Hi. I’m Bob. I’ll be sitting in for Jean this week in the blog. Many years ago, in another life, I earned my living for awhile teaching people how to fly. There was an inside joke among flight instructors that went something like this: “You can’t really teach people to fly. You just keep the airplane from crashing while the students teach themselves to fly.”
So what do my little joke and this article have to do with one another? And what do they each have to do with our efforts here? In my opinion, we all have a strong tendency to simplify our job as educators into a single dimension; our favorite teaching paradigm. “Education is …” Fill in the ellipses with whatever paradigm you wish. In fact, I think education is the accumulation of a wide variety of student experience.
For me, these thoughts bring into question not just Distance (only) Education but also lecture (only) classes, lab (only) classes, discussion (only) classes, etc. Give this some thought: rather than picking one method of education, we should be assuring that our students get a broad exposure to all sorts of teaching in all sorts of domains. Richness may be the overriding quality needed in the educational experience.
Are you teaching distance courses? Do you use Mediasite recordings? If so, can the students use the Q&A feature to e-mail you questions as they watch? If they watch live, do you use Polls to make sure they are engaged? When you’re making your Mediasite recordings, do you look into the camera to try to connect to the distance students? Do you talk to the distance students? Have you ever used Centra to conduct online office hours so you can talk directly with the distance students?
Are you a lecture-only teacher? Do you find examples from the Internet? Have you ever considered recording your lectures so the in-class students can review the lectures later, at their leisure, and without scrambling to take notes? How about the Centra office hours for you, too?
These are just a few of the questions that are pertinent. If you’d like to discuss this with us, stop by. We’re eager to talk.
