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.