Jesse Richter

I have been teaching for about seven years now and I have found it to be a great challenge to adapt my traditional teaching methods to online methods. Of particular note is the live chat session. The main concern I have here is that the communication is more or less one way in the sense that my voice is the only one heard. With the software that I use, students are able to type a message to me or otherwise participate in side conversations via IM-style messages. To be honest, I really don't like this since it removes the primary… >>>

I like how, in this first section of the course, relationships were identified between online curricula and face-to-face curricula. For example, having a clearly organized framework or structure of the course as with a syllabus corresponds to an easily-navigable online platform. I mention this because i think it is important to think about traditional teaching when designing online platforms. Each real-life component of classroom teaching should have a corresponding online component. I think if we approach online course design in this manner we will be successful. Another aspect I am particularly curious about is: how can we replace the human… >>>

Thank you Matthew McKinney for inspiring me to think about this particular topic. You mentioned the importance of being sensitive to older students as a young teacher (which happens to me my case). I would like to raise a similar point which involves young teachers teaching young students. I started teaching at the earliest possible legal age of 21. I was teaching secondary students who ranged in age from 15 to 19. Obviously, this was a bit awkward. On several occasions I had the guys inviting me to keg parties and the girls flirting with me. Furthermore, being 21 and… >>>

I Certainly agree with some aspects of this module but find myself disagreeing with others. First and foremost, it has been my experience that instructors can project a presence by continually and consistently maintaining communication with students. This includes personalized emails, group announcements, participation in discussion boards and responding to emails promptly. There was one quiz question which suggested that projecting video clips was an effective online instructional technique. I can see where this has certain merits, such as using multimedia, but I have never understood or believed how using videos can be superior to high-quality instruction directly from the… >>>