Mea Culpa!

I am completely guilty of putting off this sections assignments until close to the end of the time period. Sheer laziness on my behalf. Its horrible of me, especially since I request time and time again of my own students to not do this when they have to rely on another student to provide comment fodder. I have not provided adequate comment fodder in a timely fashion.

Having owned up to my slacking on the home work, here is my beginning commentary on the course readings:

These are totally random thought I jotted down as I was reading, they will be meshed into a coherent and articulate response to the questions addressing the similarities and differences between designing and delivering DE courses and f2f courses, and the change in the instructor's role.

(Bates and Poole Chapter 7)
• I wonder how much of the course design is influenced by the software? would the UMUC course be structured differently if it was not using WebTycho but using D2L instead?

• So if my course designer was a "Lone Ranger" before I was hired to take on his courses does that make me "Tonto?" Do I really even want to contemplate calling DW "kemosabe?"

•Fear of lower qualified instructors, lower pay?
Ok I am very much concerned about this one. I do MORE WORK for my online course than I do f2f. I check on my students every day. They get more one-on-one than my f2f students do.
This does bring up a concern I have as an instructor. I had a discussion with my dean at the art school. He wanted some information about taking classes on line, and since I teach online he was interested in my point of view. He was very surprised to hear that I get paid just as much for an online course as I would for a live course. He had not expected that. I also told him that the online students get more of my time He was also taken aback when I told him I understood that developing courses were paid the same as teaching a course for a semester, and that it took roughly a semester to get a course online and ready to go.
I also said that it takes a person who knows the material to put a course together (design) and that it is best if they do know the material if they are running the course (teaching it).
This was a great chapter to read right now, especially since I am hoping to do some course design and to assist in course design over the summer for the art school

•Content free courses that become only the students' and instructors' opinions.
Ha! this is a good point. Actually it came up in class this week. Again my f2f class in art history, we had our poster discussions. This allows us to have 5 different "conversations" that relate to class, and the discussions cannot be dominated by one or two students. Well, one of the dominating students again asked why this format, and he said its takes away the fun of seeing where a discussion goes. I said no, it keeps the discussion on topic. Apparently there is a course where all they do is show up and discuss, what they "think" about something, and the section of that class I taught they were required to actually read the text book. And they wished the other guy taught art history! Whatever happened to going to school because you wanted to learn?

•Yet again the issue of course material in one class being of use to another class. I could have used some of the information in this chapter when I was working on the evaluation plan with the group in the other class.