Week One in Review

I love the idea of keeping an online journal related to my class activities and reflection for my course at CSU East Bay in Online Learning and Teaching. This will provide me a record of my experience and knowledge gained as well as a way to synthesize the material I am learning.

Starting my first course
My first week back at school was challenging. Day one came and I had not received information on how to log into the course. I was sent an email with a pdf document to fax if I was still waiting for that information. I quickly scrambled to fill that out, faxed it and patiently waited for my email to arrive with login information. To my surprise it came relatively quickly, unlike the complications I seemed to always have as an online learner for my masters degree at Florida State University.

Once I received the instructions I gained access to the Blackboard course management system. I am not a fan of Blackboard. I support open source or independent course management systems that have more flexibility. Blackboard does not seem very user friendly to me, although I can see that there have been improvements since I last used it.

Discussion forums
I posted my profile, read other students profiles and responded to a few of them. Many of my classmates seem very interesting. I look forward to getting to know them and working with them in this course and hopefully more in the future as I continue through the program.

The discussion forum posts were a bit overwhelming. I like having to read materials and write a response, but at the same time I felt a bit lost. I could not remember which forums I had replied to and I was getting frustrated at the slow response from the Blackboard system. Once I logged in and the system was doing maintenance. I had not been aware of the time frame that I would be locked out of the course, so now I know I won't be disappointed!

Team formation
I am pretty shy in general. I like to be a good student and a good team member. Generally I wait and see if someone will step up and be a group leader and if nobody seems to be going in that direction I will volunteer. That was the case for the team formation. I tried to take the lead in creating a third team as two other teams were already formed and looked like they had a fair share of members already. The process of communicating online to form it was difficult for me. In my FSU program, I had been assigned to groups which took a lot of that pressure off. This was difficult because someone would respond to all of the groups that they wanted to be a member, and then I would have to email and post a reply that 'please be in our group' and wait for confirmation. It seems like I spent hours trying to negotiate this process, constantly checking my email and waiting for the super slow Blackboard system to load the discussion forum responses. It all worked out in the end.


Reflection about my own online course
One thing that has been very useful to me is the ideas that are flowing in my head about the problems I see in my two semesters of teaching online. I had been looking forward to the online learning experience, determined to make the experience great for all of my students. Okay, maybe I was a bit naive. I realize how much time I am committing to the class, to making the students feel like they have an instructor who is available and gives useful feedback to them, encourages them, solves problems, etc. but at what expense to my own life? This past semester I had 57 students enrolled in my two courses, and about 45 of them were actively working on the course materials. Wow, was I overwhelmed. I felt like I could barely keep up on the discussion forums. Was it my responsibility to be active in those discussions or provide feedback as well? How do I find the balance? This is something I will continue to ponder on and hopefully come up with some new techniques for my upcoming course.