Teaching Again

I'm teaching again.

A colleague from a company I worked for invited me to join her and some others teaching online for an East Coast university, fairly well known. I've taught before, but this is my first "virtual' teaching experience. It has been interesting. It's also been surprising how much I learn about my students even with the limitations of the medium. We have webcams but don't use them that much as basically it's just a head shot of the person who happens to be speaking at the time and not all of my students have cameras.

I'm doing it part-time, which is just fine with me. The prep takes time and it's taking some imagination and effort to create surrogate means to do the group process stuff that I used to do in live classes.

I have taught before, both part-time, and for a year, full-time. The full-time gig featured three classes a week, two sessions each, of 60 undergraduate students. 180 final papers to grade was a serious overload. And undergrads at the time seemed a little more difficult than the grad students I have now. I remember being stunned when student after student came in to negotiate grades. A sampling of the pitches:

"Coach says..."

"My father is giving the daughter who has the best GPA a car..."

"My car insurance rates will go up if I don't get a better grade..."

It would never have occurred to me to even try to negotiate a grade in college. I could usually figure out why I got what I got, took it as a lesson, and then moved on.

I do try to take the grade element out of the equation as much as I can as it seems to distort things. My objective is that we learn as a team and I ask them to help each other and share their results with one another. Some get it. Some don't. Student norms about competitiveness and collaboration are interesting to say the least. Not unreminiscent of the ways that people behave in the workplace.

Makes me wonder if we aren't losing the art of collaboration.

Personally, I have been reflecting on my own learnings in the process. I think I am more patient with students than I normally am. I know that I work at trying to make sure I understand them and what they are asking or talking about, It is probably a little disconcerting to some of them that I routinely ask at the end of each class what worked and what didn't, and make changes based on their input. I do a midcourse correction exercise and suggest that they could do the same with any team they work with. They've had some good ideas.

And yes, there are some who work the system. One of the features of the online tools we use is a log of how much time individuals, including me, spend in the course. This term I have two who have spent more time than I have in the course. I also have two who have been in it barely more than the actual class meeting time. The first two are doing very well in terms of the quality of their output. the latter two, not nearly so well. 一分耕耘，一分收穫  (Copy that into your Google search box.)

The classes have been very diverse. More women than men, at least a couple for whom English is a second language. I have had students born in the Ukraine, Jordan, and China, and probably a few other places I don't know about. I've had one active duty military who flew in for his first class from somewhere east of wherever you are reading this. My guess is they are mostly late twenties or thirty something. They're doing a Masters or certificate program for professional career reasons, for the most part.

One curious thing about teaching online is that with the exception of "Professor"--and I still cannot quite get used to being addressed that way--status differentials dependent on visual cues are minimized. I think it is one of the positives of the medium.

Gotta go get ready for today's class now...