Online Fear of an Online Education Pioneer
Posted by Pamela Gustafson on November 26th, 2008
In 2002 I considered myself a pioneer in online education. Shortly before my 50th birthday, I took a leave of absence from my teaching job and signed up for three online classes. To help support myself, I was a substitute teacher. I wanted to be a technology integration specialist before the job actually existed in our elementary schools.
Two classes used Yahoo groups and emails to teach the class; the other was from a university, using a platform called Blackboard. I was confident going into this, but the fear factor increased as I moved forward. The volume of emails I received was far beyond expected. The excitement at the outset evaporated into a cloud of fear and drudgery!
I dreaded going to the computer to check my email and quickly learned how to sort it with folders. Even with the sorting system, it was still overwhelming. I told one instructor I was involved in three classes — she said I should drop one. What I was attempting was nearly impossible. I asked why she didn’t use Blackboard (so you can keep messages online and never download them to your computer). She said the platform was cost prohibitive. Too bad!
For the first time ever, after a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees, and many other credits; I took an incomplete in one class.
Tags: Online Education
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Fears Before Enrolling in an Online College, Student Voices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 29th, 2008 at 1:34 am
Significant topic, I believe. Although my personal experience has only been from the “teaching” end, I have taught online courses at both the high school and community college levels. As a teacher, online is more time consuming and more difficult in some ways ~ especially to motivate marginal students, but the benefits completely outweigh the negatives in my book! No commuting, few faculty meetings (yea!), budget issues for classroom fairly nonexistant!
One area that is often (in my experience)overlooked is the complexity of the online software that various schools choose to use. I have used the blackboard platform, and others that a consortium of schools created themselves. Each term I had to update and learn new software as the schools changed willy-nilly to save money… this total lack of consistency is difficult for students. They learn how to navigate one program only to find the next term there is another to learn!
In this same thought, it has also been my experience that many counselors ask students if they are computer savvy before signing off on an online course, and they *think* they are if they can send an email or chat or surf the web. Too many students actually have little experience in how to actually get a file to their instructor in a readable format that can be opened! I know this sounds weird in our generally tech savvy world, but students may be great at playing online games,surfing, sending chats, photos… but producing an academic work, actually “using” spell check and submitting in a proper format is something they need to know PRIOR to enrolling in an online course. Every school should offer a short course on how to take an online class! Review the software their students will use and explain how to use the basic functions. Self discipline is an absolute requisite for online education from both sides of the “desk”. Schools often ignore basics and “assume” to much to the detriment of students.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Thanks for responding to my post. I would love to teach online at the elementary and middle school level. I agreed with everything you said. I am using a combination of online/onsite education with my middle school special education students, using the MOODLE platform. Moodle is becoming a prominent online platform used by school districts, and happens to be the platform my school district uses. I spent a lot of time teaching Moodle to my students before allowing them to do their assignments on the platform. I also spent a lot of time “nagging” them to submit their assignments properly and to edit and revise their work. This was an advantage to a combination of online/onsite platform.