Teaching Online for the First Time

by Dr Davis on February 26, 2010

line-drawing-computer-studentTeaching online is an adventure.

I decided I wanted to teach online this semester in December. (Bad plan.) I had the training, but I hadn’t really played around with the software. Then the teaching session I was going to go to for two days was canceled. And I had plans for work (scholarship, research, conferences) for the break and didn’t have a lot of time to set up the class.

I did get two days of training, about a week before school was scheduled to start.

And I did get the course mostly set up by the first day.

This week, though, I discovered that on one quiz I put all the questions in one answer. So if they didn’t get 100%, they got a 0%. That wasn’t what I meant to do, so now I have to go grade those manually. (Which reminds me, I need to go see if there are other things I need to grade manually that I haven’t yet.)

Then I decided I should go through and look at what we are doing for the rest of the semester, since I really don’t remember. That is when I realized I didn’t finish the last two weeks of the class.

Oops. So I’ll be grading some forums, grading an essay, and writing the content for the last two weeks of class this weekend.

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Great Emails

by Dr Davis on February 26, 2010

I write here about email etiquette, but I recently received an encouraging email. If we got emails like these all the time, we wouldn’t need to discuss email etiquette.

The nicest part (for reading anyway) said:

As a graduate instructor at the University of xx, I just wanted to send a quick note of thanks for your website. It has provided me with extensive information in teaching my courses at Uxx (first-year composition and technical writing), as well as in developing my own professional knowledge base and skill set (through CFPs, helpful hints, etc.).

It is always good to know that what is being done is useful to someone. I especially appreciate it when the someone is a teacher, since that was part of my goal with starting this website.

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