In my previous post, I talked about a survey that I had created and sent out to my students to get their feedback on how they were feeling about their courses, what they specifically liked, and what they wished were different.

Well, the results are in!  While I enjoyed the comments about what was going well and the things I was doing to help them, for the purposes of this post, I want to focus on the answers I received to the last question: What changes could be made to your online course to better help you learn and have a good experience.  Amidst the suggestions to “make it easier” or “don’t assign work,”

there were two serious suggestions that were repeated by several students that I want to address in my online classroom.

The first was to clarify instructions for how to get started in the course and how to navigate the system.  While I can’t go back in time to the start of the semester and change this aspect of the experience for students, I can move the creation of tutorials and instructional videos/documents from my “want to do” list to my “will do” list.  My plan is to use some of my time this semester to develop some tutorials and videos to incorporate into my courses next semester.  If my children ever stop getting sick, I may even get to it!

The second is more applicable to where we are currently.  I got the feeling from some student responses that they were unsure how to get help from me.  This confused me at first because I thought that I had been super clear about when my office hours were and what methods they could use to get a hold of me.  But obviously, it wasn’t getting communicated effectively to a significant portion of the students.  So I decided to attack the problem from two angles:

1. Straight-up telling them again.  I had a professor in college who used to refer to themselves and to teachers in general as “professional repeaters.”  Turns out, if you say something, kids don’t always listen.  Huh.

   

   So, I repeated.  I sent out an announcement/e-mail detailing my office hours and contact information.  I’m also toying with some ideas about how to tweak my method for holding open office hours (which at the moment is rather unstructured).

2. Focusing on my teacher persona.  I want students to feel like they can approach me and ask questions when they need to.  I had done an okay job of this already, I think, but I wanted to focus on it more.  After sending out the announcement about my contact info, I started receiving more messages asking questions, and I’ve been very mindful of the tone of my responses, as well as the tone of my feedback on student work.  Another part of this that I wanted to improve was engaging students outside of course content.  You know, as real people.

   

More on that later 🙂  Stay tuned!