Before I Take My Classes Online (3 of 3): “So, I’ll Be Able to See All Their Faces, Right?” Posted on February 5, 2015 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorIn 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. In two previous posts I addressed these often thought, if not expressed, anxieties about going online with a course: “Can I Do [Insert Your Favorite Activity Here] Online?” “But Commmuuunniiittyyy!” For the face-to-face teacher and learner, entering the online teaching environment is a cross-cultural experience. It’s natural to try to hold on to the familiar, even when aware that this can interfere with a genuinely immersive, transformative experience of an unfamiliar environment. Find your points of discomfort, and ask questions (like those in this blog series) of instructors who already teach online. How about this prickly discomfort, for instance… “I need to be able to see all their faces.” For starters, let’s observe urgently that any utterance beginning with “I need . . .” reflects, by definition, a teacher-centered approach to course design. It’s natural, habitual, insidious: I’m asked to teach a course, and right away I ask myself, “What do I need to teach this material? Let’s see, I’ll need lecture notes, I’ll need a textbook that jibes with my approach to the material, I’ll need to decide on where to ‘cap’ enrollment numbers, I need, I need.” Understanding by Design sits solidly among the learner-centered approaches to creating courses. What does the learner need in order to come to the enduring understandings that animate my aspirations for the course? Do they “need” for me to “see all their faces”? To what ends, exactly? (I don’t pose the question rhetorically as a ploy to shut the matter down, I’m just inviting the objector to imagine the objection as a genuine question rather than as an assertion.) It is a good question, because the idea that teaching involves “seeing all their faces” is (in my experience) the most common presupposition instructors who are thinking of undertaking online teaching for the first time raise. Accompanying this is the similar presupposition that synchronous learning activities are inherently preferable to asynchronous activities. The good news is that the technical, financial, and logistical obstacles to an all-synchronous, all-faces-all-the-time online learning space remain effectively insuperable. I call this “good news” because—as the very existence of this chapter implies—any attempt simply to recreate online the conditions of face-to-face learning are not only doomed to failure (“technical, financial, and logistical obstacles”), but would tragically insulate the instructor and students from the unique and often unpredictable possibilities for learning offered by the online environment. A story: My very first online course had a mercifully simple structure that I inherited from the instructor who had designed it: a Blackboard learning management system with discussion forums and a pretty nifty “virtual classroom” allowing weekly, one-hour synchronous engagement. Often, after our weekly synchronous conference, one or more students would hang back and chat informally with me for a while. One week, a student I’ll call “Laura” hung back and told me that this wasn’t her first online course, and that she was enjoying our course more than most. Unlike her previous instructors, I had not invited students to post photographs of themselves as part of their introductory “ice-breaker” forum posts. (The truth is, I had agreed to teach the course at the eleventh hour, and it simply hadn’t occurred to me to ask for them in pursuit of a closer “community.”) Laura told me that she was glad I hadn’t asked them to post pictures. In our course, she said, “Everyone treats me as if I were pretty.” Take a moment on that, if you like. I won’t say I have since never invited the inclusion of photos in online learner profiles. But I certainly appreciate, in a way I didn’t before, that the matter is a lot more complicated than my own reflexive, habitual, teacher-centered notions about what “I need.” The moral is not to never use photos. It is that these teacher-centered dogmatic claims (“I need . . .”) have to be interrogated by student experience, and are always contingent to the possibility of unanticipated student need. What other questions and concerns stand up and stand between your familiar face-to-face teaching experience and an immersive inquiry into the possibilities of online teaching and learning? Chapter Four of Understanding Bible by Design (Fortress, 2014), goes on to offer a three-stage “crash plan” for translating your face-to-face course into online or hybrid designs. Understanding Bible by Design: Create Courses with Purpose is part of the Seminarium Elements book series. Order today at fortresspress.com and Amazon.com. [sociallocker] [/sociallocker] Photo Credit: untitled, by Ryan McGuire, offered into Public Domain Add to favorites