Summary and Citations:
St. Clair shared his experience as a first-time online teacher. His learnings:
- The first time teaching a course online takes a lot of preparation and ground work.
- Grades were higher than his traditional classes.
- He supports an idea of selective technology use.
- Online students are different than traditional students.
"1. Add periods and Open University registration policies are often incompatible with online classes. For example, it often takes two weeks for students to successfully add a class. With ten-week quarters, this is a problem. Traditional class can compensate by allowing waiting students to “sit-in” in the interim, but this is not possible in online classes (e.g., Blackboard access requires enrollment in the class). As a consequence, newly-admitted student entering at the end of the add period will have effectively missed twenty percent of the course. ...
"2. Class scheduling needs to consider an online instructors mix of traditional and online classes. ... my managerial economics course was taught while simultaneously teaching other traditional classes. I found the mixed format very difficult. The schedule and rhythm of online classes are very different from traditional classes. ... [administration] needs to take this into account for instructors who would rather not mix the two.
3. University scheduling is also a problem when it comes to time slots for online classes. ...
4. The university’s technical support for online classes is often inadequate. Blackboard experiences numerous problems, shut-downs, slow-downs, and quirks that frustrate online students. They frustrate instructors as well. Worse, there seems to be no real back-up to Blackboard. The development of an alternative or back-up to Blackboard would be most welcome. Barring this development, better help with technical problems is needed. I was usually left to handle most real-time Blackboard problems on my own because Blackboard support was generally only available during traditional university hours. Worse, some help channels were virtually useless. ...
5. University and college policies that require posted weekly office hours for online classes should be changed. ...
6.My final recommendation seeks a fundamental clarification or refinement in the university’s attitude toward online classes. I think that, like me, university policies worry too much about online classes becoming havens for shirking students. And if truth be told, the university also worries too much about shirking online instructors. ...There should be no “onus” placed on online classes to conform to policies that have little relevance to online instruction" (St. Clair, 2009, pp. 174-175).
