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.

“But Commmuuunniiittyyy!”

“‘Community’ only happens face to face, because of embodiment, and the incarnation.”

I don’t know what the secular, non-seminary parallels to this objection are, but I’m sure they exist. But this is how it finds expression in a seminary. I’m going to hit this one pretty hard…

Understanding by Design is an outcomes-based approach to course design whereby an instructor first articulates her most profligate hopes and dreams for her students: what are the enduring understandings about the subject matter that animate her love for the course and which she strives to kindle in her learners? There is a cost to doing it well, but it’s a cost many of us are more than happy to pay: we have to surrender the privilege of issuing letter-grades from within the fortress of our privileged Instructor’s Black Box, and take up the adult responsibility of making our evaluations processes transparent to learners.

Transparency in assessment is a loaded concept for faculty. Traditionally, we are not accustomed to having our discernment questioned: if it “smells like a B-plus” to us, then that is that…