Dr. Karen Adsit started off the day of our Showcase of Teaching and Learning by presenting You can’t teach that online, can you?  She covered several myths of online education, including the myth that online education is just a fad and it’ll never catch on and stay! After 20 years, this myth has been debunked!

Another myth is that I won’t know my students OR I need to be able to see my students to tell if they are learning. The challenge, as a faculty member in an online environment, is to work with your students so that both you and they are able to “see” that they are learning.

A third myth is that you need to be a technological expert in order to teach online. One of the issues, though, is that learning technology is not sequential – you can learn things as you need to do them. It’s important, though, to consider students’ technological capabilities – it’s a myth that students know more technology than you do – in terms of the technology that you are using for the course. Students may know how to USE the technology, but they may not know how to LEARN using the technology.

A challenging myth is You aren’t teaching if you aren’t presenting. Like the tree falling in the woods, has teaching taken place if there is no learning? Does learning happen if there’s been no teaching? If you don’t lecture, you’re organizing content, engaging students, facilitating discussions, assessing and evaluating students (which are no different than a F2F class).

All online students cheat is another myth. Studies have shown, however, that the prevalence of cheating is the same for online and F2F. Google “educational cheating” for some fascinating ways that students cheat in F2F classes. There are several strategies that will help to lessen the opportunities for cheating. Design frequent assessments – such as a 5-question quiz or a 1-question essay – instead of longer assessments that take you, the faculty member, longer to grade.

A variation of the cheating myth is that online courses are easier (or harder) than F2F courses. Take your class in your pajamas! Why is it that the clothes you wear make something easier or harder?

Online classes take more time (variation: I’ll be expected to be online and answer questions 24/7) is another myth. The reality is that teaching takes as much time as you let it. As the instructor, you can set the parameters for things. For instance, you can say you have a 6-hour response time, or a 24-hour response time, or any other response time frame. Think about setting your response times as you would expect students to respond to you – if you expected a student to always respond within 6 hours, there would be many who wouldn’t be able to do that. Don’t set yourself up for response time failure!

Students often believe that online classes are self-paced – with a start button, doing activities as you choose to do them, and then end. It’s important to have time frames for different activities. Otherwise many students will wait till the end to work on things. You do need to have structured flexibility – the slinky framework (servers may go down, emails blow up, tornados happen, etc…).

Karen developed an excellent handout “Adsit’s Process for Putting a Course Online” that attendees received. It’s a very logically organized framework that provides a guide to best practices for an online course. If you’re a UTHSC faculty member, email tlc@uthsc.edu for a copy of that handout. You’ll be glad you did!

Q&A Time

What are some specific examples of showing presence in the classroom?
Send weekly announcements to students. Participate in a broad Socratic method in the discussion forum (dig deeper). Give students feedback. Don’t just post a score from evaluating something. Have an “ask a question” forum and require that students use it to post questions that are common to the course instead of individual emails.

Do you use social media to engage students or to just incorporate it in a class?
Used to incorporate Twitter feed into the course. Stopped doing that because students didn’t know what to do with it – did they need to read it all, what were the take-away points, etc… A lot of students also don’t know what to do with social media.