Apr 02 2009
How to become an online instructor
I was mucking about over in hubpages today and happened to come across this article about how to become an online class instructor for a university .
That is definitely something that I would love to do - I have the computer skills - and I love to teach ….but I wonder if I would still enjoy the teaching without the face to face interaction with students? Probably - I enjoy my online interactions with people I meet on Gather and through blogging and other social networking sites - so why not through teaching as well?
My own experience with online course instructors has not been very positive on the whole though. I have taken online university courses both through Laurentian University’s Envision program , and through Athabasca University .
In both cases, the materials provided were excellent. The instructor support, not so much.
Both of my Envision courses had the same professor. First mistake, I guess. At least, if I had had different profs I might have had a shot at getting at least 1 that was…. well…. I don’t want to say good, since that would suggest that the one I did have was bad - and I didn’t have enough interaction to know that. The professor I did have was just totally unresponsive, mostly.
No welcome email, or acknowledgement…. and when I emailed her with a question about an essay, her response took more than 2 weeks. It finally came about a week after the due date for the essay. Helpful.
The courses I took at Athabasca all had different tutors - but again, so little interaction as to be pretty near useless. Honestly can’t even remember the names of either of the Shakespeare people …and the psychology one I remember mostly because I sent her my final essay back in January and am still waiting for a mark for it and for the course. Because of my car accident in November, I was late (with permission)…so some delay is understandable… but I would rather like to know how I did on the course… have the credit show up on my transcript… you know… I did, after all, pay in excess of $600 for the course. It is a little frustrating.
And if I had NEEDED that course to get accepted into the phd program I applied for, it would have been a lot frustrating.
Anyway - when I am the prof, I will do a better job of it!
Have you taken any online University courses? How did you find them? What would you do differently if you were the prof?
I have not taken any, but my sister (who specializes in Shakespeare, I might add) has taught several I believe. You might check with her.
I’ve taken several undergraduate courses online from a community college. One on Excel and one was an intro to computers — both were for continuing ed credits. The Intro course was simple for me, so I never really needed to contact the instructor. The Excel course however gave me some problems because I was using a slightly older version than the textbook used, and well, Excel can be kind of buggy. The instructor was *very* good about helping me, and had fast response time.
My mom was an online professor for U of Phoenix for a bit over a year, and I know she took it very seriously. She got to know many of her students very well - she even introduced one of her students to her sister who happened to live in the same town.
I’ll hopefully be embarking on an online graduate degree program here in the next few months - so I really hope that my experiences so far won’t prove to be unique.
I am going to send my resume to the director of the communications and gen ed courses at work as soon as I finish my MA … hopefully at some point, there will be an opportunity for me to flit into some of the online course teaching spots - could do that while I am doing my Phd, without the hassle of needing Ross to drive me.
It would be ideal, actually.