The summer is looking be very busy with work at CDE, teaching at USF and many other irons in the fire. As I look toward trying to keep up with my professional endeavors, I am trying to find ways to mix all of my responsibilities together. Heavy on my mind is finding adequate time to address the needs of my class this semester.
I have 30 students in a completely distance based graduate level education course. Usually this course does not have this high of an enrollment. In addition, it is the short summer semester where we manage to get all 15 weeks of content into 10 weeks of time. I have some help in the form of a great graduate student (thanks Shelley) who not only wants the teaching experience, but also wants to use my class in her dissertation research. She is following along in the same direction as I did in my dissertation, so it will be quite interesting to see where it goes.
At the same time that I am working through large class load issues, I have also been trying to integrate a few new things into the class. Educational technology and distance education have been shifting regularly just as everything technology related does. Working here at CDE has offered opportunities for thought about different approaches to social learning and I have been privileged to conversations with many people who see things as I do. I would like to find a way to incorporate some of the teaching strategies and tools on the horizon while not adding even more material to a course that is already a challenge for students to get through.
Students in this course come in with some personal goals. Most are not taking this course as a required course, but as an elective for personal knowledge or because they see distance education in their future career. Students interest areas vary with many in areas of Adult Education, Second Language Acquisition, Instructional Technology and a mixture of industry, higher education and K-12.
One way I see myself accomplishing the transition for additional material is to offer different options for students within the content of the course. Students could then pick from the options to build a subset of interest. For example, I currently have some blog and wiki assignments as well as a Blackboard assignment which help demonstrate some of the tools available for teaching at a distance. Many of the students are already familiar with these tools while others are not. I may be able to expand the options for those who are already familiar with the basic tools by using assignments that incorporate newer approaches with applications like Second Life, Delicious, Flickr, and other multimedia based options such as podcasting and vodcasting.
Overall, I think this would make the class better and offer me the opportunity to really dig into the newer approaches I would like to incorporate. However, the issue becomes one of time. I have been teaching this course non stop for quite a while with usually only a week or so between offerings. This does not allow a great deal of time for revamping the materials or the assignments. To accomplish this, I hope to reach out to my network for ideas on how to implement sound pedagogical approaches with these newer applications and develop tasks that will require students to not just learn about the technology, but learn about the teaching process and why (and when) they would chose to use these newer tools for distance education.
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