We all want to help our students. Even those of us who are not of the “caregiver” personality (I’m certainly not), want to share our discipline, and help students understand it and the course within which we explore it with them.
I know a number of instructors who go to great lengths to do this. They create tutorials and visual pathways leading students through the class. They think out discussion prompts carefully, rewording over many semesters to get the phrasing right so students understand. They screencast, podcast, send messages and announcements and reminders.
The development of such assistive elements for a class takes time and effort. Our Jing workshops at the POT mini-conferences are filled every time with professors eager to help guide their students. Many appreciate the vast encyclopedia of resources that is the web, and create engaging activities that access what it has to offer. Some are creating social bookmarking sites and Nings, each with accompanying guides on how to use them for their particular class.
Years ago, when I was constructing my second online class, I wanted to use links inside my lecture to assist students in gaining depth on certain subjects. I created lectures in HTML with lots of links. Over the years, I revised the lectures. Often I wanted to keep the links to excellent websites, but the sites kept disappearing or moving, leading students to frustrating 404 errors. My effort to utilize the web from my own perspective, my own written lectures, was great pedagogically but it meant I had to either find the missing site or track down a new one. Even this semester, when I’ve offered students extra credit to find replacement websites for those that have disappeared, I feel trapped by what I created.
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| cc Flickr unloveablesteve |
My audio recordings intensified the entrapment. Wanting to help students understand my lectures, I audio recorded them. Many students over the years, both visually impaired and not, have told me how much they appreciate hearing my voice and inflection. But this means that every time I revise a lecture, I must re-record. Not only re-record and upload so when they click the QuickTime button that section plays, but convert it to mp3 and re-zip the big file of all the lecture sections for those who download it and play it on the go. This also means that when a link disappears, I must find a new one or else me saying “link” in the lecture (as I did throughout for those not reading it and for the visually impaired) is silly.
If I decide to change something that affects the pathway of the course (create a wiki instead of a weekly forum, for example), I’d have to reconstruct all my visual guides, edit my FAQ, and re-do the screencast of how to make your way through the class. In addition, then, to a navigational overhaul I might wish to do, I have to remake all the assistive elements.
And I’m not even going to mention the entire technologies in which we create things, and then they disappear (OK, I’ll mention Furl, where I was trying to cache the web pages to prevent 404s).
Certainly, we have similar issues with classroom teaching, but often that is a matter of simply explaining differently in class. Here the technologies we want to use, want to use because they’re effective, mean far more additional work, stifling creativity and making us more reluctant to do something new.
And that’s bad in so many ways.
