Trenchwork

Be Practical

• time management
• communications
• need to know: disclosing the information
• variety (as many modes as possible)
• teaching the technologies
• recordkeeping

Time Management

One of the first things you’ll need to do is to consider your own working schedule. How many hours should you actually use to work on student materials, answer e-mail, hold online office hours, provide help sessions, build resources, etc.? If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself spending your entire life online to the detriment of your own research, writing, other responsibilities, or even your own friends, family, and personal life. This is one of the first shocks most online teachers encounter. They begin sensibly enough, but suddenly find they’re spending almost all their waking hours dealing with an online course that seems to have turned into a black hole, swallowing all their time, energy, and creativity.

In order to avoid that problem, take time to organize your online teaching Responsibilities in the same way you would a face-to-face class. Rather than respond to student e-mail all day long, plan your schedule so that you retrieve and reply to their messages two or three times during your normal work day. If you’re on a day schedule (roughly 7am-6pm) I’d personally suggest an interval in the early morning—one of your first chores of the day—and again at the close of your work day. A quick check in the middle of the day can be particularly helpful in heading off critical problems before they have a chance to grow, but don’t allow your midday mail check to overwhelm the Rest of your day. If you can limit it to 15 minutes (certainly less than thirty!), you’ll benefit in the long run.

Some people find they can split their work days in such a way that they handle their online course load in one half of the day (e.g., mornings), and their other course or research loads in the other half of the day (e.g., afternoons). That was always problematic for me; it’s far too easy for me to work like a demon and burn myself out on student work in the mornings, then find that I’m too mentally fried to handle the intensive or even halfway thoughtful work I need to do in the afternoons. Likewise, student work kept growing. I may have started with four hours of student e-mails, papers, and readings, but it kept bleeding into my other work time. If you find you have similar tendencies and hate to leave things undone (“let me just answer that one last e-mail and then I can read this gender theory text”), you may want to divide your schedule a bit differently. Rather than trying to split your days, you may find it works better if you allow yourself to dedicate two or three days of the week to your online class (making certain that you schedule your online office hours for one of those days), and reserve the rest of your week for your own work. For instance, you may want to use Mondays, Wednesdays, and a large chunk of your Friday handling student work, and do nothing more for the online course than answer student e-mail on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Friday afternoons. Regardless of which option you choose, however, you’ll find it helpful if you tell your students what schedule you’ll be keeping; it will help set their expectations to a reasonable level early in the course.

A word about online office hours

Aside from those students who are truly distance students and live too far away from campus to commute on a regular basis, or are homebound for one reason or another, the majority of students take an online class for one of two reasons: either they can’t get a required (or simply desired) course to fit in with the rest of their academic schedule; or they already have a full 9-5 day. The latter is an eclectic group, and includes all those who hold down full-time jobs and take courses in the evenings, stay-at-home parents who have to fit an education around their families, full-time students who are putting themselves through school by working half days, and a host of others on everything but the usual 9-4 academic schedule. That means that you simply cannot offer online office hours as you would for a face-to-face class. If you do so, you’re automatically shutting out the bulk of your own students. You’ll have to think outside the box for this one. Consider offering hours in the early mornings and early evenings. Remember that most classes meet on a Tuesday/Thursday or Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule, which means that your students who work full-time probably have themselves scheduled for other classes in the evenings. Try covering bothcontin gencies and set your hours for a Tuesday and Wednesday or Monday and Thursday type of schedule. Feel free to poll your students and find out what schedules they’re on so you have an idea of what may or may not work for them, and don’t hesitate to shift the schedule if you find the current one isn’t working for either of you. Just be careful about shifting too many times; there must be some degree of consistency, or your students will simply get lost in the confusion. You don’t have to put yourself into an impossible lifestyle for this one, but just as your students are learning in a less-than-traditional framework, you must teach and make yourself available a bit differently than were you teaching the traditional face-to-face course. Remember, the purpose of office hours is to make yourself available to your students, so keep the nature of your students in mind when you plan this aspect of your course.

Reserve your weekends for yourself. You can choose to work on your own research, grade student work, or spend time with friends and family, but stay off-line during the weekend. Because all—repeat, ALL—of your teaching is done through a computer screen, you need to be sure to give yourself time away from the box. Again, remember to tell your students that you’re off-line during weekends, or you’ll find yourself deluged with panicky messages wondering why you haven’t responded to an e-mail that was sent at midnight on Friday night. They’ll both understand and respect your work schedule, but it’s entirely up to you to establish that schedule in the first place. Part of the rationale is simple common sense; your body won’t appreciate being trapped in front of a machine for untold hours. While an ergonomic setup tailored to your own specific needs will help considerably, very little can replace healthy time away to allow your hands and wrists a chance to rest, to remind your muscles how to move, and literally get the blood flowing again. On another note, that time away from the computer is important for more than physical reasons. You need a chance to reassure friends and family that they’re more important to you than the screen you’re spending a huge chunk of your life gazing at, and you need time to recharge your own batteries. A chance to, as my mother would tell me now and again, “go let the wind blow through your brains” and let a little “fresh air” into your thoughts. A chance to touch base with the rest of the reality that is your life. If you don’t schedule non-computer time for yourself, you’ll find yourself burning out in a frightening hurry.

Communications

If your course operates like most distance courses, the bulk of your communications will probably be via e-mail or online postings, but be aware that your students may expect something radically different than what you’ve planned or are prepared for. For instance, one of my former students caught me off guard when she told me that she had expected me to personally telephone each student with the assignment information for each assignment, as had the instructor from her previous (local, and much smaller) distance course. Once she understood how we were going to communicate with each other, and she had the chance to see that those methods in action, she was able to adjust her expectations, but I’m certain that the early stages of the experience were both a bit confusing and frustrating to her. As a rather fine economics professor with whom I once worked was fond of telling me at regular intervals, she “preferred the phone.” Be certain your students know how you plan to communicate with them, and what means you expect them to use in order to communicate with you.

One of the expectations you level on your students should be a requirement that they sign their e-mail. While some university or educational webmail software automatically append the user’s name to the return address, many don’t. Nor do programs like AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo’s mail unless the user has changed her settings to reflect that preference. As an instructor, you need to know who you’re talking to, and cute e-mail addresses may be fun—even peculiarly informative—but not particularly helpful. Require your students to clearly identify themselves in every correspondence with you just as you’d require them to put their names on any papers they turned in during a face-to-face class.

That said, there are a number of methods available to you. The first and foremost is, of course, e-mail. Use whatever software works best for your specific needs and resources, but make certain you’re running—and frequently updating—a good virus protection program with an e-mail scanner. Student machines seem to attract electronic bugs, particularly since a large percentage of them use Word and Outlook, and a frightening majority of their users have not yet learned the usual hard lessons about viruses. You can expect to have at least one in twenty acquire an infection during the course of the semester, and I can’t emphasize enough what you’ll suffer if you happen to be the one who loses all class data, correspondence, and records. Protect yourself.

Along those same lines, be sure you save all your correspondence to and from your students, regardless of how trivial it may seem. Because you don’t have the benefit of face-to-face interaction, you’ll find yourself struggling now and again to remember what you told to whom. Those e-mails are your record, your paper trail, and your tickler file. Save every scrap, and back up all your records frequently. If you have a very small class, you may find it helpful to place your student mail in an online location accessible by both of you. While you’ll definitely want to do that for all class-wide mails, a small class may enable you to push that one step further and create an online repository for individual students. For instance, if you have six students, you could logically create six protected discussion boards, web pages, or group blogs where you and/or one of those six students could post, track, or mirror mail. Again, however, remember that while recordkeeping is a must, the idea is NOT to recordkeep yourself out of time to teach. Keep your objectives and class size in mind; techniques that work well for a small class can be a nightmare for a large class, and vice versa. On a more serious note, those mails are also your support in the event of an administrative problem. For instance, a student who contests a semester grade on the grounds that she did the work and says that you told her it was fine won’t get far if you can produce the mails that confirm that the assignment was never turned in, or that what was turned in never met the assignment objectives. The same, of course, applies in reverse, and that knowledge will help keep you on the straight and narrow.

Strongly encourage your students to keep all class-related e-mail until the end of the semester. There will be times when they’ll need to refer back to an older message, and if they’ve not kept a copy, they’ll have to come to you for it. More frequently, a student finds her assignment file has been trashed either by a bug or a careless save, and needs to find the earlier version she sent you in the body of an e-mail. If she has her correspondence, she has the assignment. Likewise, just as your correspondence serves as a record of what’s happened or what’s been said, it does the same for your students. If they need to remember what you said a month ago about the assignment they’re just beginning—that thoughtful aside which suddenly triggered a new inspiration—they’ll be able to find it in their own records without asking you to sort through your old mail to see if you can remember what you said well over a thousand e-mails ago.

Establish a policy—and tell your students you’ve done so—of responding to every single mail you receive from your students within X number of working hours. My own preference is usually eight, which allows me to bookend my day with e-mail. Make certain they understand that if they don’t receive a confirmation mail on an assignment or a response to their mail, then it means that you didn’t receive their mail. The exception, of course, is the simple one-liner like “Thanks!” or “Got it” for which the student isn’t requesting a return note. If, however, you establish that policy from the very beginning of class, students won’t wonder whether their mail got lost in the twilight that is sometimes the Internet. It also allows them to be responsible for their own mail. If they don’t get that confirmation mail, then they know they need to check with you about it. AND, if they’ve done as you asked them and kept copies of all their mail, then they won’t have to re-create the mail; all they need to do is re-send it. Likewise, if the mail is a dated assignment, they can actually forward their already-sent message to you, which means that you’ll have proof of their attempt to meet that assignment’s deadline.

A related side note

Aside from the question of viruses, e-mail has come to be remarkably stable in the past few years, particularly if you’re using a reliable service provider or school server. Hardware will of course fail, and often at inconvenient moments, but that comes with the online territory. The same is true of any mechanical or technical tool; if you use a machine, you can predict that it will fail at one point or another. Some servers, providers, or programs, however, tend to be a bit problematic, and their problems are too often more than just faulty equipment. For instance, AOL has a nasty tendency of sporadically turning away incoming mail that is NOT generated from another AOL account. If your student has her school e-mail forwarded to her AOL account, then she runs a risk of not receiving class mail. If she’s one of the lucky, she’ll get through the semester without experiencing the problem. If she’s not, then she may not know she has a problem until it’s become more than just an inconvenience. The mail-handling policies you put in place from the very first hour of class have the potential to either bury or rescue, so weigh them carefully.

Aside from e-mail, there are a host of other communication methods, such as your web pages, discussion boards, blog posts, MOO, AOL’s Instant Messenger,ICQ, mIRC, GMail’s chat program, etc. Your web pages, discussion boards, and blog posts provide their own copy, so to speak. Don’t delete them unless you’re replacing them with updated information, and I would urge you to consider the problem before you do so. If all you’re changing is an odd typo, there’s no problem with straight replacement. If, however, you’re changing content, be sure you mark the new material or changes in such a way that your students won’t overlook it, and be certain you save the old post for your own records. Just as with e-mail, you’ll want to keep a record of everything you tell your students. Saving previous postings may feel redundant, and to some extent it is, but again, it’s your documentation. It’s a bit difficult to prove that you never said you don’t fine late papers in a previous version of your paper guidelines, for instance, if you’ve thrown them all away.

Almost all the synchronous communications forms such as MOO or AIM allow the user to log or make a transcript of the conversation, and I strongly recommend you do so. Again, it will give you a record of what you’ve said, but let me also encourage you to send a copy of the transcript to the relevant student. It won’t occur to most of your students to record the conversation, and just as your virtual paper trail serves as your own tickler file, so will it for your students. It’ll help them remember what they said, particularly if they were having to acquaint themselves with an unfamiliar technology at the same time—a process that can make the details of a conversation fuzzy for even the best of us.

Regardless of format, simply communicating with your students will take an incredible chunk of your time, perhaps second only to the actual reading, responding to, and grading of student work. Remember to work within your own schedule, and keep those issues of time management in the back of your mind when you sit down to answer student mail. It may not seem like a bad idea to tell yourself that you’ll answer mail as you receive it during the course of your day, but if you receive 120 student e-mails, that’s an average of three to four hours worth of constant distraction during your day. Simply put, you’ll find yourself not giving complete answers, re-reading a student’s work a dozen times in order to try and regain your thoughts, and not finishing any of the other work clamoring for your attention. Compartmentalize your communication periods during your work day so that you and your students can get the most out of it.

One last word about communications; specifically, class-wide messages. Even the best organized of us have system failures, or a network server that unexpectedly decides to make a lunch of a user’s e-mail account. Take the extra moment to post a copy of any mail you send to the class as a whole to a specified location. For instance, dedicate one web page to class-wide e-mail, and paste a copy of each e-mail on the page in chronological order. If you use courseware such as BlackBoard or WebCT, set up a resource folder for class-wide mails. However you do it, be certain your students know where you’re putting the copies. Then, if they think they may have missed a mail, they can check the file themselves without generating another e-mail you’ll have to answer, and which is far too often a bit unclear. It may, for instance, easily take you four e-mail exchanges to answer “I think I missed something. What did you say?” when all that’s necessary is a quick two minutes to post a copy of the mail. Make it your responsibility to provide the backup safety net, and theirs to be sure they use it.

The Need to Know: Disclosing the Information

We’ve all met or worked with people who not only believed that information was power, but that they had the right to more than the rest of us, and held it so close to their chests that we felt ourselves operating in the dark. Frustrating, isn’t it? It’s no less so for your students. Prepare complete and thorough instructions and information about every facet of the course and each assignment. Consider what questions would be asked in a face-to-face course, then multiply it by five. Remember, you won’t only be fielding questions that deal with the course material, but also those that have to do with or are affected by the technology and online environment. To put it in perspective, think of it this way: Your face-to-face colleagues aren’t liable to be asked how their classroom space works or, comically, whether they’re male or female.

Address every question you can consider being asked, and as you find new questions being repeated, revise your materials to include them. The more information you provide up front, the fewer times you’ll find yourself repeatedly answering those same questions. It will save you time, and will serve the added benefit of heading off problems or confusions before they get so far out of control that a student can’t salvage an assignment. Likewise, it’s difficult for a student to say she didn’t know there would be a research requirement to a paper if that research requirement is fully explained on the information page for that assignment. Again, this is one of those times when more really is better.

Having said that, be aware that there’s a fine line before you reach information overload, and a site or set of resource pages becomes overwhelming. Take care to organize your material, label it clearly, compartmentalize it, use subheadings, even an index or FAQ (list of frequently asked questions) if you can manage it, and depending on what format you’re working with. Provide all the information you can, but organize it in decent spoonfuls rather than wheelbarrow loads.

Variety . . .

There is one remaining important concept to keep in mind when you’re presenting information and course materials, and that’s your medium. When you’re in a face-to-face class, you have the advantage of being able to present information in more than one format. You can use music, audio, video, artwork, etc. You can hang posters on walls, draw diagrams on boards, use overhead projectors. You can use individual students to demonstrates positions and concepts, or you can use your own physical presence to dramatize a point. You can skip across the room, make cuckoo calls, or stand on your head if you like, and if it will help them remember a critical idea.

That ability diminishes considerably for most distance courses. The difficulty isn’t that technology isn’t capable of doing all those things, but rather that most of us simply don’t have the time, skills, or support resources necessary in order to do them. We are far too often dependent upon the power of black and white text, and that means that our students are receiving the information they need in only one medium. Unfortunately, not everyone learns well that way. If you can, therefore, try to accent your materials with other mediums than the typed word. If explaining an assignment in a sound file will fit with the rest of your course layout and you have the skills and resources to create one, then by all means—go for it. Don’t be afraid to experiment with sound bytes and video clips. You may find your organization’s Audio Visual section helpful if you don’t have the video recording equipment, or if you simply need someone to man the camera while you sit on the hot seat for a three-minute clip.

There is a world of alternative medium possibilities open to you, but again, don’t let the novelty or “cool” factor overwhelm your own common sense. Treat them like salt—a little goes a long way—and make sure they support your course rather than the other way around.

. . . and Accessing the Cool Stuff

Keep in mind, however, that not all of your students will have the same level of technical experience, or the same quality hardware and software, so always provide a text equivalent for any alternative medium presentations, and be certain you prepare the supplement in a format accessible by the majority. Better yet, prepare it in more than one format, and be certain you cover the lowest denominator, so to speak. Don’t assume your students have a certain software. While many of them have relatively new machines, a surprising percentage of them are using older machines (often handed down within the family) with very limited resources. As a case in point, I recently saw an instructor distribute program information in a pdf file. Unfortunately, he expected users to feel free to modify the text, and it never occurred to him that a fair percentage of them may not have Adobe Acrobat installed, or may not have the means to alter the file without blocking and copying the text into their own word processing program—and thereby losing all the document’s formatting. Don’t make the same mistake. If you’re distributing information in a text format, keep in mind that plain text (.txt), rich text format (.rtf), and html-formatted files are readable by virtually everyone, regardless of what system they’re using.

Be certain your students can access the information, otherwise it won’t matter how brilliant your message is, or how creative your presentation.

Teaching the Technologies

A couple of years ago, I met a distance instructor who was struggling with the technology her Department had set up for her course. Her own computer skills were much weaker than they should have been, but she had excellent support and training opportunities from the school, and the university had arranged training workshops in different geographical locations for their student population. Her largest frustration was that she felt she was having to teach her students how to use their course tool and, in her own words, she wasn’t being paid for that. Part of the difficulty, of course, came with her own insecurity and uncertainty with her own computer, the mechanics of basic programs, and the unfamiliarity of an online and distance format rather than a face-to-face class environment.

Soapbox Sidenote

We’ve become relatively clever about creating mentoring programs for our new instructors in face-to-face environments, but we’ve neglected creating such programs for our online instructors. The assumption is generally that if they can teach in a “real life” environment, then they should have no trouble doing so in a virtual one. The fallacy in that argument is obvious. Just as teachers need training for face-to-face teaching, they desperately need training for distance education, and that’s not something we’re providing. In this teacher’s case, not only would she have had someone who could have helped her over the rough spots and get a better handle on the technologies she was using—and help her understand how to best help her students without spending all her time trying to solve technical problems associated with using the environment—but she’d have had a safety net for those times when she did find herself in trouble.

As an aside, most students can handle being introduced to a new technology if they’re properly prepared—if they know what to expect and what’s expected of them. Far too many instructors simply dump their students in the new environment with no ground work, then either don’t understand or aren’t surprised when their students respond negatively to the technology. The practice is a recipe for disaster; it dooms both the assignment and the student to a failed experience. Take the time to prepare your students before you introduce them to a new tool. Give them an overview of the tool, visuals so they know what it will look like, instructions for the basic functions. Once you’ve explained the environment itself, take the time to tell them what you’re using the tool for, and what performance you both expect and won’t accept. If the technology has access requirements (e.g., browser requirements), and if it is available prior to the time when the class as a whole will be using it, consider having them test their connection to be sure they can get to where you’ll want them to be for the class assignment. It’ll save you both a few anxious moments and wasted time if you can troubleshoot access problems before your deadline./p>

A Word of Warning

Many assume that their students have basic computer knowledge—or more than they actually do possess. It’s become something of a catchword that “young people are very technologically proficient today,” and we’re astonished when we find they’re not as advanced as we thought.

Problematic areas usually include not understanding about how windows tile, “sloppy” mousing, and a general confusion about file names and file extensions. The first two frequently appear in conjunction with each other, such as when students are in online environments, then accidentally pick up the frame of a window behind the environment’s and assume they’ve been kicked out of the program because that window has “disappeared.” They don’t realize that they can check their task bar and find which windows are open, then click on the window they want on top. The confusion about file names and extensions is a common one that usually raises its head when they’re working on a web project or having to turn in an assignment in a specified file format. For instance, they don’t necessarily realize what the extensions mean (e.g., .doc is a Word file, .txt is a plain text file, etc.), and therefore don’t necessarily understand where they’ve gone wrong when they send you their web page as a Word document.

Computer knowledge and experience varies from individual to individual, but don’t make the mistake of assuming expert knowledge until your students have demonstrated those skills. Reach for a comfortable middle, and allow them to show you what they do and don’t know—then adjust your responses and guidance as necessary.

There is, of course, a need for balance. You cannot spend the bulk of your time teaching the technology rather than the course material, but neither should you expect your students to be fluent in all aspects of the course “language.” Level the responsibility for learning the language upon them, but expect that you’ll be the first person they’ll turn to when they find themselves stuck or confused. Take the time to find out what resources are available to your students in the event they need more help than you can provide. Likewise, if your students are in the same geographic location, consider the option of using a buddy system or team approach. If Sarah is particularly good at MOOing and John is having trouble getting past the front door, perhaps Sarah can give John the nudge he needs, particularly for a small boost to her participation grade. Introduce new technologies fairly early in the course. That will allow the students to get comfortable with them, and do so without feeling that the entire semester will be spent in a high-stress technological learning curve. Go ahead and get as much of this part of the learning curve out of the way so you can focus on the heart of the course—the course material.

Recordkeeping

You’ll find it helpful if, before the course begins, you take the time to prepare up all your tracking sheets and databases. While you’ll probably want some sort of electronic database, let me encourage you to create a tracking sheet for assignments that you can simply check off or annotate via pen and paper as the assignments are completed or turned in, particularly if they’re turned in via e-mail. It need not be sophisticated—a simple table layout will do—but it will save you both time and energy if you can check the work off immediately and as you go rather than have to spend hours trying to track it in your records later. Paper notes can easily be entered into your favorite database later as you have the free time, but they’ll help you get an immediate overview of how the class is doing, who’s struggling, and who’s in trouble as those events happen, and that can be critical to the success or failure of a student who’s suddenly found the online environment more difficult than she anticipated.

We’ve touched on this before, but it bears repeating: Save and back up your files, records, databases, and correspondence fanatically. It’s virtually impossible to recreate most of those records, and life will grow impossibly stressful if you find yourself in the nasty position of having to do so. Once the semester is over, archive all your class records and files onto a CD or series of diskettes and tuck the archive safely away, just as you would any face-to-face class records.

Online Teacher’s Guide Table of Contents:
Be Practical
Be Prepared
Get Personal
Self-Preservation
Teaching Resources
Blog Resources
MOO Resources
A Warning