Week 6 in Collaborative Communities

I appreciated the Time Management Tips for Online Teaching from the UW Stout program.  Reading and ruminating on this list was another instance of Collaborative Communities in E-Learning is prodding me to think ahead to my next online class.  Two tips from the list caught my eye:

• Don't answer email while grading. Handle email at specific times each day and don't be tempted to check it at other times. Whatever it is, it can wait, and it is just a distraction from other 'less interesting' tasks.
• Discussions – make note of important contributions while reading discussion postings. Keep a gradesheet hard copy handy or have a spreadsheet open to make notes while reading. 

If I ever make online teaching a significant part of my work, I will need to become more efficient while on line.   Part of this will mean flitting between tasks less, avoiding checking e mail and discussions as directions from completing tasks.  More efficient work days will require me to concentrate on tasks, and then take breaks.

I also am interested in using spreadsheets to keep track of student contributions to discussions.  Grading forum discussions for me as usually meant using Moodle to count student posts or provide the sum of their post ratings.  I combine this data with a subjective judgement of the quality of comments.   I would like to add specific examples to my feedback to students, and the idea of keeping a file for each student in which to record these examples is attractive.  I know that feedback is only meaningful if it is timely and specific.  Using a document to record quality comments as I read them would be a vehicle for meeting both of these criteria, and thus make my assessments more useful for students.