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, CuratorFor 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….
Before I Take My Classes Online (2 of 3) Posted on January 14, 2015 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorFor 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…
Before I Take My Classes Online (1 of 3) Posted on December 9, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorIt 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…
“Smells Like a B-Minus?”: Surrender Privilege for Transparency Posted on October 1, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorUnderstanding 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…
Hey, Instructors: Show Us Your Essential Questions! Posted on November 18, 2013 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorI’ll show you mine, and you can show me yours. I have written before on designing a course “backward” from essential questions, using the “Understanding by Design” system created by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Also here at Seminarium, others have described their own experience with “Understanding by Design.” A key idea is that we teach, not so that the learners will acquire particular facts in our subject matter, but so that they will develop enduring understandings that can be transferred into other contexts and subject matters. Toward this end, early in the process of designing or revising a course (“Intro to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible”) or unit (“Latter Prophets”), you want to come up with the “big ideas” and “essential questions” toward which the assessments, activities, and resources are oriented. These are my own, for the course “Introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.”