Teaching, Training, Telling--towards a theory of elearning Genres

Teaching vs. Telling.  The division is deep.

Context
From December to May, I was teaching an online class in early British literature that required me to devise ways for students to learn in an online-only environment--and really learn, or why were we going through the motions?  I was concerned with making students' means of acquiring information as interactive as possible, and with assigning activities that reinforce the learning while also getting them to think a bit deeper about the ideas, and make connections--all of the things a good instructor is supposed to do.

During this time, I was involved--at my 8-5 job--in ongoing revision to a training certificate program for entry-level adminstrative professional staff.  In the process, the business writing class that we teach was moved to the "II" certificate from the "I" certificate--and I took exception, because even staff who are not writing long documents spend a significant amount of time communicating by email--both internally and externally.  So I proposed something like an "Email Best Practices" class, which would either be taught in person (maybe for an hour) or could be an online course.

When our director said no to a traditional class and yes to the online training, I envisioned something that would allow the user to make choices between good and bad email practices while delivering the essential information--something really interactive that would actually teach.  I don't really think that the 6-hour, 1- or 2-day business writing class accomplishes much in the way of making the participants' writing better, but it does give them strategies for more effective communication.  With the email training, I wanted to actually curb some bad email practies.

Dilemma/Problem
Because the online class is part of a certificate program, and there are people who need to finish in the next few months, there was a bit of anxiety among participants in the program.  This led to the director of my department giving--well, more an ultimatum than a deadline.  At any rate, it has a very different feel than most of my deadlines, perhaps because of how arbitrary it is.  And it's not like it's the only thing on my plate--quite the contrary.  So speaking to my direct supervisor, who is a reasonable person, I received a recommendation (only more forceful than a recommendation, becuase it is bound to the aritrary deadline): just throw some information into PowerPoint and we will convert it to an online class from there.

Just. Throw. Information. Into. PowerPoint.  That's the elearning equivalent of an all-lecture course, and not at all what I had in mind for this course that was really supposed to teach something--to help people to communicate better via email.  I protested.  I bargained.  I philosophized.  But no.  This is the task I have been given--use PowerPoint as an information dump.  I co-presented at a conference earlier in the year about making PowerPoint more interactive.  I have been trying to use PowerPoint to develop interactive tutorials that I can post in Blackboard to give my students an interactive, self-guided lesson.  This upsets me so much.

The Crux
What I realized, speaking with my boss today, is that the contrast between what I want to do and what I have time to do taps into my conception of teaching, and my perception of myself and my role as a teacher--even in designing online materials.  I want to help people to learn.  I don't just want them to fill a checkbox.  This isn't like the type of compliance training that only requires that the information be available, and gives you a checkbox to acknowledge that it has passed in front of your eyeballs.  I wanted more from this.  So my level of satisfaction from this project has just decreased dramatically. It is no longer a teaching problem; it is an efficiency problem.

Solutions and Theorizing...
I could, of course, just create this first version and then revise it and make it as great as I want...  That option was offered, but I don't think that will happen.  I simply don't work like that.  I need purpose and momentum, and once it's up, and not really mine any more but the property of the department (all of you "#altac" people out there, take note--this is life outside of academia), I will simply feel done with it and ready to move on.

Our compromise is to call the training "Tips for," and to change what I saw as the overall purpose.  Instead of teaching, we will simply be listing best practices, more or less.  It won't stick.  It's not designed to.  So it maybe doesn't matter? *sigh*  Not ideal for my original intention.

But I was thinking... There is a place and a time for giving information, and it can be accomplished in different media differently.  As soon as I stopped thinking of it as a "course" and started thinking of it as an "FYI" (more or less), my purpose manifested itself in interesting ways.  Sitting down to introduce the slide show (which will be without sound, because who has time for that?), I immediately asked the question, "Why do we need to write better emails?"  This lead me to investigate statistics on how much we use email in a typical business day.  Email is professional communiation.  So my purpose became, "Let's make it professional communication--and here are some tips."

I can tell people things--I do it all the time.  But I do have to have a purpose in doing so, whether or not it is well-articulated.

Then, there's elearning itself.  There are the really interactive courses (some of them taking up to 30 minutes because hey--the more time you spend clicking through, the more you learn, right? or not...) and the less interactive.  There are some that simply talk to you and others that have you play games.  Some are literally just words on the screen. But each fulfills its purpose.  Some compliance training is like the screen that you sign before picking up a prescription.  Anyone know the information that they're referring to?  Anyone care much?  But someone needs that signature for their records.  Similarly, people dealing with biohazards need to have several text-heavy screens floated past them so that they can click "acknowledge."  I'm not making this up.  It's scary, and I don't believe in it, but that training is fulfilling its own legalistic purpose--which is most emphatically not to teach.

So elearning, you might say, has different genres.  And those different genres make distinct use of the capabilities of the software, some extremely minimal, others extensive.  And maybe compliance training isn't bad training, it's simply what it is--driven by its own purpose which has eveything to do with the liability of the provider and absolutely nothing to do with the increased understanding of the user.  So... genres.

It doesn't make me happy to have to shift from elearning as a teaching platform to elearning as an information dump, but at least I have a way to reconcile myself to the circumstances and something to think further about.  Genres of elearning.

Small Successes II: Success with Sonnets!

My life so far in April has been characterized by hope, uncertainty, disappointment, and hope all over again--so basically stress--the cause of which is an unexpected and un-looked-for job possibility at a school I applied to in August for a completely different position.  None of this has anything to do with my current adjunct class, which has been rolling along.  So I'd like to describe another success.

This activity was designed to give students a sense of the expressive potential of sonnets, the shifts in the poems, and different possible interpretations of individual poems.  First, I found pairs of actors' interpretations of individual sonnets.

Sonnet #	Read by
12	David Tennant
	John Gielgud
18	Tom Hiddleston
	David Tennant
	Michael York
29	Matthew Macfayden
	Patrick Stewart
73	Andrew Motion
	John Bell
116	Patrick Stewart
	Juliet Stevenson
	John Gielgud
130	Alan Rickman
	Daniel Radcliffe**
	Stephen Fry
	Tom Hiddleston
	American Sign Language Version
144	Niamh McGrady

Students were asked to follow these steps:

1. Read the sonnet. Record your reactions below—the subject(s)/topic(s) of the poem (such as the beloved and immortality, or thepower of literature/poetry), the speaker’s attitude toward the subject, the thesis/argument that the poem is making about the subject,the tone and/or mood of the poem.2. Listen/view one reading of the poem from the list. What mood does the actor portray? Does the actor’s mood change? Record wherethe actor changes the mood (line 5? Between the second and third quatrain? Etc.) Does this reading agree with your own? Does itchange your impression?3. Listen/view a second reading of the poem from the list. What mood does the actor portray? Does the actor’s mood change? Recordwhere the actor changes the mood (line 5? Between the second and third quatrain? Etc.) How does the second performance compareto the first?

I also created a worksheet with a chart to help students to be able to record these observations--because poetry analyses, in particular, need some structure!

The responses were good overall--better when the student wrote a bit more about the poem initially, when there was a significant contrast between the two versions, or when one version impacted the student's initial interpretation gained from reading the poem.  Sometimes, I suspect that the readings actualy influenced an interpretation where none had existed before--also a good thing.  And frankly, I really enjoyed finding the sonnets.  It was gratifying that the videos were able to substitute for discussion of interpretations, giving a sense of what the sonnets were about, as well as their ambiguities (the versions of #130 were particularly good for this).  I believe the students enjoyed the readings as well.

After they completed the worksheet activity, I had them post a comparison/contrast of two versions of the same sonnet to a discussion forum to share with the class--the online equivalent of a brief presentation and an assignment follow-up that I require often, since they are learning from each other to a large degree.  I haven't looked at these yet, but the forum theoretically gives students the opportunity to bring their ideas together into paragraphs rather than leaving them in the chart.

Small Successes I: Paper Activities

So I realize that I haven't had much to say in a while about my class, and in part, I want to record the successes that I've had along the way--things that I hope to repeat in the future.  I know that last time I checked in I was on the verge of despair.  *sigh*  I still have more moments of weariness than enthusiasm, but I haven't felt that bad since that week.  I have also been allowing myself to read for pleasure more, and not forcing myself to read along with everything I assign.  The latter makes me feel like a bad teacher, but it's not as if I'm lecturing on it, so I'll give myself a pass.

One thing that I feel I have done the right way is breaking the steps of the paper down for them and requiring students to "check in" (more or less) to demonstrate that they are working on the paper.  These assignments help them to stretch out the work on the assignment rather than saving it until the last minute.  They give me the opportunity to monitor progress--or not, because for the most part the burden is on them (which I'll explain).  Because they are wrestling with the paper over time, I do, in fact, hear more from them when things aren't going quite right, if they get stuck, etc.  This is definitely a success in an online course.  

What I'm proposing is something that was standard in composition classes--Topic Proposal Memo, Thesis Statement, List of Sources, Outline (maybe), Rough Draft, Final Draft.  Besides teaching time management and giving the opportunity for feedback along the way, we were also making sure that if a student was inclined to plagiarize, the supporting materials would have to be plagiarized, since a paper would not be accepted without them.  That's not really my rationale, since my paper is fairly unique and probably can't just be downloaded.  What is unusual is requiring these steps for a sophomore-level class.  Sophomores are supposed to be able to do these things on their own, right?  And sink or swim?  Well...  not really.  Not in reality. 

One of the amazing things about the online-only class is the opportunities I have along the way to correct what they're thinking about things, how they're interpreting things, how they are expressing their ideas in writing.  In class, if they don't speak, I don't know what they're thinking. Because the class meets every day, there are no assignments designed to let me know what they're thinking--whether they're getting it.  As a result, they don't necessarily get it, and I don't know until the test.  Heck--they don't know until the test.  In this case, I know.  And if we can have a discussion about it where other students can see, I'm actually teaching.  Yay!  This is how being a "guide" instead of a "sage" can still be an important function, requiring a teacher who is insightful and engaged.  

This paper was a beginning lit review, if you will.  My intentions (objectives, really) were to have them be able to write a research question, use it to do research, find scholarly sources on a literary topic, read and summarize, and begin to synthesize the sources in a very basic way in order to present the articles to an audience who wishes to know more about the literary topic in question.  It took a bit of wrangling to get them there, and I haven't graded the papers yet, but I know that learning has happened along the way.

Their supporting activities were:

1. A research question posted to a forum.  Each student had to post a question in order to see others' questions so that they were not influenced beforehand.
2. A bibliography submitted as an assignment to the instructor only.  This gave me the opportunity to check to see whether the sources were scholarly and whether the bibliography format was correct.
3. A rough draft/peer review wiki.  While it did not really function as a peer review, it could have.  Students posted their rough draft to a new page in the wiki.  They could also make changes to theirs (technically they could have to others' as well), and make comments on their and others' drafts.  If they wanted my feedback, they had to solicit it, and one did.  I could have forced each student to comment on another's draft, but feedback-by-coersion is not typically good quality stuff, so I let it go.

I had many questions during the first two stages.  Some were caught up in adhering to the question or making it perfect, so those people learned that research ideas do mutate.  Many, many students learned to construct better database searches.  And at least half of the remaining students had a rough draft in time.  All in all, a success--they did not drift away completely.

These supporting assignments were only worth 25 points each.  At first, I was going to roll these in to the daily grade equivalent--a pathetic 10% (which should be more given the effort).  Instead, I decided to reward their efforts by making the 75 points part of the paper grade, which is 15% of the overall grade.  I believe that the effort of staying on task and the learning activities involved deserve to be 3/7 of the 15%, because they are being rewarded, here, for the considerable effort of learning on their own, being engaged, and asking for assistance when they needed it.