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Reduced transactional distance and online community
At the start of COVID, I hastily wrote a post about teaching online using email and a phone. I wrote that post because I was concerned that faculty and institutional support staff would be overloaded with trying to move courses into a learning management system, which isn’t always an easy undertaking. In some institutions where there isn’t much capacity to support faculty it seemed like it would be an overwhelming task for faculty to have to learn how to use a learning management system if they’d never been in one before. My approach in this circumstance has always been to identify the the lowest common denominator tool from an access…
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Student Conditions and Access in the Online Pivot
It’s been just over a week since I posted a short piece on how to teach online with email and a smartphone and what a week it’s been. There’s continued to be great support and resources being shared and some of us are settling into a new reality. I’m encouraged by the emphasis on care and flexibility, and in reflecting on all that has gone on this week I think the first task in moving online is not deciding what technology to move to but what kind of access and conditions your students have in their new reality and take it from there. It’s a bit late for some educators…
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The OER project
originally uploaded by semaphoria Today is the day that I’m launching a personal project that I’ve been brewing for a while. My interest in what is happening in the OER world right now has extended to a desire to try and understand what the self-directed student experience would actually be in attempting to use OERs to learn a topic area that would normally be measured as a degree level course. I’m having a bit of deja vu right now, since for my MA thesis in 2001, I spent 2 months documenting and journaling my attempt to use only freely available internet resources…
