Kerrin's 2 cents' worth - 2
Please listen to this podcast before responding to the discussion prompt.
Transcript of pod cast
Music: Prelude No. 18 by Chris Zabriskie, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. freemusicarchive.org
Hello, this is Kerrin McMahan speaking. This podcast is titled, “Pacing Matters.”
As we know from the reading about Andragogy vs. pedagogy, adults need to be self-directed and internally motivated. We might take from that the belief that, since our students are mostly adults, we shouldn’t be too prescriptive about things like how and when tasks should be done. From there, we might move to the belief that an online course need not be specific about what must be accomplished, or the time frame for its completion.
Trust me, that last step is a mistake.
If you want to learn this the hard way, try teaching an online course that is entirely self-paced; that is, a course in which there are no due dates for anything other than the big Kahuna due date otherwise known as the end of the semester. Just put the assignments out there and say, “let me know if you have any questions.”
On the last day of class, as you start to grade your way through a mountain of mostly really bad work from students who have never asked a single question, while dealing with an even more colossal mountain of excuses, requests for extensions, and pleas for “extra credit”, reflect on the wisdom of expecting your students to take charge of their own learning process.
I know, when we were in graduate school we were handed a reading list at the beginning of the seminar, and expected to return a polished work of scholarship at the end, and what happened in between was our lookout. Your students are not in graduate school. Many of them are still teen-agers. Many of them were not successful in high school and don't have the slightest idea of how to be successful in college. Those who are mature adults may have been out of school for 20 years. You can’t put it all on them. That’s not the kind of teaching we do at a community college. Unless you think the majority of the students getting an F or dropping the class is a good outcome.
We need to help students pace their progress by imposing appropriate, and firm, due dates. Most of us, when we read our student evaluations from face-to-face classes, are accustomed to the complaint that we go “too fast.” Sometimes that’s justified and we need to adjust our delivery. But there are students for whom any pace would be “too fast.” Obviously we can’t cater to the least prepared learner; neither should we assume every student is as well-prepared and motivated as we were when we were undergraduates. You find a pace that works and stick with it. That might require some trial and error. My best advice is to follow Aristotle in avoiding the extremes. Don’t put a self-paced course out there and retire to your easy chair for the next 15 weeks. But don’t go to the other extreme of making something due every couple of days and being completely rigid about deadlines. Most of our students are adults with complex lives. The main reason they take an online course is for convenience. Give them a pace that will enable mastery of the material without either making them jump through hoops or leaving them on their own.
That’s just my 2 cents. See you online!