I try to post mostly good things about my job here, or to be vague if I feel the need to grumble. BUT YOU GUYS my job is making me a little hyperventilate-y just now. I am teaching an online summer class and it is not going well.
I think before you take a summer class it's easy to think of summer classes as laid-back. Mellow. It's summertime; ergo, the living is easy. Students also tend to think that online classes are easier than the face-to-face versions. So a summer online class should be approximately as onerous as taking a nap, right?
Except I am the person trying to squish a semester's worth of material into a month, and there is no way for that to be anything but onerous. This is stuff they will need to know, and many of them are just not learning it. A few of them don't even seem to be attempting to learn it. I can view the user stats on the back end of my course management software, and I still have students who have viewed a single-digit number of files here in week 3 of the term.
My chair and I had a helpful conversation about the class last week. I also sat down with our campus coordinator of online education, and implemented a couple of her suggestions. But here is a true fact: I can spend a lot of hours captioning my lecture videos to spell out the hard words for my students, but it's going to be easier for them if they watch the videos than if they don't. I have several students who are taking this class while working full-time. One is taking two online classes and also working full-time. As far as I know the Ministry has not issued her a Time Turner.
Right now the very last student is taking the second exam. It's tricky to write an exam for an online class. I don't want them to be able to google their way through it, and so I'm asking them to think and synthesize. I've been watching the scores trickle in today and the conclusion is unmistakable: thinking and synthesizing are hard.
One-way enthusiasm is also hard. I am doing my best to give them engaging and thought-provoking lecture videos. I am trying to set up online discussions in which they can learn from each other while contemplating interesting questions.
It doesn't seem to be working.
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