Online chat

Well I had planned to hold my first onine chat last night for the unit. There were only two people that were engaged with it, myself as instructor and another student. The other student has been in constant contact with me throughout the semester, via skype and phone - which has been great! I offered this up to all the other students at the beginning of the semester but none of the others seem to have taken this up. I am really quite surprised by this as online and distance education learning is really very difficult if there is not much discussion. I think that using the internet can only go so far. Words in emails and on announcements can be misconstrued - so from my perspective it is great to talk. As an example of this I spoke on the phone to a couple of students about one their assessments. They seemed genuinely excited and happy that I made the decision to give them a call and seek to clarify their questions. Back to the online chat though. I did hold this at 5pm hoping this would last an hour and that some fruitful discussion would take place. Perhaps this was too early? Perhaps students are working at this time and cannot study or interact in this environment. How do I find this out? Make this more explicit in the introduction section of Blackboard. I tried this with a discussion board posting, which was only partially successful. Perhaps I need to make sure that I am really very explicit and perhaps do up a proforma so that the students can fill this in at beginning; and I can find further details about them. Yeah I think this is a good idea. So I will have to email them all, will do so later this morning and try and ascertain what is the best time for this to occur. Speak with some other academics that have had success about this. I suppose it points to my pedagogy - I probably need to set this up early in semester. The student that was on chat board suggested (what a very good idea!) that perhaps it needs to occur every fortnight at the same time - this comes back to how I set this up in semester or with this online teaching pedagogy; I really believe that online students should not have just a one way experience (eg read paper, answer questions) - this form of pedagogy is teacher directed, is owned by the lecturer and does little to interact with the students. I should be better than this.

I also really wanted to get some feedback about this semester. I have really made some effort to get the site up and running, the assessments to be 'practical' and useful and the engagement at a higher level. But this has been hard - without FB on this (& formative FB at that; not the summative FB out of unit evals) it has been difficult. It is not like face to face classes where you can often sense whether students are having success or not.

Signing off.

Nearly a month!

It has nearly been a month since I hae made a posting to the blog on my online teaching. I really want to be in a position to conceptualise how the self-study works and have had a conversation with a colleague of mine about these processes. Do I do this on myself or do I do with via collaboration with another staff member?

The students have been away on their teaching placement for the last 4 weeks and during this time I have continued to develop their online learning platform. I have created the podcasts, I hope they find this useful? How do I know it is really difficult to get some feedback from the students about my online teaching. What can I do, perhaps I might need to post something up on the platform to see whether this is appropriate. Yeah why not, I think I saw a reading on self study about the issues of engaging, reflecting in action and then changing the pedagogy throughout. Is not this the sign of a good teacher? I am sure that it is. I did make a call for the students to make a posting here, I even gave them the URL for the blog. Why have not they posted any of their comments? This concerns me a little as online learning environment really needs to be discussion driven. But on the same page it is interesting that they might not want to make their postings public, they might prefer them to be private. But I think that the online environment and teaching is relationship driven, it is always dialectical and needs to be open in this way.

Back to the content - I have created a new folder which provides students with the opportunities to make comments about their teaching placements. I have even tried to embed a twitter screen into this week so that students could tweet their thoughts on their placement. Once again is this because students are overwhelmed with the technology or is there some other reason. Feedback, I need to get some feedback. I remember being to a session a couple of weeks ago on online learning tools. Yeah I think that I am a leader in this sense, I use twitter, podcasts, embedded videos, different folder icons. I do need however to continue using some other conferencing facilities so that I can give students a real time opportunity to discuss these issues. Surely this would be an opportunity to develop and use some feedback about the unit. I did post a survey for this so maybe it might work. Oh I can not access the tool myself, perhaps I need to get the e-desginer to help me out with this. I did go and speak with this individual about some other things, but now I have remebered - I wanted to ask about the online chat environemtn in MUSO or something else.

Content - so I created some sites for relfection on teaching placement, this hopefully should do the trick. The following module was focussed on contemporary issues. This is really tricky as I know most students will choose the issues of obesity, health, fitness and others - how do I get them thinking in other ways. The issues that they are most likely are facing them relate to issues such as academicasation, technologicsation (is this blog contribuitng to this or not?)healthisation and sportisation plus others. Green talks of this and has written well on this topic. Hopefully the students will have a read of this.

Is really putting questions in a tutorial form an effective way of learning, it helps students learn at different rates - so perhaps. But is just seems really cold. I have given them podcasts and videos and readings all in multi-modal ways. So I really hope that this is effective. The last module I am currently working on and relates to Physical Education futures? What next for our future physical education teachers. Clearly it is related to them finding a job, might need to think about a session on writing to key selection criteria.

Enough for now. Need to invite my colleague into this.

Finishing Task 1 (Assessment 1)

I logged on today and found that I had no checked the posts for about 5 days...shit this is not good when time like this has elapsed. I have particularly focussed on staying in contact with all these students. It is hard enough not to be able to speak with these individuals face to face the only way that I can do this is via Blackboard and other mediums (as an example of these other mediums I have attempted to use podcasting and audio tools to allow students to hear my voice, instead of just being an amorphous thing).

There are still a couple of students that have not logged on to any of the groups of assesment 2, is this my fault? have I not been clear enough? I made sure that I put an announcement to give these students an opportunity (last week)to give the students the chance to choose groups for themselves. I know that learning in the online world is much much different from face to face but the low interactivity in general on the site is somewhat concerning. I want the students to see how to develop a portal in such a way as well.

Are they reading this journal? I am not sure...The students have been asked to respond to their thoughts on the engagement with this unit through their reflective journal. Have they had a look at this site that enables/prompts them to think about their teaching? Where are there ideas for feedback, thoughts, emotions for them. What other prompting tool could I use...email them...make a podcast explaining to them to respond...this is a little hard here. I do hope that the students will at some point spend some time reading my thoughts here and are able to translate this to their own professional learning as either a student-teacher or teacher. Clearly there are some issues associated with using such a medium, but the importance of writing in this way is to uncover the pedagogical reasoning/rationale for teaching in the way that I have.

Enough for this evening. My baby girl (Sacha; 2 years is crying) and I need to go and tend to her.

Trent

Change in staff!

Well the election has been called. What does this mean for the on campus class? The staff is a candidate for election. She has called me and told me that she will have to resign and give her unit over to someone else. How is this going to work? Aren't I as unit leader going to be put into a position where the unit scores are going to be viewed negatively because of this. Shit! Why am I thinking about unit scores? This is a very personal thing to say? Why am I getting caught up in the notion of the academic BS that goes on? You should really be supportive of her development. You are not your CV. This is a quote from an article by Sparkes which discusses the relationship of the audit culture in universities. "You are not your CV" "You are not your CV" . Make sure that you call the new person and give them all the support you can. This is the person that you are.

I know that this person will do a great job, but really it is an unenviable task - she has been thrown in at the deep end and what kind of support can I give someone that is working over 200km away. The phone does some things but really we need to be doing things face to face. Is this problematic in our teaching? We are on 2 different campuses with 200km between us and she will be teaching on a third campus. Sometimes I really hate this gig. I want to do the best for all involved, the teachers, the students and the university but this is really frustrating and in reality is not fair on anyone.

Let's try and support her as best as possible. Help, help, help and support. That is what stduents want to see. Mentoring of staff, but why the hell is the notion of being measured at the forefront of your mind. What has the university done to you?

Week 3

Well the first assessment is in - a philosophical task on the importance of PE to education. I am really looking forward to these to see how many of the students have read and demonstrated their understanding, especially beyond the scientific. But this will also tell me about my pedagogy in this class and how I have set up the online environment. You have all seen my other posts on how I have worked on this for long periods of time, but this is where we may see some pay-off or not!

The discussion boards as the interactive mechanism with the group is starting to pay off. We have had some really great discussions with individual students about who they are and how they became physical education student-teachers. I am responding at the moment to these individually one-by-one trying to highlight a couple of points and even drawing some research into them. Is this an appropriate strategy? What do the students think about the approach presented to them? They are not really replying to one anothers posts yet. Perhaps I might need to put a reminder announcement on the importance of responding to others posts, how a discussion and clarity may come of it during the process.

The next couple of weeks will be focussed on planning. I hope this goes OK, but with only one post on their experiences in week 1 I am not sure what is going on. I have heard that some don't have the text - I wonder if this is impacting on what they are trying to achieve. Will pay attention here.

It is finally starting to work!

I logged in today and finally saw that some students had started to engage with the discussion boards but also with the Assessment tab here. What a relief! I was beginning to think that there were no students in the unit. I have had about 6 of the 14 actually engage which I am happy about. At one point I was going to start to allocate the students to groups themselves for assessment two aas not much was happening. I might still need to do this soon if students don't seem to engage...we will play a waiting game! I tried to individually respond to all the discussion board messages that were posted. My rationale for this was not only did it personalise the experience is but this form of discussion board can generate 'data' that gives themes based on experience and then students can see how thematic research occurs using qualitative studies.

SOme very good responses based on personal experiences - they seem to be really switched on so hopefully some of the readings (especially Arnold and some others) give them some questions to ponder in their own practice. I am also really looking forward to seeing their one page philosophical papers on physical education.