By: Samah Sabra
When I started this position in May 2012, I had a conversation with a friend who was about to embark on her first online teaching experience. Over coffee, she told me that she was a little nervous about what a change in medium of course delivery would mean for her. Would she be able to engage students in the same way? Could her personality and teaching philosophy come through to students in an online learning environment? Her questions were important ones and they set me thinking a lot – ok, almost obsessively – about what instructors are undertaking when they decide to teach an online class. As is my tendency when I can’t stop thinking about a subject, I decided to do some research about online teaching and learning.
Let me, if you will, set the context for what became a personal research project which led to the development of what has been one of my most rewarding experiences as an educational developer. I am someone who, until last year, could often be heard grumbling about how various – especially digital – technologies seemed to be taking over “our” lives. As my friends would tell you, I was slightly technologically challenged – or so I believed – until around this time last year when my mom bought me a smart phone as a gift for the successful defense of my dissertation. I became fascinated and, at first slightly disturbed, by how easily and quickly this phone became part of my day-to-day life. I could use one little device to check my email, message and call friends and family overseas for free, listen to music, keep track of my to do lists, maintain my daily agenda, do quick internet searches, or take photos and videos – sometimes with amazing added effects. It really was amazing – a fact that really hit me when I visited Signal Hill in St. John’s, Newfoundland this past summer.
Against the backdrop of this context, I started to be more and more aware that the students we teach at university have come of age in a world where this has always been possible. In a world where they did not ever hear, when making a service call, “if you do not have a touch tone phone, please stay on the line.” Most of them have not only grew up with touch tone phones, but with smart phones, digital technologies and online social networking. To a certain degree, they came of age in a socio-cultural milieu that is very different from the one most faculty have grown up in. It is the world of Web 2.0 tools, and there are a lot of them out there and they are constantly changing and updating. How is a busy faculty member supposed to keep up with the constant change?
Those were the questions that led us to develop the Faculty Learning Communities on e-Pedagogy. We currently run two of them and the projects we are working on in each group – how public they are, what tools we explore – depend on the desires and comfort levels of the faculty, instructors and staff who are involved in each group. In one group, for instance, our work remains private, but we are learning about tools that can help us with academic integrity in online environments, giving students audio-visual feedback on assignments using lecture capture tools and using online tools to manage group projects. In the second group, we are mostly working with video-production and editing tools and are blogging about it as we do so. In both groups, however, we spent the first semester immersing ourselves in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in order to learn about e-Pedagogy. What we have learned is that, as with face-to-face classes, when you go online you have to make sure that you have a solid foundation and understanding of what you want to accomplish before you can decide what tools you can consider. In other words, the learning outcomes for the students must be the driving force behind our addition and choice of technology. The other thing we have learned is that there is a lot of help available in doing this work – both online help and face-to-face help at Carleton University’s EDC, IMS and CUOL. If you are considering adding technology to your classroom, please don’t hesitate to contact us.