Essential Question:
What would you require of instructors who taught a course you designed? Why?
When a
person designs or is a part of designing a course, they know the details and
intricacies of the entire course. This makes teaching the course fairly smooth
because they understand the reason of each activity and the intentions of
having an assessment or collaboration time. When the course is passed off to another
teacher that was not a part of the design, then the learning environment is not
known and it is needed that the teacher learns the course as if they made it themselves.
The major expectations that I have for an instructor who is going to teach a
course that I have designed will be to know the content and technology, to
provide meaningful interaction between students and between teacher and
student, and provide timely and meaningful feedback and support to the students.
Moore and
Kearsley explains interaction is key in having a successful course and this
includes learner-content interaction, learner-instructor interaction, and
learner-learner interaction in distance technology courses. High level
interaction looks like the instructor responding to all inquiries, students
responding and initiating messages, two-way visual and text exchanges between
student and instructor, students share results and feedback with other
students, and encouraging communication between students. (2012) Having
interaction with the content and people gives the maximum learning experience
because students are processing the material and speaking about it with others.
Teachers
should also think about how the course is going to begin and what information
the instructor needs to give to the students. A checklist that is provided for
Online Instructors by University of Wisconsin is helpful and it contains the
following main things for instructors to cover: course management system,
course maintenance, reference citations, course multimedia accessibility, news
and announcements, gradebook set up, virus protection, course calendar,
syllabus, welcome email, pre-course survey, student orientation, student
contact info spreadsheet, course goals, learning objectives, ground rules, discussion
prompts, past course evaluations, and course assignments. (2016) This check
list is very helpful for an instructor who may be teaching a course I designed
so that the course is organized for the students to learn successfully.
Moore, M. G.
& Kearsley, G. (2012). Distance Education: A system view of online
learning. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
University of
Wisconsin-Stout (2016). Checklist for online instructors. Retrieved from https://www2.uwstout.edu/content/profdev/teachingonline/before.html.
I too loved the checklist from the University of Wisconsin! It was so concise, yet detailed. My brain works from lists and if I were teaching someone else's class it is exactly what I would want.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the biggest make or break is the interaction. In my opinion, it is just like any course whether distance or face to face. Students that feel connected just do better. If you know someone will comment back or ask you why you didn't do something you are more likely to do it. You don't want to let someone down. Now this isn't true for everyone, but I believe for the majority it is true. I think if I were to give one bit of advice to an instructor it would have to be interaction as well.