Week 7

New Media for Online Learning

I have taught 3 online classes in my teaching career and every time I teach a class online, I am using a new media of communicating with the students in the class.  I like to explore and find interesting ways in which I am able to reach out to my students and answer/assist them with any problems or difficulties they may be encountering with mathematics.

My first experience with my online math class was using the e-pak and emails between myself and the students.  I would post bulletins on the bulletin board when there was a test or quiz coming up, but I would also send out a mass email so that the students in the class wouldn't be surprised or unaware.  Using email seemed to work out good for the students because all of the students who were active participants in the class checked their emails almost everyday of the semester.  I would also check my emails everyday and usually get back to student questions within 24 hours of them emailing me a question.

The only problem that I discovered with emailing my students is that I felt distant from them.  I like face to face classes where I can "read" the expressions on students' faces to see if they are actually understanding the material I am lecturing on.  By using the e-pak and emailing responses back to students when they had questions, I couldn't get that sense of satisfaction like as if I were actually teaching the class in front of them.  I actually didn't really feel as if I was teaching my class but instead just answering questions like a tutor and letting the e-pak teach the students the mathematics.

So the second online class I thought I would incorporate the discussion board idea and have students post homework questions on the discussion boards and give credit to other students who can successfully explain the solutions.  I would sometimes post more difficult questions for the students to answer as well.  This provided more interaction with both the students and myself and students were always checking the discussion board for the latest post to see if they knew the answer to questions that were being posted. 

This new form of communication between the instructor and students was a little better than just emailing alone.  I still emailed reminders out to students and they would still email questions they had regarding certain problems, but at least we had more than one form of communication that we could use. 

The last online class that I taught was an intermediate algebra class and I wanted to use some of the technologies that Dr. Newberry has used in this class.  So in addition to the discussion board, email, and the e-pak from the publisher, I thought I would try podcasts and creating my own videos for more difficult problems in algebra.  For extra credit, I would post on the discussion board a difficult problem and the students would be able to attempt to answer the questions my posting their responses on the discussion board.  The student with the first correct response would be award the extra credit points for that problem.  If none of the students could answer the problem, I would create a Camtasia video explaining how the solution was found.  At first, these were audio only, but with the addition of a tablet pc, I was able to do screen recordings of the step by step procedures of how the solution was found.  The students really appreciated the videos and most of the students found the screen captures to be more helpful.

It seems like every time I teach an online class, I learn more and more of the capabilities of the media that is available and the amount of communication that students want from the class.  I have not had the experience of using a threaded discussion in my own online class.  I have used Skype to communicate with students over the internet, but Skype requires that we communicate synchronously.  But the advantage of using Skype was that there was no loss of understanding between me and the student.  The student could ask me a direct question when something was not clear. 

I have never heard about Second Life until this week in the podcast.  I would like to explore they new form of media to see how I could integrate this into my online classes.  It sounds like something that community college students might benefit from and enjoy using in the future.  Perhaps this could help students who normally have a phobia of mathematics become more comfortable discussing math related problems if they do not have a fear of embarrassment from their peers.

James