This semester I am teaching an online Technology in Education course for graduate-level student educators. It is interesting to see what these educators upload for their assignments as they work and create in Web 2.0 environments. One of the assignments this week is to build a wiki using Jim Holland's Web 2.0 Tools for Educators Web site . This site gives them an overview and excellent examples of how they can use wikis in their classrooms. My thanks to Jim Holland for his wiki reference area. :)
As an online instructional comment, what I have noticed working with these graduate-level educators online is that they seem to be adverse to reading directions (this is no surprise and tech help personnel would tell you that this is similar to working with the general public). In most of our course assignments online, I have had to extensively edit the course assignments to include screen shots of the LMS (Learning Management System) and educational Web sites online and include linked areas showing exactly where they need to go by using arrows and other visual aids.
As an online instructor for many years, I think I can safely say that this is usually the norm for working with students online --graduate or otherwise. Even when I believe (and my colleagues believe) we have created an assignment which clearly states what the student needs to do and why, and it includes a rubric to give them objectives, they still write and call us asking for technical help.
What can we do to better assist our online instructors and students with these issues? In my opinion, we need to (1) Clearly state what we want them to do and why; (2) Have another educator or staff person read the assignment to verify that it says what you want it to say (peer review); (3) Add visual aids or other PDF sheets as tools to assist the students and the instructors--and save them as resources in and outside of the course site (for e-mail attachment use); and (4) Create "how-to" text sheets so that each instructor who teaches the online course has these aids for their e-mail correspondence with their students.
Sharing and providing information is what professional educators are paid to do. Sharing information and helpful tools should just be part of the "education model" for online instructors. We need to continue to assist each other by sharing and saving tools and instructional information sheets in reference folders in our online course sites. It is just the right thing to do.
mj
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