In a couple of days, we’ll be offering two workshops at MiraCosta: one is a Beginning Online Teaching workshop and another an Online Class Showcase. Each is only 80 minutes long!
The Showcase is the result of a number of instructors, those who’d been teaching online a short time, asking if there was any way they could get into the classes of more experienced folks and look around. The ensuing discussion led to a number of concerns:
- that unauthorized people would get to look around the classes
- that such unauthorized people might use things they see for evaluation purposes
- the people would get in at some level of access that might make it possible for them to “mess up” the class they’re visiting
- that there wasn’t time to “clean up” the class before people visited
I really do understand these concerns, but my gut response was to wonder whether the instructors understood that they would control who is added, that they would surely only add them at the student access level, and that they shouldn’t feel shy about their class since it was clearly good enough for their current students. In a larger sense, some fear is justified — any number of technical people have access to all our courses and all our administrators. But I didn’t get the feeling that this larger concern was the source of the objections, but rather a more immediate feeling of threat.
The result is that instead of having an open lab session with participants clicking around our offerings, we’ll have a presentation tour of some online classes. This will give people a chance to see how five or six instructors set up and run online classes, without risking any discomfort on the part of those demonstrating.
For the Beginner’s workshop, instead of presenting a formula or process, our intention (developed by Jim Sullivan) is to discover what the participants need in terms of guidance. We’ll do this by asking: what are the top three things you wish to achieve in your online class? Then we hope to cluster ideas as they emerge and offer some advice.
