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.