As I prepare myself to design my "second" online course (I write second in quotation marks as I don't know whether to count the "first" one on Latin American Dialectology as one or not, since I just improvised its design,) I started reflecting upon my own experience as a distance learning student in an online classroom when I was an undergraduate student in college.
The tutorial I just finished was very condensed and informative. However it only shows what an online classroom "should" be or "could" be, according to the research. Now as a Professor, I think about my past experience in online learning and blame instructions (or lack thereof) in all my aches as I was going through a course titled Morphosyntax of the Spanish Language.
Instructions: clear, precise, and most importantly, tells you what you are supposed to do as a student in any class. Seems obvious, right? Well, not necessarily so! When I first read about the importance of instructions in the tutorial, I thought it was obvious we had to make every instruction understandable to students, but then I realized that even if that is our intention, we are not always successful, as teachers, at being clear about what we expect our students to do for an assignment. If this is a challenge we encounter on a daily basis in a traditional classroom where we are able to stand in front of our students and ask them "Are there any questions? Does everyone understand what they need to do for homework?" and we fail at being completely clear as to what we expect our students to do, it is CRUCIAL for us to be, dare I say, repetitive, in order for our students to understand to the letter what we want from them?
I can only go back in time and refer to my personal experience in order to talk about online courses. As an undergraduate student I got to take five online courses. The first one was about the morphology and syntax of the Spanish language. I thought it was my worst nightmare. I thought, "who teaches this online? This is like taking math without having it explained at all! I feel alone!" I had always been a very good student, but I kept getting B's and B-'s in all assignments for this class. I used to write to my Professor and never got the answers I wanted from her regarding my performance and how I could improve. I never got to meet her in person, so this only added to the frustration of trying to talk to someone who, in my mind, did not have a face or a body, because she was living in a condo in this magical place called the Internet, but some of my classmates who had the same Professor for a different class swore to me she was the most wonderful and caring person they had ever met, a side of her I never got to see. To me, she was the enemy; someone standing between me and the very desired 4.0 GPA for that semester. After getting a B+ as a final grade in that class I vowed never to take another online course, because I saw it as a waste of my time, my parents' tuition money and I was sure I was not going to learn anything. There and then I pledged my devotion and complete fidelity to traditional classes and traditional classrooms... until I took one of the most wonderful elective courses I have ever taken. It was a course on cultural patrimony, where the professor decided to "lecture" through PowerPoint presentations that showed three tropical penguins having a conversation amongst themselves about cultural patrimony and everything it entails. I felt I was reading a comic book, but the fact was that I was learning a lot more than I had realized at the time, because I still remember today a lot of the concepts and what constitutes cultural patrimony according to those cute little tropical penguins. I only realized I had learned so much in that online course at the very end, during the final exam, when I was able to produce very articulate and elaborated answers to complex questions regarding cultural patrimony. After I took that class, I realized it was not the topic nor the professor that made an online course good or bad. After all, you are not in front of the students playing charades in order for them to understand what you are saying. It is the quality of the design and the clarity of the instructions for the assignments in that online course that makes a world of difference to a student that will hate and not take anything away from the class and to the student that will love and learn things that will be in his/her mind for a lifetime. If students manage to surf through the online classroom as they do in their own house, where everything is very intuitive and "obvious" to find, then this will be a very rewarding experience to both student and instructor. After my cultural patrimony class, I went ahead and took three more online courses on Advanced Spanish-English translation, where instructions were clear and learning was accomplished.
So, in honor of Rumba, Bochinche and Safarrancho, the three tropical penguins that inspired me and motivated me through cultural patrimony to try to be an online teacher, I dedicate SPAN 202, my online classroom, to you. And, of course, to their magical creator, Professor María, from Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas, Venezuela, the best online teacher I ever had.
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