Week 4 Small Group Notes: Online Teacher

This is the summarized notes of group discussion for Week 4.
(Week 4 Small Group Notes)

A. Our group felt that the two most pressing issues for an instructor online were

• The time it takes to effectively prepare the materials and other resources, facilitate discussions and collaborations, integration of technology into course
• The level of technical expertise that is required of the instructor and also the support and resources needed to learn existing technology available and ability to keep us with the current trends
• Degree of teacher participation in the online course
• When to intervene. Time to intervene.
• How to motivate students to keep them engaged
• Changing role of the teacher—tension between traditional instructional expectations and learner-centered ones
• Incentives needed to teach online
• How to confront pedagogical issues online
• readiness
  - willingness/ role change/balance between student-centeredness & course goals
• Online academic authenticity: how to deal with inauthentic work by students?
  
  
  B. The roles of the instructor that all of us felt were important we
• Teacher as learner
• Teacher as facilitator
• The instructor providing the infrastructure required for students to have an optimal learning environment.
• Roles are changing
• Teacher as parent
• Teacher as assister or guide to learning
• Teacher as facilitator to individualize learning
• Teacher facilitates student collaboration
• How to establish conditions for an online learning community
• The instructor providing the infrastructure required for students to have an optimal learning environment.
• community builder

C. Incentives we all felt would be important to consider were

• Release time, recognition and tenure
• The opportunity to use technology that might not other been available, instance laptops or PDAs
• Intrinsic motivators—the desire to improve the learning environment for students
• Internal things like satisfaction
• External things like rewards
• Real world activities and connections
• Newness—just to have a chance to do this
• Recognize and reward regularly
• More teaching stuff at one’s fingertips—
• New skills, new competencies, new learning
• Possible research publications
• learning new technology
• innovation & adaptability
• meeting different learner needs
• future employability
• flexible work
• promotion
  
  D. Support that instructors would find valuable
• Communities of learning
• Instructional Designers as resources to help instructors design online courses.
• Self-help if not getting support from organization
• Training
• Private consulting
• Mentoring and tutoring
• Course assessment development support
• Administrative support
• technical
• pedagogical
  
  E. Expectations
• Adequate funding, support and resources for technology should be available to help design and facilitate online classes.
• Students expect you to be available 24 hours a day.
• Technology would decrease the amount of time required to facilitate class
• Online 24 hours X 7 days X 52 weeks
• Technology will work
  Unrealistic expectatio
• Can develop a healthy learning community online
• Flexibility will be there
• Expect to try some new things
• get information quickly
• better quality of instruction
• students need to be prepared