Before I Take My Classes Online (1 of 3)

In this three-part series, drawn from Chapter Four of Understanding Bible by Design  (Fortress, 2014), I address three questions commonly asked by face-to-face instructors who are considering–or who have been asked to consider—their first online course.

It may be that you’re already excited about the possibilities of online learning, or maybe find yourself compelled while yet skeptical. Perhaps you have been invited to teach online for the first time…or have been coerced by some means into doing so. Perhaps you have had some experience with online teaching, and it hasn’t worked out well. Whatever your trajectory to this point, you stand at the start of a trek into a foreign land. I frequently tell my learners that reading the Bible is always a cross-cultural experience. Here, I invite you to see online learning and teaching too as a cross-cultural experience—but into a foreign land in which you might elect to establish a permanent residence. Think of it as a second home.

Venturing into this foreign country, you’ll naturally be drawn to grasp at any practices or ways of thinking that promise as little change as possible. After all, we are creatures of habit, and it’s human nature to try to minimize a change in environment. But you don’t make a home in the desert by turning it into the North Woods with which you are more comfortable. You don’t adapt to college by insisting it can be just the same as high school. You don’t prosper during a student-exchange semester in France by trying to recreate your own home within that of your hosts. Consider the ways that we successfully adapt to new environments: (1) we expect culture shock; (2) we become informed; (3) we observe and imitate those prospering in the new environment; (4) we begin integrating the new with the old. Chapter Four of Understanding Bible by Design will get you started into this process. If you have friends or colleagues who are already teaching online, and happily, talk with them as much as possible. Find out what they like about it, so that you can begin to imagine experiences, and not just that collection of humiliations that makes up your secret fears about online teaching. Ask them questions like these.

“Can I Do [Insert Your Favorite Activity Here] Online?”

“I always have my students do [Activity X]. Can we do [Activity X] online?”

The good news is, you probably can. Small-group discussions, debates, student presentations, icebreakers, case studies, role playing—a lot of our favorite classroom activities can be accomplished online. The less-good news is, they are often best accomplished in some form very different from what you know in your face-to-face classroom. For example, it’s easy to create two small groups and set them against one another in a formal debate. However, it’s much easier to manage this asynchronously, over several days, rather than in some synchronous format. (A synchronous approach—say, using a Google Hangout—has a much higher overhead in requisite student skills, bandwidth, and preparation.) But—to get back to good news—the new format imposed on you by the conditions of online learning will come bearing its own gifts. For example, many instructors find that they like asynchronous discussions: comments are more carefully thought through; it’s almost impossible for a few students to dominate the discourse; classroom wallflowers tend to blossom.

From an Understanding-by-Design perspective, though, one is forced to ask: “Why do you assume that you are going to do [Activity X] at all, in the online incarnation of your course?” The resources and activities normal to your face-to-face course are the least important thing about that course. What really matters—and you probably know this already, consciously or unconsciously—are the big ideas and essential questions animating the course, and your convictions concerning what a learner must do in order to show compelling evidence that they have acquired the enduring understandings representing the goals of the course.

So, when we translate our face-to-face course into an online environment, we’re not packing a bag full of our habitual resources and activities, because they’re not actually our beloved children. They are just the children’s paraphernalia. Our beloved children are the enduring understandings that animate the course, as we articulate them in our Stage-One and Stage-Two planning in Understanding by Design. That’s what’s going into the travel bag.

In a pair of follow-up posts, I will address two other common responses:

“But Commmuuunniiittyyy!”

“So, I’ll Be Able to See All Their Faces, Right?”

 

Understanding Bible by Design: Create Courses with Purpose is part of the Seminarium Elements book series.

Order today at fortresspress.com and Amazon.com.

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Photo Credit: untitled portrait, by Gerd Altmann (offered into Public Domain)

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