Another Academic year, another rich menu of MOOCs from which to choose. Pedagogy First is offering the Program for Online Teaching again. I heard Lisa Lane tell about it (in a hangout with Jeff Lebow, I think) some time ago. Somewhere between the connectivist cMOOK and content-centric xMOOC, Lisa describes it as “task based” and a “sMOOC” (for small MOOC). Thanks to Stephen Downes’ OLDaily, POT came to my attention again at just the right time.
I “fell” into online teaching when learners in other communities asked if they could join our Tłı̨chǫ Language classes last winter. Blending local f2f learners with online participants presents unique challenges. I muddled along, trying to reinvent the proverbial wheel by cobbling together Skype, trial subscriptions to Blackboard Collaborate, email lists, and my Moodle installation. To my surprise, it was considered a success, and I’ve been asked to repeat it this year. My fledgling online teaching experience should give me hooks where I can hang new learning from POT. And, while not safe-as-in-sandbox, my language class will be my proving ground. They will judge whether my pedagogy improves as I journey through this sMOOC.
Hi, Jim! It would be great to chat with you a bit about how you combined F2F and online participants together for a learning experience. I have experimented with that, too, with others in the Program for Online Teaching. It would be great to hear more about your experience.
Laura, I’d love to compare notes. Our class was very free-flowing, addressing items raised by students and the language expert from a cultural perspective. It involved a lot of narrative. Classroom participants tended to focus on others in the f2f group, and it required some effort on my part to keep the online participant(s) included. We usually had only one to three online participants.
From a tech viewpoint, I found Skype far superior to Blackboard Collaborate (why couldn’t they just keep calling it Elluminate???) because of the noise cancelling issues. When a live group is one of the participants, it’s not possible to use headphones, and managing microphones is just awkward. It tended to isolate the online participants even more in the conversation. There was also an issue with how the session recordings treated the video, which was important in the discussions. When we were practicing content (word pronunciations) however, there was a more structured flow and online participants could take their turn. I liked the slides feature of BBC, much easier to use for content than chat and screen sharing in Skype.
The best way to share what has been tried in the Program for Online Teaching is to share these slides with you: <a href = "http://mccpot.org/wp/2012/07/on-site-or-online-how-about-both-creating-simul-learn-experiences/"On-Site or Online?. It was great to hear about your experiences! I haven’t tried Skype much, personally, so that was great to read more about your comparison of Skype and Blackboard Collaborate in your reply. It was great to learn more about the details of what you tried. Thank you for sharing! If you have any thoughts for me, too, let me know. You can find me through the Program for Online Teaching and Pedagogy First!
URL for above slides: http://mccpot.org/wp/2012/07/on-site-or-online-how-about-both-creating-simul-learn-experiences/