Module 6: MVMs

After reading Chapter 12 of Making the Move to eLearning: Putting Your Course Online by Chamberlin and Lehmann, I have discovered that I am not an online instructor. I am a full-time, tenured faculty member that happens to sometimes teach her entire load online. There is a difference that is worth noting.

I am required to be involved in college governance. That means that I spend about 20% of my time attending meetings and participating in activities that contribute to managing the campus. I am currently a member of the Tenure Review Committee and the Instructional Pluralism Committee and I am an alternate on the Faculty Commons Council. I am required to be on campus for college governance meetings. I am also required to hold on campus office hours equal to the amount of time that I teach F2F. In Winter I will teach 5 credits F2F and 11 online. I will need to hold 2 hours per week on campus.

My normal work hours are 7:00 am to 3:30 pm Monday through Friday. I am able to stay in touch with my online classes all week between classes, office hours, and governance. I grade papers at night and on the weekends, because there just are not enough hours during the week to get it all done.

Because I normally work Monday through Friday all day, I take the weekends off. In all the years that I have been teaching online, I have had only a few quarters when I taught completely online and only one in which I was able to teach from a remote location. Contact instructors who teach completely online have a very different life from FT, tenured faculty who are involved in governance. If we try to live the life on an online instructor, we are criticized, and rightly so, for not contributing to the college committees. When we are protected by tenure and have a guaranteed load, we have certain obligations on campus to fulfill.

The work we did in class this week centered on using different methods of moving discussions forward. I felt mostly disengaged from the large group topic because there was no real discussion. I can see how the reply only technique can be used to create lists and documents, but it should be used for specific purposes and in limited amounts--in my opinion. We also continued to practice our facilitation techniques in small groups.

What I took away from this week is that reply only technique appears to limit discussion. Because our Canvas LMS allows only replies and side comments or the creation of a new discussion as forms of threaded discussion, I have to pay special attention to how this method is working in my classes.

Resource:

Lehmann, K., & Chamberlin, L. (2009). Making the Move to eLearning: Putting Your Course Online. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Education.