Category: Exploration

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301 course Critical Inquiry Exploration Reflections

Training in the absence of active presence by a teacher

Classroom without instructor
Teaching Presence?

It is ironic that we are reading about how active presence of a teacher is a key element to CoI (community of inquiry), since this otl301 course and its precursors, otl101 and otl201 have notably lacked any real-time presence by monitors. There has been no feedback from instructors or designers of the training and little peer interaction, little in the way of what might be called community, in fact. We have been asked to consider several questions:

How has your view of the effective practice changed now that you have read more about teaching presence?

I think I have become more aware of how students feel when they enroll in a course and then feel left-to-dry by the curriculum and assignments sans human presence in the course. Reading about teaching presence has helped me to identify this lack in the current training agenda for online instructors at TRU-OL.

In what ways did the effective practice that you identified show the characteristics of teaching presence?

In my previous post, I reported a course where students collaborated to cover three times the amount of material on the subject of philosophy of language that they would have been able to cover by individual effort. I reported on the dynamics of class meetings and how students were entrusted with tasks whether others were dependent upon them to understand readings and to negotiate an understanding of various views of language and the basic questions considered by philosophers of language while they were formulating their own views in this regard.

My own knowledge of the field provided a certain amount of guidance and moderation when it was obvious that authors held divergent opinions and views. I could pull out quotes that I had collected, along with commentary I had provided in my own study. I could also guide students toward relevant sections of larger works that an initial reading might not be able to see as directly relevant to philosophy of language.

During the study groups sessions and the authorial review sessions, I floated between groups who were free to call on me to ‘referee’ disputes and provide suggestions for more focused study.

During the presentations, I moderated to make sure ideas were presented and questioned in a respectful manner, even when students of other authors had considered stances that were vastly different from the ones being presented.

How could the idea of teaching presence have made the experience even more effective than it was?

If I were to teach that course now, I would consider meetings with groups between class sessions to monitor individual study more closely, particularly with the more junior scholars. What I was effectively doing was teaching undergraduates (and graduates) in the style more like that of a graduate (or even post-graduate) seminar. Scholars with less experience can do this sort of study in groups, but they need more careful coaching and mentoring, given the distractions of undergraduate life.

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201 course Critical Inquiry Exploration

Revis(it)ed Learning Activities

I have a post category of learning activities on this blog. My updated version of the learning activities posts I have made so far can be accessed by following this link. Hopefully, this filtered view of posts on this blog will display the five posts that I have made showing learning activities during this course.

My aim in attending to learning activities has been to choose activities I do not have as much experience with as some others discussed in the readings for otl201, while also focusing upon activities that directly contribute to the learning objectives of a course. In this present case, I am concentrating upon activities that will increase student engagement in online courses, since that is a learning objective of otl201.

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201 course Critical Inquiry Exploration Learning Activities post 3 Resolution

The Aim of Student Interaction

Reading further in the same resource referenced in another post, I noticed the report that the actual nature of the activity seems to be less important than the “meaningful communication” between learners and instructors (M. Dixson, p. 8). Combining this insight with earlier discussions about empowering students to have input into the methods and standards by which they are assessed in the course, I would like to consider an activity early in an online course where students select learning objectives and consider activities, reporting on their understanding of how the activities will accomplish the objectives, as well as how they see themselves being able to provide evidence of minimal, adequate, superior, and excellent achievement in any assignment that will be assessed. The work of earlier students will remain on record for later students to build upon (and earlier students will also be able to review the work of later students, if they are still engaged in the course).

This should also provide a certain amount of self-assessment and reflection upon the work done in the course, rather than a dynamic where the student does the work and the teacher is the sole judge. There may even be the opportunity for group reflection upon individual work done over time.

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201 course Critical Inquiry Exploration Learning Activities post 3

Increasing Student Engagement

While reading an article reporting on different strategies for increasing student engagement in online courses, I had the notion to create a survey of live topics in my critical thinking course. In this activity, students would be presented with an array of topics and issues in the topic area. By their response they would identify:

  1. How settled their own view on the issue is;
  2. How aware they are of other views that could be taken; and
  3. The level of acceptance they have for other views.

Such a survey might then provide a list of suitable issues that could be explored in virtual debates, where students could present reasonable arguments for others to consider and assess for strengths and weaknesses.

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201 course Critical Inquiry Exploration Learning Activities

Social Matters Forum otl201

I have long encouraged my students to use Moodle as a social engagement area. To that end, I have a social matters forum in each course site. I require students to write a short introduction (2-3 sentences they don’t mind others knowing) and I give a long list of possible topics, so that students need not include information they are uncomfortable sharing.

The section of otl201 devoted to instructor strategies mentioned this as a strategy to increase social presence in the course.

The introduction (and a response to someone else’s intro) are the only posts I require, but I often alert students to social events that are happening on campus and around town, so they can see the forum’s purpose as an outside-class activity. Often students take up the practice of notifying others. However, more often, they choose to use a group created in Facebook for that purpose. This gives them more flexibility of who they choose to include (most often excluding the instructor–ouch!–but also including those within their comfortable social circles. It will be interesting to see how such practices might adapt/evolve in the context of continuous-intake courses where many participants may be the only ones at their particular point in the course being taken.