Week 2 of Introduction to Online Instruction

We completed our first week in the Blackboard version of Introduction to Online Instruction. It was a reasonable start, but we need to have more participation by students to make it a successful class. We had 23 students enroll. 1 decided to drop out and 5 others haven't logged in yet. That leaves us with 17 who have been to the online course area, although only a small number actually completed the work for the week. Things may get more challenging with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up.

Resources

I've been adding some resources to the Resources folder in the course. Most are examples of tools you can use in an online course. Today I put in a link to CommentPress, which is an interesting theme/plugin for WordPress which makes it very easy to connect comments to a text. This could be a great tool for certain kinds of online courses, assuming you have a way to get the text into your blog. It might not be great for really long texts, such as books, but how about if you studied a serialized book like the Samuel Pepys diary and had students comment on some of the entries, or you had English language learners take turns commenting on paragraphs in a story. Here's the description of CommentPress from their website:

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.

Blackboard comes up a little short

I wanted to use the blogging tool available in Blackboard for this blog. I even started out using it for my first entry, but when I tried to link to the blog from the course menu, it wasn't possible. I don't think it will get read as much if it's buried inside a folder and since it's very simple to link to an external site from the Blackboard menu, I set up another blog using Blogger in about 3 minutes and I'm all set. One negative there is that with the Blackboard blog tool, it would be easier for students to add comments. With Blogger, they will have to log in in order to do that.

Introduction to Online Instruction, Day 2

Our course got started yesterday and here are some comments and a list of some of the mistakes I made:

I think it's a good idea to assign less work in the first week of an online course than in the other weeks. If students are unfamiliar with the online course area, there will be problems just finding the course and the assignments and not everyone will log in on the first day. You could end up with people who have already fallen very far behind just a few days into your course. You may also want to consider when most of your students will be doing the work for your course and schedule the due dates around that. Most of the time, people wait until the last minute before things are due, so if you want students to comment on the work that others are doing or just respond to their discussion board postings, allow time for that by making that work due before the end of the week. I set up this course to have the discussions due on Thursday so that we keep busy throughout the week.

I sent out the course welcome notice but didn't pay attention to who was enrolled in the course at the time I sent it. Blackboard doesn't show enrollment dates, so today, when I saw that six more people had joined the course, I had to send out another notice to everyone.

I sent the first welcome out around noon Pacific time, but we have some students on the east coast, so that was pretty late in the day to get the welcome information.

The syllabus was ready to go yesterday, but I didn't post it or send it with the email. It's online today, but it's a good idea to have the course syllabus completed by the time the course starts. I don't always do this even in face to face classes because I like to make adjustments based on the experience and interests of the students, but in an online class, you don't want to leave everyone guessing.

When you create an item (similar to a web page) in Blackboard, the whole thing shows up wherever it is located. If you create a weblink or other content, you just get a link to that content and you don't see the whole thing. The result is that a folder with several items can get pretty messy. It's easier to organize things in folders, so if you have an item, just put it inside a folder and that way students will see it immediately after they open the folder, but not before. I've reorganized the Course Materials folder so that there are no items at the top level.

Reflections on the online course

I'm using this blog to record my experience teaching Introduction to Online Instruction at UC Riverside Extension. The class starts November 5th and ends December 9th.