The Skillful Teacher

Familiarizing Ourselves with the Online Experience
Before teaching in cyberspace for the first time, it is a definite
advantage if you can take an online class as a learner. Noticing what
affirms or demeans you, and what helps or hinders your learning in
an online environment, helps you understand what will make for a
supportive learning environment in your own online course. A min-
imum recommendation for all teachers working online is to secure
a special ID that will allow them to view their class through their
students’ eyes. To enter your own course as if you were a student,
without the capacity you possess as the instructor to manipulate and
alter the online environment, provides a valuable new perspective
on the course. It also brings to the surface the learning approaches
you most favor and the knowledge and skills you most value which
may, or may not, match those favored and valued by your students.
It is also helpful while planning your own online courses to have
access to similar courses taught by online veterans. Being able to
access a colleague’s class while it is in progress, see how she orga-
nizes the course and handles student-to-student and student-to-
instructor interaction is enormously helpful in putting your own
course together. Once your own class is up and running, it is equally
valuable to have an experienced colleague sign on as a student or
teaching assistant, something that can be easily done through
WebCT or Blackboard. Your colleague can take a quick peek at the
class as if she were a student much more easily and conveniently
than is the case in a conventional class. Unlike face-to-face peer
observation, there is no need to coordinate complicated schedules
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or require colleagues to fight traffic in the effort to observe your
class. Your colleague can sign on as a guest and offer observations
about the course’s content and organization. It is especially helpful
for a colleague to negotiate the menu of resources you have posted
and to review the discussion postings or chat records to assess how
well class conversations are deepening students’ understanding and
promoting student participation.
One of the major complications surrounding the introduction
of online teaching is that many teachers (including me) who teach
online have spent most of their years as elementary, high school,
and college learners in conventional face-to-face classrooms. This
learning history inevitably frames the approach they take to teach-
ing in an environment fundamentally different from the one they
know as learners. This is why I advocate taking a class online before
teaching one. In an ideal world any enthusiastic dean, vice presi-
dent, or president who urges an expansion of online education in
their institution should provide teachers with at least two course
releases; one in the semester or quarter prior to beginning online
teaching so that the prospective teacher may take an online course
as a learner, and one in the semester or quarter that the course is
being taught to take account of the large investment of time needed
to prepare for and conduct online teaching well. But since we don’t
live in an ideal world, we have to work with what we have—and
this chapter examines how teachers new to online teaching can
help create the conditions for student learning.