Posted by & filed under The Online Student.

“Know your audience.”  The advice is ubiquitous—given to salespeople, public speakers, marketers, teachers, and interviewees.  Its no less applicable to the online instructor.  Seeking to know one’s students is a best practice for online educators hoping to have an important impact on their students’ lives and careers. You can’t give people what they need if you don’t know what they need.

So, who is the online learner?  In this series of articles, we’ll seek to answer that question.  We’ll start with demographics.  Education Today recently published an infographic of the demographic breakdown of distance learners across a variety of domains.  This infographic, as referenced here from Classes and Careers and supported by an impressive reference list,  does a great job telling the story of the online learner.

The average online student is 34 years old.   Only 38% of online learners fall in the “traditional college-aged” category.  This is why the terms “online learner” and “adult learner” are often used interchangeably.

What does being older imply?  Perhaps it implies that distance learners have “been there” and “done that” and have decided that they liked neither.  They want something else.  And they believe that a degree that will help them get it.  They look to the online teacher to help them do that. They hope that this degree will open doors for them; doors that will lead to more fulfillment, more money, ideally both.  As most adult learners are currently making less than 40K a year, the motivation is there.  This certainly isn’t the only motivation, but it’s an important one.

While they were “being there” and “doing that” online learners were gaining a lot of life and career experience.  Experience they bring to their classrooms and can share on the discussion boards and in their assignments.  They are students, but not novices.  Thus, they tend to do better with the proverbial “guide on the side” approach vs. the “sage on the stage” approach.  Online teachers can pull those experiences from their students to enrich the classroom experience and drive points home in personally relevant ways.

Further, the racial distribution highlighted in this graphic is suggestive of diversity in the online classroom.  Approximately 47% of students surveyed identified themselves as Caucasian, 25% as African-American, 21% as Latino/a, and 3% as Asian.  As academics we know that diversity is key for idea generation, so capitalizing on this diversity and soliciting information from this diverse group of students will yield rich discussion as well.

While the infographic doesn’t speak to marital status, adult learners are much more likely than traditionally-aged learners to be married or divorced.  They are more likely to be parenting with their partner or single parenting.  Additionally, 81% of them are employed while they are in school and most of them (68%) are taking what amounts to a full time course load.   It makes sense, then, that they gravitate toward the online, asynchronous classroom and why the “set your own schedule” campaign is an effective one for online programs.

Distance learners are working, parenting, taking multiple courses, balancing their goals with their spouses’ goals, and somewhere in there they are (hopefully) sleeping and eating.  Stress levels are high, time is precious, and the empathetic online instructor is aware of this.  This awareness guides more effective decision-making when it comes to setting due dates (i.e. allowing students the weekend to work, as that’s when they have the most time), late work policies, and the amount of group work in a term, etc.

Seventy-nine percent of online learners have taken out school loans.  Unlike some of their stereotypical, traditionally-aged counterparts, they cannot rely on their parents for assistance.  Not only are adult learners making a modest living at best, likely supporting a family, they are taking a gamble on what their education will do for them.  The financial sacrifice is significant.

The statistics that adult learners hear on TV and radio are grim, yet the good news is that, at least according to this survey of 5.6 million online students, 98% report achieving their academic goals.  The supervisor satisfaction rates for online graduates are impressive as well, with 87% of supervisors saying that their online graduates perform better on the job than graduates of brick-and-mortar programs.

Despite this good news, with the economy the way it is, it still feels like a gamble.  This tends to breed vulnerability, which breeds anxiety, which is often tempered by faith and hope.  A mixed bag of emotions represented by a first name and last name on the computer screen.

In sum, distance learners have a lot of skin in the game. They are excited yet vulnerable, very busy yet very committed, knowledgeable but humble, hopeful but scared to death.  This information has a lot of implications for online teaching strategy, which we will discuss in upcoming articles in this series.

How do the demographics fall in your classrooms?  This survey represents a large group of online learners, but it is likely that within academic programs, undergrad vs. graduate programs, and non-profit vs. for profit schools the breakdown can look different.  We would be interested to hear how such information is important in your online classrooms.  Please comment below!

Posted by & filed under Q&A Series.

As I look at the postings for online adjunct positions, they nearly all require experience in online teaching.  Do you have any advice as to how to gain such experience?  Is there one platform more popular than other–Moodle vs. Collaborate vs. ??

Thinking back to the jobs I post (and write 500 character blurbs for) I would say most schools “prefer” online teaching as opposed to requiring it.  In that instance, apply anyway with whatever experience you have.  If your CV otherwise presents you as a great adjunct teacher, you may not be at a huge disadvantage.  Don’t let the preference prevent you from trying, especially if you are a passionate adjunct instructor who has good experience teaching in traditional environments.

However, there are many schools that do “require” online teaching experience.  That’s the conundrum isn’t it?  Need experience to get experience.  Here is the advice I would give:

1)  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a series of articles for our AdjunctWorld blog about Subject Matter Expert (SME) positions.  Take a gander at that series.  Start with the 4 Benefits of Being a Subject Matter Expert article, and then read the related ones.  If you are interested in writing content for schools wanting to create repeatable, standardized courses in your discipline, this is a good way to break into online teaching.  To have SME work on your resume is a form of “online work” I believe.  We often post SME jobs to AdjunctWorld, so if you see one in your discipline, click on it.  I myself have just as much SME work on my resume as teaching and I think the SME work comes off as impressive.  Shows you understand the discpline and some elements of instructional design and have done research on what online classroom “lectures” should look like.

2)  If you have taken online classes in your own academic career, that often counts for something.  Highlight that on your CV when you apply.  A lot of jobs I post will say “Experience teaching or taking online classes preferred.”  I strongly believe that being or having been an online student is great experience toward being an online instructor.  You have empathy and know what students need in a good online teacher, for sure.  If you haven’t taken an online class, consider enrolling in one.  The experience would be good on a lot of levels–more professional development in your discipline plus online experience to boot.

3)   Moodle is certainly a very popular LMS.  Blackboard too.  Here is a link to the 20 Most Popular Learning Management Systems in Higher Ed.  You should be able to find online trainings for most of these, or books, or other tutorials.  The cool thing about Moodle is that its an open source platform, so a lot of the trainings are free!  Start your search on Youtube, you’ll find some great tutorials there.

I hope you find this information helpful.  There are also full online teacher training courses out there.  Several exist, but the only one I have experience with (and could therefore recommend–I’ve taught many sections of it myself) would be the Best Practices in Online Teaching series offered by the Learning House, Inc.  It is offered free to teachers who teach for Learning House parnter schools, but for a fee to anyone else interested.

As always, best of luck to you in your job search!

Posted by & filed under Job Listings.

Each week we will summarize all the Adjunct jobs we’ve added to AdjunctWorld during the week, in case you missed them, and for easy reference.  If you’d like to be notified moments after we post new jobs, please LIKE our facebook page or follow us on twitter.

So, without further ado, this week we posted 37 new Online and on-campus Adjunct jobs on AdjunctWorld from 10 different schools. Currently there are a total of 1,444 Online Adjunct jobs listed there.  Click below to see a selection of these recently posted jobs:

 

6 Online positions – Holmes Community College

6 Online positions – University of Liverpool

6 Online positions – Walden University

AdjunctWorld’s latest 10 Online Adjunct positions

 

…as well as online Adjunct positions at Berkeley College, Carrington College, Grand Canyon University, Strayer University Online, University of Maryland University College, Washington State University, and Western Governors University.  

 

Personalized Daily Job Alerts

Would you like to be alerted to the jobs in your discipline(s) right after they are posted on AdjunctWorld, rather than waiting for this weekly summary, or watching for our facebook & twitter posts?  Over the past week we’ve sent out hundreds of daily job alert emails to Premium AdjunctWorld Members.  Click here for a description of all of the Premium Membership benefits and how to subscribe.

 

Thanks! for being a part of the AdjunctWorld Community.

Posted by & filed under The Effective Online Teacher.

Welcome to the last in our series of articles on the “Effective Online Teacher.”  So far, we’ve discussed some of the skills, knowledge, and characteristics of great online teachers.  In this article, we will conclude with a few additional strengths associated with quality online teaching.  These points can be thought of as places to begin research or to plan personal/professional development experiences.

1) Strong Academic Skills

The trend in higher education today is to hire instructors who have significant and current “real world” professional experience in their area of expertise.  On the radio yesterday, I heard an advertisement for a local nursing program in which a current student of the school stated, “I like that I’m taught by instructors who are currently working as nurses at the hospital where I would like to work.”  It’s a big part of marketing these days.

Indeed, professional work experience is climbing to the top of the requirements list for many colleges—online and off.  However, this is not necessarily to the exclusion of what we tend to think of as more traditional requirements.  In other words, sought-after online instructors not only are working in the field, but they are also strong in academic areas as well.

Effective online instructors are good writers, know how to integrate the extant literature in their area to draw conclusions, and see value in teaching students to find data to support their arguments.  Not only are they knowledgeable about practical concerns “at work,” they also know how to model the academic side of things.  This goes for undergraduate classes (where students may be preparing for graduate studies) and graduate classes (where students will eventually need to achieve scholar status upon graduation).  So, good online instructors represent the best of both worlds—professional and academic.

2) Competency with Learning Management Systems (LMS) 

As I write the 500-character job descriptions for the jobs listed on AdjunctWorld, I often find myself needing to squeeze in requirements regarding LMS experience.  I see a lot of “Moodle experience required/a plus/strongly preferred” or “Candidates with background in Blackboard/Schoology receive special consideration.”  But what if you taught for many years at a school where you used a proprietary LMS (as would be the case with University of Phoenix instructors) or if you have never taught via LMS before?

Effective online instructors are comfortable, or seek to achieve comfort with the Learning Management System they are using to teach their courses.  The LMS is the classroom and, as in the face-to-face classroom, the teacher has to know what they are doing in it–where to stand, how to operate the visual aides, how to organize the space.  Same goes for the LMS-based classroom, although it’s a bit more complicated than knowing how to turn the projector on.

LMSs do have some commonalities.  If you are strong with Moodle, chances are you are equipped to learn Schoology or Blackboard more quickly than if you were an LMS novice.  But, each LMS also has its idiosyncrasies.  My advice to adjuncts wanting to gain LMS experience is to do one or all of three things:

  • Take online classes yourself that use various LMS technology.
  • Find online trainings for specific LMSs (there are a lot of these available.  Moodle, an open-source platform, even offers a lot of free online trainings!).
  • Make a connection (via LinkedIn or our AdjunctWorld community) with an instructor who uses the LMS you are interested in learning more about and pick his/her brain about the software and how to learn more about it.

I also like to tell adjuncts that having been an online student is often considered online or “LMS” experience as well.  Some of the schools I review will write, “Online teaching experience or experience as an online learner preferred/required.”  Being an online student is in some ways as valuable or close to as valuable as having been an online teacher before.  Additionally, most all face-to-face classrooms these days have some LMS component, whether it’s for turning in papers or posting grades.  This counts as some experience even if the class wasn’t completely online.

3) Comfort with Threaded Discussions

The discussion board is the heart of the online classroom.  Effective online instructors know how to get the most out of these discussions.  Some tricks of the trade include:

Knowing when to back out of the discussion and when to step in. The discussion board belongs to everyone and is not the instructor’s “stage”.  The instructor, though, is tasked with guiding the discussion toward specific learning objectives.  One approach is to allow students to speak to each other for a few posts and then the instructor can post a paragraph at the end of that thread that summarizes what the students are saying and what they might want to think about next.  Don’t over do it, don’t under do it.  Find the middle path, so to speak.

Knowing how to direct eyeballs.  When we see a post we want to respond to, the tendency is to click “reply” and then write what we have to say and click “post” or “submit.”  But, kind of like bloggers have to market their posts with catchy titles, online instructors should be mindful of the titles of their posts, which they are usually able to change with each reply they make.

 

When I taught for the University of Phoenix early in my online teaching days, I’d have a thread about two screens long where the titles read:  “DQ 1 Week 3 due Thursday May 3” up to “Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re: DQ 1 Week 3 due Thursday May 3”.  The eyeball will lose those “Re:Re:Re:Re” posts, so be mindful of how to make the thread read more like story by changing titles.  Suggest that students do the same thing.

Knowing where to direct students to connect them with each other and to prevent redundancy.  I find this to be especially the case with Moodle, where each student’s original post is a new thread.  Students are not required to participate in one big discussion thread, but in each other’s “mini-threads”.  There can be some redundancy here and maybe a little disconnection, but there are ways to remedy this.

 

For example, if I read a thread by Bob and he’s saying essentially the same thing that Mary did in her thread and I replied to Mary’s thread, I might say something like this to Bob, “Great points you make here, Bob!  Mary and I were just discussing the problems with radical behaviorism over in her thread as well.  Seems like you two are like-minded when it comes to the importance of social learning theory.  Join us over in her thread and we can continue to discuss!”

 

This prevents me from re-inventing the wheel and connects Bob and Mary as a way of strengthening the classroom community.

4) Comfort with Synchronous Technology

I think early on in the days of online education, online classrooms were trying to “compete” with or be more like traditional classrooms and often required synchronous sessions.  There is a trend, I’m noticing, to get away from that—many online classrooms today are completely asynchronous.  I am a fan of this trend as online students, and online instructors for that matter, are drawn to online education for precisely the asynchronous nature of it.  How is an online class advantageous for a single working mother if she has to be online for class while she is at work?  Or if she needs to find a babysitter for an hour in the evening so she can log into a synchronous session?

Still, some schools require a synchronous component.  Further, synchronous technology can be very useful in other ways:  Office hours, tutorials or screen shares for a student having trouble, or for class assignments where extemporaneous answers are important.  Thus, some comfort with synchronous technology is necessary.  These technologies may be embedded within the LMS in the form of text or video chat, or they can be more widely used software or aps like Skype, FaceTime, GoToMeeting, or Adobe Connect.

Experience is the teacher here, but effective online instructors prepare themselves in advance by doing their research and getting practice with such technologies in their personal lives (i.e. practicing FaceTime with friends or using a GoToMeeting session to catch up with family across the country).  Seeking out formal trainings or locating a training manual is a good idea as well.  If you are taking an LMS training, synchronous LMS features should be covered there.

5) Proficiency with Office Tools and Presentation Software

One of the requirements I tend to scan over when I’m considering a job description is “Candidate must be proficient with Office tools”—meaning the candidate needs to know how to use Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. (or Mac or open-sourced equivalents).  That requirement is so ubiquitous that I often don’t think twice about it.  However, I am reminding myself now that some amount of competency with Office tools is important for the online instructor, who relies on word processing and presentation software for a myriad of things—from presenting material, to grading student work, to organizing emails (in the case of Outlook users).

Knowing how to use track changes and comments in Word, for example, is very useful when editing/providing feedback for student work.  Knowing how to embed video or voiceover into a Powerpoint can really bring a written presentation to life for the learner.  While most schools have tech support teams available to help, knowing a bit about the technology you require students to use in your class helps you help them when they are having trouble.  For example, if you require students to use speaker notes in Powerpoint and a student writes you saying that they don’t know how to do that, you want to know how to help them.

People are starting to steer away from traditional Microsoft and Mac Office products and are more into using dynamic Web 2.0-based options for doing assignments and presenting material.  Web-based, collaborative word-processing tools like Google Docs and presentation aps like Prezi and Slideshare are becoming increasingly popular because they tend to be more dynamic and allow for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.  Becoming familiar with these programs would be a good idea as well.

6) Aware of FERPA Rules as The Pertain to Online Teaching

All teachers are expected to become intimately familiar with the Family and Educational Rights Privacy Act (FERPA), so that they adhere to all privacy rules when interacting with students.  Because the web is inherently less private than the face-to-face classroom, online instructors need to be particularly wary of what information is posted where and what social media sources they may be using outside of the LMS that put students as risk.

Here are a couple of good articles on the topic:  Student Privacy and Online Classes and A Guide to FERPA for Online Students.  I’ll nod toward two issues I come across most often.

Unintended disclosure of performance information in a discussion forum.  If we are communicating with a student about anything related to their grade when it comes to a discussion forum post, that must not be handled in a public forum reply.  Instead, it should be done privately through the LMS messaging system or other official grading channels.  For example, it might be tempting to reply to a late student in the message board with something like, “Thanks for this post, Bill, but unfortunately I cannot grade it because its past the deadline.”  This instructor just publicly told the class this student got a zero.  Most of the time mistakes like this happen innocently (the instructor not realizing where they are posting), but it’s a violation or a potential one, regardless.

Mandatory use of outside-of-LMS social media sites to conduct class assignments.  Some adult learners avoid social media accounts for personal reasons.  When you require students to sign up for an account to participate in a graded class assignment, you are asking them to forgo some of their privacy.  While there are more private ways of using social media than others (i.e. using a private group vs. personal page on Facebook), LMSs are uniquely designed for the higher education sector and incorporate FERPA rules within them.  In most instances, the LMS is best for hosting mandatory class discussions, etc., although this is not to say that optional social media usage is forbidden.  Knowing what the school’s policy is on social media usage would be important in making the distinction.

Many of the qualities listed in this article do not need to be fully mastered prior to teaching an online class (perhaps with the exception of FERPA)—experience is a good teacher.  But the effective online instructor is always working these “muscles” so to speak, and seeking to develop competency and proficiency in these areas in order to reach their virtual learners.

What are your thoughts?  What other strengths are important for online instructors to develop?  Comment below!

 

Related articles:

7 Characteristics of Effective Online Teachers

4 Interpersonal Skills for Effective Online Teaching

5 Things Effective Online Teachers Know

Posted by & filed under Job Listings.

Each week we will summarize all the Adjunct jobs we’ve added to AdjunctWorld during the week, in case you missed them, and for easy reference.  If you’d like to be notified moments after we post new jobs, please LIKE our facebook page or follow us on twitter.

So, without further ado, this week we posted 86 new Online and on-campus Adjunct jobs on AdjunctWorld from 20 different schools. Currently there are a total of 1,438 Online Adjunct jobs listed there.  Click below to see a selection of these recently posted jobs:

 

20 Online positions – Grand Canyon University

10 Online positions – Western Governors University

10 Subject Matter Expert positions – University Now

AdjunctWorld’s latest 10 Online Adjunct positions

 

…as well as online Adjunct positions at American Public University System, Argosy University Online, Colorado State University – Global, Concordia College of New York, Concordia University Nebraska, Concordia University Portland, Genesee Community College, Georgia Military College, MCPHS University, Palo Alto University, Parker University, Southern New Hampshire University, Spencerian College, St. Leo University, St. Thomas University, UNAD Florida, and University of Northwestern St. Paul

 

Personalized Daily Job Alerts

Would you like to be alerted to the jobs in your discipline(s) right after they are posted on AdjunctWorld, rather than waiting for this weekly summary, or watching for our facebook & twitter posts?  Over the past week we’ve sent out hundreds of daily job alert emails to Premium AdjunctWorld Members.  Click here for a description of all of the Premium Membership benefits and how to subscribe.

 

Thanks! for being a part of the AdjunctWorld Community.

Posted by & filed under Q&A Series.

Matt and I get several really good questions from adjuncts regarding anything from the inner workings of the AdjunctWorld database to the general state of online adjunct teaching these days.  Because these questions are poignant and relevant to our community, we thought we’d start a series of Q&A articles based on the emails we receive.  We answer based on our knowledge, research, and experience, but leave the comment section open for you to help us answer these questions too!

Here is a recent question from an AdjunctWorld community member:

As I look through online adjunct teaching vacancies, I notice that the institutions appear to avoid specifics, like the number of weeks of each class, the salary range, and the anticipated class size.  I’ve clicked through several institutional websites without being able to find this information, or even the individual who might know the answer.  Without this specific information, these listings are really not very useful. Can you help?

You are hitting on one of the frustrations I have both as an adjunct and as someone who lists jobs on AdjunctWorld.  I can only take information that the school itself has listed on their human resources page.  In the vast majority of cases, they do not list much about salary, time committment or class size.  I agree–pretty important information!  I’ve noticed this not just for adjunct positions, but for a lot of job descriptions out there on the web, even for full time, tenure-track faculty positions.  Makes me wonder if its not a legal thing that schools are adhering to or if it is somehow, in some strange way, “better for buisness” not to offer that information.  Maybe they want folks to begin the applicaiton process before knowing those specifics.

Some other hypotheses I have–it could be a seller’s market out there.  Currently more adjuncts looking for work than there are positions available.  Knowing that, schools may be focused on making sure they are hiring the adjunct who best fits their needs–focusing on requirements, skills, and talents they are seeking in an adjunct.  Most all job postings consist of very long lists of qualities they are looking for in an instructor.  They assume they pay fairly, but don’t focus there, instead emphasizing finding the right person for them (someone who meets their accreditation requirements, too).

Another guess–salary varies based not only on degree but on experience.  To list a salary range might not be all that helpful if the salary range is large (from a Bachelor’s degreed adjunct with little experience to a Doctoral degreed adjunct with 20 years experience).  It wouldn’t help me to know that the salary range was $1000 – $5000.  A range like that might also set up expectations that the school can’t meet depending on how well they are doing financially at that time.  The job posting itself might be general because the specifics change from month to month.  Class sizes one term may be small, the next large.  They don’t know.  Same with how much they are able to pay.

I’ve always found that the best way to get the skinny on the specifics of a job is to talk to an adjunct who is currently teaching there.  Do you belong to adjunct groups on LinkedIn or Facebook/Twitter?  You could make connections with adjuncts who teach at the schools who have jobs listed that you are interested in and open a dialogue with them about salary/time committment, etc–and get the kind of information you would need to determine if you’d like teaching there or not.

Since schools are competing with each other for qualified online applicants, I would say that they are all offering close to what could be industry standard.  I’ve found that industry standard is $1300-1500 for 5 week online courses.  That’s for undergrad classes.  Incremental increase in that as the class gets longer and a little bit more for graduate courses.  PHD instructors get paid a bit more (but not a whole lot more, in my experience) than Master’s level instructors.

Best practices in online teaching suggests that classes be no bigger than 20-25 with anticipated drops getting you closer to 18 in an online class.  This doesn’t speak to what schools actually do, but if a school if following best practices, you shouldn’t have more than 20ish in each class.  But a school who wants to follow best practices might not be able to in a given term based on enrollment, need, and financials.

Hope you find this helpful!  You are reminding me, in the rare event that a school does list salary/time committment information, to make sure I include it in my 500 character blurb!

 

I open this question up to the AdjunctWorld community–why do you think schools don’t always list the specifics we often look for?  Comment below!

Posted by & filed under The Effective Online Teacher.

bbh-singapore-BUK-z0LrGBo-unsplashSo far in this series of articles, we’ve covered some of the personal characteristics and the interpersonal skills associated with great online teaching.  Some of these skills/characteristics might be considered natural elements of an online instructor’s personality, but many can be studied, learned, and practiced over time to build competencies necessary to effectively reach online learners.

In addition to these skills and characteristics, there are some areas of study that good online instructors “keep up with” in order to understand their online learners and what they need from the class.  The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the things that online instructors should seek to know as they venture to teach distance courses.

1) Characteristics of the Adult Online Learner

We discussed the importance of empathy in the virtual learning environment in an earlier article.  Empathy is critical for building the online community, which turns an online class from a self-study to a personal growth opportunity that capitalizes on every mind in the classroom.  One important way to cultivate that empathy is to know your audience.   Who is a typical online learner?

Of course, there isn’t a straightforward answer to that.  Online learners are diverse, yet there are some general themes that drive these students to take asynchronous, online classes as opposed to traditional, full-time on-campus courses.  In general, these students fall in the “adult learner” category, meaning they are older than the typical 18-22 year old college student, have been working for some time, and have families of their own.

Their motivations for attending college are specific.  They aren’t going to college because that’s the thing you do after high school.  They want a better life for their families, they are burned out at their current job, and/or they have had a life experience that inspires them to go in a particular career direction.  They are so driven that they will make financial, familial, and occupational sacrifices to go to school.  These students comprise a large percentage of your online classroom.  These are students who know what they want and are looking to you to help them get it.

One point that I like to make to traditional face-to-face instructors who are venturing to teach online for the first time is that a lot of adult learners have had previous experience in the traditional classroom.  They started college, but didn’t finish for whatever reason.  While they are driven to finish now, they may also carry some baggage from that experience, which some may have considered a failure experience.  This makes them vulnerable.  Part of the online teacher’s responsibility, then, is to help these students flip that thinking and see school as a place to learn, grow, and succeed and not as a place where they are evaluated or where they have to measure up.  This is where having a relationship with their instructor is important.

A Google Scholar search or a search through your institution’s library database will yield several articles on the characteristics of the adult online learner and what they need from an online classroom.  This is a good place to start.  I’ll nod to this online e-book as a good reference: Online Education and Adult Learning:  New Frontiers for Teaching Practice.

2) Adult Learning Theories

Distance and adult education is no longer in its infancy.  Academics have been studying it for quite some time—since back in the days of mail-order correspondence classes.  And, as scholars are wont to do, we have developed many theories of adult learning.  While we don’t have to have to be expert practitioners of all of these theories, a general understanding of them is important.  Many of us were never taught how to teach (it was just assumed if you are an expert in, say, American History, you should be able to teach it), so developing a generalist background in adult education theory is a way to compensate for this.

Here are some places to start in your Adult Learning Theory research:

Malcolm Knowles’ Theory of Andragogy

Howard McClusky’s Theory of Margin

Knud Illeris’ Three Dimensions of Learning

Peter Jarvis’ Model of Experiential Learning

3) How to Present the Material in Class

Ben Ambridge, in his TED Talk titled “10 Myths about Psychology, Debunked,” made a convincing point about the invalidity “learning styles.”  He says that the idea that people have a way that they learn “best” is largely unsupported by science.  He argues that people don’t have unique learning styles; rather, the information being taught is better presented in certain ways.  You can’t teach someone to drive a car by talking them through it.  We all want to see pictures when we are cooking from a recipe—its not because we are “visual learners” but because recipes are best presented visually.  We don’t learn abstract concepts about physics by watching a ball drop from the sky—we need some written or verbal explanation to accompany it.

In other words, we don’t have to worry about discovering each of our students’ learning style and jumping through hoops pedagogically to accommodate.  However, we can acknowledge that there is a tendency for online classrooms to present knowledge in one way—through the written word, be it .pdf lecture, e-book, Word document handouts, web links, etc.  We should consider and investigate how the concept we are teaching is best taught.  Maybe its not best taught through written explanation.  Maybe we need to offer some video demonstration, or auditory cues, or to provide students with a kinesthetic experience of the material from behind their computers.  All of this takes pre-planning, creativity, research, and collaboration prior to class starting.

Effective online teachers, then, do not simply present their material in an arbitrary variety of ways meant to capture the individual “learning styles” of their students.  Instead, they investigate how their learning objectives are best presented and use those methods to reach the students.  This often does mean that the material is presented in a “variety” of ways, but it’s to a point.  Not just because “students learn differently.”

4) Practical Applications of Academic Theory

Seeking to apply theory to practical concerns is by no means particular to the online learning environment.  Indeed, it’s an essential skill for any teacher wanting to drive a point home to his or her students.  It’s something that interested and interesting teachers do anyway.  But, I mention it here because practical applications are an integral part of several adult learning theories, including Knowles’ Theory of Andragogy and Jarvis’ Model of Experiential Learning.  Knowles’ theory posits that adult learners need to know why they are learning something.   Jarvis maintains that adult learners need to have an experience with the material in order to truly learn it.

What does this suggest that the online teacher do to bring an element of practicality, especially to “theory-heavy” classes?  Here are a few ideas:

Find a TED talk that speaks directly (or maybe even indirectly) to the topic. TED talks illustrate how great thinkers are coming out of their Ivory Towers to use what they have learned to reach the global community, now and for the future.  As a psychology teacher, this is one of my favorite methods of engagement.  Short, inspiring talks that get students thinking with their fingers together!

Require students to consider how a theory described in the text is relevant to a current event—like the Baltimore riots, the behavior of ISIS, or the public’s reaction to a celebrity’s misbehavior.  This works particularly well in the discussion forum environment.

Design individual assignments so that the output is something that the student will actually do when they are working in the field.  Have clinical psychology students write a case report, public health students write a grant proposal, nursing students write a case note, education students decide what assessments they will use to evaluate a child with special needs, etc.

Require that a student perform an activity related to the material and present that experience either in an individual assignment or in the discussion board (i.e. have a social psychology student sit directly next to another person in a relatively empty movie theater and have them write about their experience).

Just some ideas!  Would love to hear some of your ideas (comment below!)

5) School’s Policies and Procedures for Online Classrooms

Adjuncts who teach for one school in particular are usually pretty familiar with the online classroom policies and procedures for that institution.  Adjuncts who teach for multiple colleges, however, are tasked with researching a lot of different policies.  While some of these policies are similar across the board, others are more nuanced and specific to the school.  In many instances, there is no formal training or explanation of these policies—you have to hunt them down on the school’s website.  I have taught for one of the major for-profit online schools and am simply required to hit a radial button to “acknowledge” that I have read and understood the school’s very, very lengthy procedural document.

Of course we read such documents—all teachers, online or off, do and should.  Online instructors, though, should be seek to be familiar with some specific information that helps their online classroom run smoothly and without problems that could interfere with the online learning process.  Adhering to policies also gives students at that institution a consitent learning experience.

Carefully research your school’s policies on:

Use of social networks in the classroom

Use of outside technologies or websites in the online classroom

Student and teacher attendance

What constitutes minimum online “presence” (how many times students and instructors should post in week)

Feedback turn around time

Format of feedback

How to handle conflict in the virtual classroom

Tech support

Extra credit

Knowledge of the above not only makes for more effective online teaching, it also provides the online instructor confidence and an identity as someone who “gets” this population and this job.  I’m curious about your experience as they relate to these five points!  Please comment below. I’d love to hear from you and see what you have to add or share.

 

Related Articles:

7 Characteristics of Effective Online Teachers

4 Interpersonal Skills for Effective Online Teaching

Posted by & filed under Job Listings.

Each week we will summarize all the Adjunct jobs we’ve added to AdjunctWorld during the week, in case you missed them, and for easy reference.  If you’d like to be notified moments after we post new jobs, please LIKE our facebook page or follow us on twitter.

So, without further ado, this week we posted 38 new Online and on-campus Adjunct jobs on AdjunctWorld from 14 different schools. Currently there are a total of 1,413 Online Adjunct jobs listed there.  Click below to see a selection of these recently posted jobs:

 

9 Online positions – American Public University System

8 Online positions – Ashford University

6 Online positions – Walden University

AdjunctWorld’s latest 10 Online Adjunct positions

 

…as well as online Adjunct positions at Chimborazo Publishing, Inc., Concordia University Portland, Florida International University, Grand Canyon University, Laboure College, MedPartners University, San Joaquin Valley College, The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Upper Iowa University, and Western Governors University.

 

We also posted three international teaching opportunities in China through the Panda Eagle Group.

 

Personalized Daily Job Alerts

Would you like to be alerted to the jobs in your discipline(s) right after they are posted on AdjunctWorld, rather than waiting for this weekly summary, or watching for our facebook & twitter posts?  Over the past week we’ve sent out hundreds of daily job alert emails to Premium AdjunctWorld Members.  Click here for a description of all of the Premium Membership benefits and how to subscribe.

 

Thanks! for being a part of the AdjunctWorld Community.

Posted by & filed under The Effective Online Teacher.

christina-wocintechchat-com-VpcgTEKerEQ-unsplashA well-honed set of interpersonal skills can make or break the effectiveness of a college instructor.  It is the instructor’s interpersonal style and unique personality that brings the material to life, captivates students, and motivates learning and critical thinking.  Off the top of your head, you can probably recall instructors from your college days who reached you through their dynamic personality.  You may even recall, with a shudder, those instructors who didn’t.

These skills are no less important in the online classroom environment.  Countless articles have been written on the importance of creating an intimate online classroom community when engaging students in the virtual environment.  The online instructor’s interpersonal skills are essential ingredients in the creation and maintenance of this community.

The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the most important interpersonal skills required of online instructors.  While some may think that such skills are innate and fixed (you either got ‘em or you don’t), it is certainly possible and even necessary to develop these skills over time.  Practice them. Research them.  These, indeed, are learnable skills and techniques that that most instructors can acquire if they choose to do so.

1)   Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and appreciate the perspective of another person.  This is a critical component of online teaching.  It requires developing self-awareness—knowing what one’s personal beliefs, biases, and experiences are.  It also requires developing other-awareness, or realizing that other people have and are entitled to their own perspectives based on their own unique life circumstances.

A teacher uses empathy to understand their students so as not to make assumptions about or judge them. This empathy creates a safe atmosphere for students to make mistakes or have successes, learn from them, and grow as a result.  It is within this sort of atmosphere that students engage with their teacher and each other.  Further, working closely with such an instructor can inspire students to develop empathy themselves.

Consider an example:

A psychology teacher believes that using extrinsic motivators is a detriment to child development.  When teaching operant conditioning, a student mentions that a “great” example of operant conditioning is when she gives her toddler candy for using the toilet.

A non-empathetic instructor, unaware of her biases, might unknowingly use her authoritative position to “drop knowledge” on her “naïve” student and reply by waxing poetic on the “follies” of such parenting decisions.  Even if this instructor approached the topic kindly, how would this student feel, especially in the public discussion board venue?

An empathetic instructor, conversely, is aware of her bias and does not judge her student for making this statement.  She would agree that the student gave a great example of the phenomenon being discussed.  If this same instructor did want to nod toward the power of intrinsic motivators over extrinsic, later in the discussion or apart from it she might post a link to a TED talk on a related topic and ask students to simply discuss their thoughts on the video.  No soapbox, no condemnation, but students are made aware of the alternative views and can consider the implications for themselves.

2) Reflective Listening

Adult learners are not new learners.  They have been students of life for a long time.  In some instances online students have more of this “life” experience than the instructors do (I myself am younger than most of my online students).  They need to know that their instructors are listening to them and value that experience and aren’t just standing at the front of the class filling heads with knowledge.

The discussion forum is where reflective listening skills are put to the test.  Students are looking to see not only that the instructor is hearing them, but that their teacher is listening to everyone else, too.  When the students know that you are an engaged listener, they are more likely to come to you with questions and be more open to your feedback.

These listening skills are perhaps best illustrated with an example:

Good, Reflective Response:  “Thank you for your thoughts here, Stacy.  You highlighted a great example of operant conditioning.  Parenting examples, such as the one you gave, give us a lot of grist for the mill for understanding Skinner’s behaviorist theory.  Potty training methods are very Skinnerian.  As are nearly every method we use to get our children do to their chores!  Ha!  Class, jumping off from Stacy’s post, what are some other examples of how we use Skinnerian methods in our day-to-day?”

Not-So-Reflective Response:l:  “Good answer!  I agree, that’s a great example.  According page 29 in the textbook, what would Tolman say about your example?”

In the “good” instance, the teacher made sure that the student knew that she read and understood where she was coming from and was so interested in her response that she thought it was worth engaging the class in further discussion.  In the not-so-good instance, the response could have been a response to any student’s post.  It’s generic.  This student was simply “scanned over” and everyone can tell.

3) Facilitation

Discussion boards are fluid and do belong to the class (they aren’t the instructor’s “stage”), but the instructor does guide the discussion along toward the objective.  If a thread is getting off topic, the skilled online teacher sums up the discussion and then asks a question or challenges the class to do some research on a related topic to rein the discussion back on track.  The instructor does not necessarily have to tell the class “Hey, you are off-topic” (which may bring the discussion to a screeching halt), but can acknowledge the discussion as an interesting one, but guide it back.

It’s also a skill to know when it is okay to let students get off topic a little.  If the discussion continues, maybe it will relate to something in a later lesson.  Then the instructor can refer back to the discussion at that time, further personalizing the experience for the class.

Sometimes there can be a student personality in the mix that necessitates more redirection.  Susan Ko speaks well to how to redirect these students in her article “Managing Difficult Students in the Online Classroom.”

4) Genuineness and Humor

Some of my fondest memories from college included meeting with instructors in their office for office hours.  Yes, it was cool to get the extra instruction and guidance, but what was even cooler was seeing their office.  Seeing pictures of their family, being in awe of all the trinkets from their travels, surmising their personality by noting how organized (or not) their desk was.  In short, getting to know the instructor a bit.  Not too much, but just as much as they were comfortable putting on display in their office.

Online students don’t really get to have this experience and it would be a shame if we didn’t provide it for them.  So, online instructors should make some effort (to the extent they are comfortable) offering a bit of personal, non-CV related information about themselves.  This can take many forms—a PowerPoint introduction about their hobbies, some photos, an anecdote in their biography, or a game of two truths and a lie.  This goes a long way toward establishing a sense of genuineness and authenticity in the classroom.  Allowing students the opportunity to do the same lays the foundation for the all-important classroom community.

The instructor’s personality also shines in the classroom discussion.  A lot of the face-to-face instructors I talk to express concern that their “personality” won’t be appreciated in the virtual environment.  But, it can.  Instructors can choose to present their lectures in video format or use voice over in their presentations to let their voices be heard.  However, tech savviness of this sort isn’t critical, as online instructors should also feel comfortable with an informal, conversational writing style, one that uses appropriate humor or a non-annoying amount of emoticons, yet maintains a professional focus on the material.  I’m from Kentucky, for instance, and am pretty liberal with my use of “y’alls” in my communications with students!

A solid set of practiced interpersonal skills are fundamental to the success of the online classroom.   What is your experience of interpersonal skills in the online classroom?  Have anything to add to the list?  Have a good experience to share?  A not-so-good experience?  I’d love to hear from you!  Comment below or email me!

 

Related Articles:

7 Characteristics of Effective Online Teachers

5 Things Effective Online Instructors Know

Posted by & filed under Job Listings.

Each week we will summarize all the Adjunct jobs we’ve added to AdjunctWorld during the week, in case you missed them, and for easy reference.  If you’d like to be notified moments after we post new jobs, please LIKE our facebook page or follow us on twitter.

So, without further ado, this week we posted 50 new Online and on-campus Adjunct jobs on AdjunctWorld from 10 different schools. Currently there are a total of 1,379 Online Adjunct jobs listed there.  Click below to see a selection of these recently posted jobs:

 

12 Online positions – University of Maryland University College

9 Online positions – Excelsior College

8 Online positions – Northwestern State University

AdjunctWorld’s latest 10 Online Adjunct positions

 

…as well as online Adjunct positions at Grand Canyon University, ITT Tech, Study.com, Troy University, University of Southern California, Utica College, and Western Governors University.

 

Personalized Daily Job Alerts

Would you like to be alerted to the jobs in your discipline(s) right after they are posted on AdjunctWorld, rather than waiting for this weekly summary, or watching for our facebook & twitter posts?  Over the past week we’ve sent out hundreds of daily job alert emails to Premium AdjunctWorld Members.  Click here for a description of all of the Premium Membership benefits and how to subscribe.

 

Thanks for being a part of the AdjunctWorld Community!