Great advice from Alex, and just what I need right now.  After a whirlwind period since March 1st, where I went from teaching one class and scurrying for work to teaching 6 classes in one term and starting my PhD program, I now am done with teaching for the month of July and “taking a deep breath” as I work on this new concept in my life called “relaxing.”

Viewing Alex’s presentation for this module helped me get more focused on the task at hand of developing my strategic management course.

For this assignment, I’m going to focus on how the “five factors have contributed to online success.” (Pickett, 2008)

The five factors are below, followed by my comments on each

– Passion for teaching “You don’t need to be an amazing technologist” (Pickett, 2008)

I love teaching.  Anyone mad enough to go from teaching one course at one college to 6 courses at two for a semester while commuting three hours each weekend to get home has passion for teaching.  But seriously, what made me wake up to effective online teaching was the fact that the technology is just a tool; it’s the passion behind it that makes it effective.

By putting the same drive into your online class that you do F2F, you can recreate the energy, even if the platform is different.

– Willingness to “rethink” how you teach – reconceptualizing what you do F2F in the online environment (Pickett 2008)

I enjoy the spontaneity of the F2F environment.  It has encouraged me to make my discussions vibrant and encourage the students to communicate “real-time”, but asynchronously.  What I mean by this is as I put together my discussions of the cases, I can reflect back on the prior discussions so that the thoughts from prior modules stays fresh.  Having a basic concept of the discussion is great, but for that particular element, I don’t necessarily have to know what discussion question I have to ask from week to week, just a general idea.  This will get me to rethink how I run discussions, but moreso get me to rethink how to do so online.

–Commitment and time to develop (Pickett, 2008)

I’m being forced to rethink how I am using my time to develop my course.  Seeing my thoughts and words on a computer screen ready for anyone to view has given me the structure I need to be an effective online instructor.  Sometimes, I get feeling that some of my lectures can be run by the seat of my pants depending on the topic for the week, but that won’t pass muster online.  There needs to be more defined parameters, and more upfront planning to make sure the topics flow properly, something a non-timed environment must reflect.

– Complete course prior to teaching (the discipline to do so) (Pickett 2008)

Now that I’m just doing my online course, I need to have discipline to focus on this task.  I’m so used to runnying around like crazy to get everything done that I need to be better at focusing given the additional time I have on my hands now.  So I’m as of today getting back to doing my schoolwork at 6am when no one I know is awake and I can “pretend” the rest of my day is full of commitments.

– Institutional/administrative support (Pickett 2008)

So reliant are we on ourselves when we teach a F2F class! But I’ve seen the resources available now to me at my school, so I know I can leave the technical side to my school, and rely on the effective resources I have to concentrate solely on the content.  I can refocus on working on the content offline (especially in this module), and then use Moodle as a tool to house this information, vs relying on making sure I save my work as I go and hope I don’t accidentally hit the back button on my browser and lose all my info (as I did a couple times already with discussion posts!

Robert (3.5)