Week 5 Reflection: The Importance of a Good Start

This week in Collaborative Communities the focus was on the days before and the days immediately after the beginning of an online class.  This time is a window of opportunity that is so critical that Lehmann and Chamberlin recommend that instructors devote 70% of their energy to this crucial time (155).  Discussions and working surrounding this window of time have led me to reflect on the beginning of my online Politics and Law class last fall, my first and only online class.

A couple of factors complicated the beginning of this class, and as I look back on it, I think these complications contributed to some difficulty in the class.  This was not only the first time that I had taught the class, it was also the first time the class had ever been taught.  I spent much of my summer designing the course and had not completed it when school started, although I did have the first few modules completed.  As a result I was still devoting a fair bit of time to instructional design.  The students and I were also spending time and energy figuring out how to operate the Cisco TelePresence rooms that we used twice a week.  I blogged about using the room here.  The f2f communication made possible by these rooms was eventually very helpful in answering student questions and demonstrating tech tools, but its use distracted us at the outset of the course.  We quickly settled, but by then we were past the window.

This image shows a six seat TelePresence room. I was working in an eighteen seater with a bank of twelve seats behind the front room.  There were also two additional screens showing my computer's screen to the class.  Image courtesy of Cisco, all rights reserved.

Forum participation was one area where I devoted more energy than I anticipated to getting students to participate.  As I look back I think that my prompt in the introductory forum was too straightforward--basically, "introduce yourself"--and included too many posting tips.  My work in Collaborative Communities this week and my experiences the first time around will definitely serve me well in my next online teaching experience.  I am glad to have had the opportunity to draft a new and improved prompt for an introductory forum, and I am looking forward to feedback to facilitate further improvements.