A few years back, to make myself eligible for teaching community college and live out my dream of being a side character in Community, I got an online MS. It was pretty good! And pretty strange, after a decade as an educator, to be the educatee once again.
Especially strange to do it in this weird online world.
I wound up admiring pedagogical moves I expected to dislike, and frustrated with ones I expected to admire. Before the lessons all slip my mind — or “go local” in my thoughts, and stop feeling like new ideas at all — I wanted to record a few takeaways about how to structure an online course.
To that end, here are four YESes, two MAYBEs, and a big fat NO.
YES #1: Videos with personality.
Since you won’t meet students in person, videos are the only chance for modeling what expertise in this discipline looks like. So don’t just run through the technical exercises. Give us the flavor of the field.
What questions do experts asks?
What tradeoffs do they face?
How do they weigh the tradeoffs of their various tools?
Good production value is great, but more important is to lay out your expertise in its full variety and glory.
YES #2: Quick, frequent, automatically-graded practice.
Every form of learning involves some simple building blocks: vocabulary terms, basic concepts, elementary procedures. So don’t make this any more complicated than it needs to be. Every week, ask students what they should know, using closed-form questions that a computer can grade, and give them immediate feedback.
Multiple choice? Fine.
So easy that an eighth grader could do it? Also fine.
The point is not to stretch them intellectually here, but to make sure they’ve got the basics.
YES #3: Enriching, open-ended work (where you punt on actually grading it).
Learning involves more than just acquiring building blocks. You’ve got to build something with them! You’ve got to confront a natural question and apply your tools to solve it.
But here’s where too many teachers fall into a trap: they want unambiguous answer keys and objective grades.
Guess what? World ain’t like that. Learning ain’t like that. The good stuff is inescapably qualitative. Don’t try to stuff the vast feast of your subject into the panini press of objective grades. It just makes a mess.
Instead, accept this: the work needs to be meaningful, but the grade only needs to avoid feeling openly unfair.
So, design good projects, with any level of frequency (one of my best classes gave one per week; another good class gave only one during the semester), and just let the students grade each other.
Keep it crude and clean: 95% for good work, 70% for barely adequate work, 50% for lousy work. Each student grades (and is graded by) three others. Adjudicate conflicts, but don’t sweat the details. Just pick good tasks, and let the chips fall where they may.
YES #4: Build a student community.
Hard to do. And utterly crucial.
So try your best: require them to comment in hokey ice-breaker threads; assign students to study pods; do everything you can to get them talking to each other, because everything I know about education says this is the crux of it.
Now, the MAYBEs. I’m assuming that you, the MOOC instructor, would like a high-stakes summative assessment, one that’s more substantive than the “quick, frequent practice” (#2 above) yet with more objective-feeling grades than the “enriching, open-ended work” (#3 above).
I’ve seen two options, each flawed, and each defensible. Choose your poison.
MAYBE #1: High-stakes, spyware-administered exam.
In other words: make the students install HonorLock or some such monstrosity on their computer, and have it monitor them while they click through an exam.
I took a ton of these. I found them insulting and infantilizing. I also found them easy, which gave me the luxury to disdain them, so I limited by complaints to glaring at the camera while the “academic honesty” malware I’d installed on my computer verified whether my desk was sufficiently clean.
Not the best learning experience. But I recognize the pressures toward this format — pressure that sometimes comes from the students’ own expectations for “objective” assessment.
MAYBE #2: A big final project graded by your TAs.
Potentially a rich learning experience. Definitely a pain to grade. If poorly done, a breeding ground for academic dishonesty and its ensuing headaches.
So, while I prefer this approach to taking a closed-book exam while an “academic honesty” algorithm spies on me via my laptop camera, I realize this way is more labor-intensive, and I sympathize with the reluctance to take this path.
Anyway, those are the maybes. To close, I want to highlight one pitfall to avoid:
NO #1: Long, complicated, highly prescriptive assignments.
A common feature of my most frustrating classes. These manage to be the worst of all worlds: too long and infrequent to give quick, actionable feedback on basic skills; yet too narrow and prescriptive to give meaningful practice at open-ended, higher-order skills. The result: drudgery.
If you find yourself with an assignment like this on your syllabus, I recommend inspecting every question. Is it about an essential, basic skill or fact? Then turn it into a multiple-choice question that can be graded instantaneously. Or is it about a higher-order, contextual skill? Then build it into an open-ended, peer-graded assignment.
Final thoughts: Having now taught a few semesters of community college, it’s interesting to see the ways in which I do and don’t follow my own advice.
In particular, my Intro Stats projects aim to be rich, open-ended work, yet arguably fall into that “highly prescriptive” pitfall.
Then again, I’m not teaching M.S. candidates. My students are early in their path to a B.A., or still in high school, and what counts as “prescriptive” may vary as you move through education.
(At least, that’s my rationalization for breaking my own advice…)