John Garrigus, who uses them to “teach naked” and enliven classroom discussion. However, I’ve been thinking that screencasts are not necessarily the centerpiece of the learning experience of my students. It’s just one element, among several, and as such, it is not always [gulp!] indispensable! If it’s indispensable to anyone, it’s indispensable to teachers who feel that they need to manifest a tangible presence in the class. I often feel that way: They need to see me and hear me, somehow, someway! Other forms of presence are harder to conceptualize and enact for teachers such as myself, so the ole screencast becomes centrally important, if not a crutch.

My friend and collaborator Matt Crosslin has blogged about related topics at Edugeek Journal, and I really think I need to start experimenting with proposals. Keep the ole screencasts, but start branching out and helping my own students branch out. His article is called “Adding Value and Battling Staleness in Online Classes”. I love the use of the word “stale” in his post title. That’s precisely what happens to screencasts: they become stale in a way that one’s live lectures rarely become. For dynamism, fluidity, and spontaneity, other forms of freshness abound. Check out Matt’s post!

Web Teaching Journal (Week 5): Grooving on Good Content

This is the fifth in a fifteen part, weekly journal on my experience teaching a web class. Each post explores how things are going in the current week and ideas for future revisions of the course. For my first post, see Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries and Drops). For my second post, see Week 2: Failures in Communication. For my third post, see Week 3: A comedy of Errors and a Silver Lining? My fourth post is titled Week 4: Cut and Paste. To see entries posted after this one you’re reading now, you can also just pull down the categories menu on the right and select the Web Teaching Journals category.

I’m in week 6, but this is my week 5 post. Class has quieted down considerably and is running by itself. Students talk to each other. They know where to find me for help. Everyone seems calm. One of the most rewarding things that I am discovering is that a lot of my decisions about what to put into the class, content-wise, are paying off. Good content matters, after all. If you have the flexibility to make choices about what to present as content in a given course, I would say really exercise that discretion to maximize student interest. My students keep on telling each other in the message boards that they are excited to be learning new things. They get riled up, surprised and inspired by the material. I don’t agree with a lot of how they process some of the material, how they interpet it, but seeing their interest makes me proud. Getting interested and coming to attention when you discover something new, regardless of how you frame it, is an important first step in learning. My class is introductory, and I don’t feel that obligated to correct every misconception that arises in web board discussion, so I’m letting some things slide. And there’s something valuable in listening to, I mean “watching”, what students are interested in, because it teaches me how to teach them better next time. It teaches me what kinds of things hold their interest and what misconceptions need to be addressed in future incarnations of the course.

Web Teaching Journal (Week 4): Cut and Paste

This is the fourth in a fifteen part, weekly journal on my experience teaching a web class. Each post explores how things are going in the current week and ideas for future revisions of the course. For my first post, see Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries and Drops). For my second post, see Week 2: Failures in Communication. For my third post, see Week 3: A comedy of Errors and a Silver Lining? To see entries posted after this one you’re reading now, you can also just pull down the categories menu on the right and select the Web Teaching Journals category.

Technically, I’m in week 5, but due to inclement weather and power outages, I am posting a bit late. The class has settled into a routine. Students know how to use the message board and use it regularly. They have gotten the hang of how the course works and have settled down. The professor, that would be me, has also settled down, which is a big help. Sometimes fussing too much, and unecessarily, amps up emotion and sets up unrealistic expectations. Emotion and frustration then can lead to mistakes that can make your students crazy. So everyone’s calmed down.

My students turned in their first assignment in week 4 and I was sorry to see several of them doing the ole unattributed cut and paste from the course readings in their writing. It’s technically plagiarism but I don’t see a case that looks and feels like a total dereliction of duty on their part with regards to thinking on their own. We’re talking one sentence or two, tops, where students clearly feel unable to synthesize a particular theory on their own. They’re not pretending that a concept is their own, they just don’t want to bother to come up with their own phrasing for one pesky idea. In other words, they are borrowing from the author without quotation marks, while signalling that they are speaking about his theory.

One of the things that I don’t like about teaching web classes is that it necessarily, by definition, caters to certain practices that are fostered by our current web culture:

(1) Misattribution, no attribution, and outright, ‘malicious’ plagiarism. AKA “Cut and paste.”

(2) Short attention spans.

(3) Reading screens rather than books, see #2 above.

It is what it is, no need to make grandilocuent pronouncements about these things. They are not inherently good or bad, or set in stone. My job as a teacher is to work against the current of a lot of things in a person’s upbringing or at any given moment in a culture or at a point in history. If it were easy to teach, I’d find it less interesting.

Web Teaching Journal (Week 3): A Comedy of Errors and A Silver Lining?

This is the third in a fifteen part, weekly journal on my experience teaching a web class. Each post explores how things are going in the current week and ideas for future revisions of the course. For my first post, see Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries and Drops). For my second post, see Week 2: Failures in Communication. To see entries posted after this one you’re reading now, you can also just pull down the categories menu on the right and select the Web Teaching Journals category.

First of all, I’d like to thank Matt Crosslin over at Edugeek Journal for commenting on my previous post (week 2 journal). His comment had a calming effect on me and reminded me that some of the problems I was describing were not necessarily a function of the medium (web teaching) but the start of the semester. He also noted that community forms, when it forms at all, around something spontaneous or necessary. Community via professor instruction is really kind of silly and unreasonable. His comment also made me reflect on a very simple fact about a lot professors who teach web classes nowadays: they have not taken a web class themselves. This problem will fade as the professorate incorporates individuals with experience in web classes, but for a lot of us working now, we are really at a disadvantage. We just don’t know what it’s like to take a web class. Some of us try to imagine it, and pass that sensitivity on to how we design our courses, but it’s not the same as really taking a web class.

OK, back to community and my previous moaning about fostering it in my class. I have found a brilliant way of fostering community on the message board: make a lot of mistakes and confuse your students. They will turn, in desperation, to each other on the message boards, to try to gain clarity. Here’s my paradox: I have fostered a lot of community in my class as of right now, but it’s because there has been too much confusion and stress.

I once used the phrase “in the can” to praise and criticize web classes I was teaching before. If it’s in the can, a class runs itself, if it’s not, it’s more fluid and changeable. For two semester I taught an “in the can” version of this class. It pretty much ran itself. I could be present, or I could be less present, but the class was fine and stress levels were contained. Now I uncanned my class, took it out, shook the mothballs free, re-organized it, moved it to a different Learning Management System and said this is not so hard, I think I know how this works…. it will be fine! Better even!

Well, maybe x changes are better, but every misstep you make, every microscopic mistake you make gets magnified to the nth degree in a web class. Then when students start asking questions, and talking to each other, and asking you for help, and when you respond and try to get everyone back on track, you just can’t the genie back in the bottle. People are confused by the original situation or by your explanation of how to resolve it or work around it. It’s mostly fixable but in the process you produce a lot of stressed out students, even frustrated students.

I’m of two minds about this reality right now. On the one hand, I’m frustrated myself over some of the errors I’ve made that have caused all the chaos. On the other hand, I feel like I’m really learning a lot about how to avoid these mistakes in the future (what a platitude, I know, I know). And most importantly, I am chagrined that I finally got what I wanted: community in my class. In times of crisis students come together. There’s a lot of message board participation now. I tell ya, they feel comfortable, cuz they ain’t holding back. Another silver lining is that I feel more connected to this web class than any of my other ones. As crazy as things are, I am involved with the students, every day, and sometimes, a bit too much.

My goal is to streamline things so that starting in week 4 things work in a more predictable manner. I am aspiring to some silence on the message boards because that will mean students are more relaxed.

That’s all for this week. Below is a list of the major mistakes or problems that have fanned the flames of community in my web class:

1. In Moodle, the “hide previous unit” button not only hides the unit content, but also unit activities like quizzes and forums, meaning that students cannot look at their quiz results etc., which causes great anxiety (of course!).
2. A problem with force-subscribe in Moodle (which we eventually resolved) created a situation in which students subscribed to everything in an attempt to get things to work and now that the subscription scripts are working in Moodle, students are being destroyed by barrages of email from all of the message boards. (My announcements board is the only thing that I’ve force-subscribed students to, but with everyone subscribed to everything, too many email copies of stuff are flying around).
3. A minor error in naming an external link launched many emails and message board posts expressing consternation about the “missing” or non-existent resource.

Web Teaching Journal (Week 2) “Failures in Communication”

This is the second in a fifteen part, weekly journal on my experience teaching a web class. Each post explores how things are going in the current week and ideas for future revisions of the course. For my first post, see Web Teaching Journal: Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries and Drops). To see entries posted after this one, you can also just pull down the categories menu on the right and select the Web Teaching Journals category.

When I used to have bad dreams about my teaching, they usually went like this: I’m teaching in a huge quad and my students are so dispersed that they are mixed with passersby and out of the reach of my voice. A variation on this dream had me teaching in a long “L” shaped room with the students at one end (around a corner) and me on the other. I’m sorry to report that teaching web classes is often like those nightmares. In fact, the one kind of teaching that really instantiates my nightmares in transparent ways are web classes. This one, at least in week 2, is no exception. Let me tell you what’s going on.

Students are not using the message boards as much as they should to talk to each other. I am still getting questions that have been covered on the boards and that’s disappointing. I prepared a SurveyMonkey survey to try to determine ways of tweaking the class but after posting it in my announcement board, even after force-subscribing all students to that board, only 5 out of 30+ students have taken the survey. (One student claims they are not getting email copies of the force-subscribed messages in my Announcements board, and I have no idea if this is occurring with other students…now you’re getting the flavor of my nightmares!). In short, I can’t get a read on what’s going on or get the students to tell me what’s going on via the survey. I put some CD-ROMs on my door for students to copy onto their laptops with a sign-out sheet next to them, and now one of the CD’s is gone and the sign-out sheet is blank. Apart from deadlines for quizzes and assignments, I’m not feeling like I’m reaching the students. Thank goodness for the 5 or 6 students who are dedicated message board users.

Apart from the first quiz, we’ve had our first assignment, divided up into separate categories. Some students had to write reactions to the readings, others had to do a web search and find, and evaluate web pages on selected topics. I instructed them to use the Berkeley “How to assess a web page” rubric but many of the students did not follow it at all.

The last time I taught this class in WebCT I did not have a lot of the feelings I’m having this week and last week. I can’t figure out what it was about WebCT that might have made the difference because, on the surface, Moodle seems so much better to me. Right now I feel frustrated, but more confident in several changes that I have made in the class. I feel more in control of elements at my own disposal. The problem is I’m not sure it will make a difference.

The crux of the issue for me today, one week since my last post is this: should I even expect some semblance of community and generalized communication in a web class? Maybe a web class should be pretty much automated and we should dispense with “community” and “interaction.” I know these are verboten concepts among teachers who prize experiential learning and active learning, myself among them, but I’m really not sure this class will work in those ways.

In closing I want to say two things. The first is that this class is not running on autopilot. I am one week or two weeks ahead of the students with regards to building the class. Don’t get me wrong: I have 95% of the components at my disposal, but I am building as I go to ensure a “presence” in the class. Perhaps this was a mistake. The second item is that this week I spent 5 or 6 hours dealing with this class, easy, that’s already double the amount of time I would have spent teaching this very same class live.

Web Teaching Journal: Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries, and Drops)

Web Teaching Journal: Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries, and Drops)

OK, before it all vanishes into the ether, I think I will write a weekly blog about my experience teaching my current web class. Hopefully I can chart the ups and downs of this experience and get a grasp on how this class progresses or does not progress.

I got into web instruction because I saw in it an opportunity to ensure curricular stability in an environment in which qualified instructors for night classes could not always be found. Web classes, I reasoned to myself, could be a serviceable “patch”, to ensure the maximum amount of coverage for working students who desperately needed certain classes to graduate on time. What if we made decent, creative, exciting web classes to meet the needs of these students? That was the plan. That’s how I slipped down the proverbial slippery slope a few years ago. My experiences teaching these classes have been infuriating and rewarding. Sometimes I have felt like a total joker and other times like an effective teacher. In future posts on this series I plan on filling in more blanks about my history teaching web classes.

My current class, Spanish 3312: Introduction to Latin American Culture and Civilization, is being run on Moodle, although in the past I have used WebCT. This is the class description: “Spanish 3312 is an interdisciplinary introduction to Latin American society, history and culture. The course is designed to provide students with an engaging and accessible outline to the diverse and complex contours of Latin American history and culture. Topics covered include Pre-Columbian culture and history, themes relating to the Conquest of the New World, private life and customs in Colonial Latin America, race relations, important literary texts and writers, the Mexican Revolution, political controversies surrounding the Cuban Revolution, human rights in the Southern Cone and U.S.-Latin American Relations in the Twenty-First Century.” Sounds pretty cool, huh?

I made myself crazy in December of 2008 developing the foundational series of video lectures around which I would build the present incarnation of this class. In the past, my videos had been boring talking head videos (aren’t all talking head videos boring?), and I had taken the most generic approach to the material. Basically a lot of annotated chronologies of events. In December 2008, however, I developed a new approach: I picked the most “fascinating” topics imaginable around which to build my class lectures. So, for example, I developed lectures on the weapons used by the Conquistadors (including their use of dogs), on the vagaries of translation during the Conquest, on witchcraft in Colonial Mexico in relation to the Inquisition, on the Cult of Che Guevara, etc. The second change I made was to make video lectures based on animated powerpoints with embedded audio. I used ishowu, a 20$ screencasting programa for Macintosh, to overlay my voice onto the powerpoints. I am still working with this core set of videos, each of which contain a bibliography to let students know where my information is drawn from, and image source credits to teach them something about the importance of attribution. (All images I use in my videos are public domain, and a lot of them were found in pre-1900 books in google books).

My course requirements are as follows: online quizzes, a few short homework essays, message board participation, one essay and one final project, which will be an annotated bibliography of online and bricks and mortar library sources. I used to have an on-campus midterm but I’m making a go of it without that this semester to see what it’s like. I’ll return to these assignments and my thinking behind them in future posts.

So, what are my initial impressions after a few days of running the class?

My first impression is that I am happy to be using Moodle over WebCT or Blackboard. Moodle is very webpage like in its layout and I really like how it’s open. Unlike WebCT and such, you don’t have to click 5 times to navegate through the site. It looks like a big, long webpage through which you can scroll up and down. It works better for me, but I’m curious to know what students who have worked in different web environments think about it.

My second impression is that it is pretty hard to communicate with students, no matter how many instructions you write. In fact, the more instructions you write, the more they seem to get lost in a fog. Now is a key time in the class because students need to get established into a routine and figure out how the forums and quizzes work. Once they get into a routine and know how things work, then the class can run smoothly and we can tackle other challenges. But it’s a rough road to hoe so far. Students are not using the message board that much to talk to each other and to ask questions about the class, as I’ve instructed. They are holding back questions and some are sending me private emails to ask questions that relate to the whole class and its functioning, questions that need to be asked publicly for all to see. All of which is making me worry about getting on track properly. It’s as if the class was not “together” yet.

I had a review session on campus and two students showed up. To help foster community, I told the students who attended to report back to the class on the message board. And I’ve directed those students who emailed me with questions to post their questions on the message board. Maybe this will help crack the ice.

A few students have dropped, including one who cited “scheduling conflicts” with my web class! Poor guy, I should not have confronted him about dropping the class, even jokingly (as was my intent). Students don’t realize what they’re getting into often, and when they start working in a web class, they realize that they HATE IT. Although I too prefer live classes, it always bothers me a little bit when this happens. It may not seem that way, but a lot of hard work went into making my class interesting and fun. But the truth is, the more I speak to other students about their other web classes, the more I realize that mine is much better than many others. You know, those classes in which the only thing that happens is this: Read this web page, visit these web links, here’s your homework, and here’s your quiz. Goodbye. What a travesty. People actually get paid to teach that way?

OK, see you next week.