First of all, creating a relationship with your students is the primary consideration. If your connection with the class is robotic and impersonal I think kids just get turned off. The great feature of online learning is that personalization, and differentiation is required. You're dealing with kids one on one for every assessment and through email, blogs and discussion posts. Through in some face to face interactions and I think online learning can be every bit as fun and engaging as the physical classroom. That being said, if you're a bad teacher going online won't by itself work miracles. After all you can't make chicken soup out of chicken....OK, I'm not going there.
I also think online learning loses credibility if it's a freaking joke. If kids just copy and paste from wikipedia or ask.com into electronic worksheets no learning takes place. The class needs to be challenging as well as fun and rewarding. Again, that's up to the teacher and course design.
Finally--the cheating thing. We must find ways to not only identify cheating, plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty, but we also must engage kids in ways that they won't feel the need to do that. How can we trigger their motivation to honestly engage in challenging work?
Part of me thinks this is complete bogus. Whether the teacher is great or poor, friendly or pirate-like, the student can learn if he/she tries. In the ten years I have worked as a teacher in public schools all I have heard about is "personalization" and "differentiation" and any other pedagogical term de jour, and grades are flat. Perhaps this catering to the student as if he/she is the consumer, is in fact enabling students to actually act like disgruntled customers, willing to throw a fit until they get what they want.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the lesson that teachers should strive to teach, is that students, teachers, children and adults alike must learn to get along and work together, especially if they don't like one another. The virtual format may make the student-teacher relationship more content-specific and less personality-dependent.
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ReplyDeleteBig Kahuna Online Trainer: I agree one of the most important aspects of online teaching is building a relationship with students. I think that is also true in the traditional classroom.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Herr D: I agree that the majority of "new" ideas in education are simply recyled ideas from the past that were thrown by the wayside for one reason or another. But when I think about the best teachers that I had in one subject area or another, they were always the ones that I felt a "connection" with. I would be the first to admit that I don't take the time to get to know all of my students and parents as much as I should. One nice aspect of the online class is that I can connect more with each individual learner.
ReplyDeleteGreg: What are some suggestions that you have for helping us build relationships online?