Consider your entry into teaching, no matter your discipline. With the possible exception of education or teacher training programs, almost all disciplines fail to provide robust training opportunities for new and future faculty. Many research universities now offer opportunities for their graduate students to take courses in pedagogy or participate in teaching development programs, for example, but very few require it (Haras, Ginsberg, FĂ©rnandez, and Magruder, 2017, p. 56). We can hardly blame overburdened PhD students for prioritizing their research over their development as teachers, especially when faculty at research universities might not see teaching as priority in their own professional lives.
Likewise, professionals in the field entering the teaching force for the first time might be working full-time and coming to campus in the evening out of a desire to share their knowledge with the next generation, and have to balance teaching work with full-time jobs. Given the low rate of pay that institutions often provide to these adjunct instructors, schools might be reluctant to require teaching development activities as a prerequisite for the job.
As a consequence, most new teachers fall back on what we experienced as students, and what we observe our colleagues doing in the classroom (if we observe our colleagues in the classroom â teaching is a notoriously isolating business), as we develop our own classroom persona and methods.
So how do we learn to teach? We might have been given a syllabus from someone who has previously taught the class. Perhaps we then chose a textbook either based on what the previous instructor(s) used, or maybe based on our experience as students. Having selected the textbook, we proceeded to comb through any syllabi that we were given. We co-opted several elements, made adjustments according to our preferences, and established due dates for major assignments and exams. That may have been the extent of our big-picture planning. When preparing to teach my first literature survey course, I remember thinking to myself: Well, all 200-level lit classes have two papers due, a midterm exam, and a final exam. So I guess that's what I'll do. Looking back, it doesn't seem like a very intentional way to plan a course.
To be fair, once we've selected a textbook and roughed in the main assessments of the class, most of us then do everything we can to plan a cohesive course that equips students to succeed on those assessments. In all the years I've spent working with, mentoring, and developing college faculty, I've never met anyone who set out to create a random class with no sequential logic, no connection between readings and tests, no central organizing principle. We assign readings, videos, and other content that will prepare students to do well on tests, papers, and projects. We plan class sessions and homework assignments in a way that we hope will help students understand class concepts. We may even provide study guides, rubrics, and other materials to help students do well on our assessments. But while we have good intentions, there is frequently a lack of deliberate thought about exactly why we are asking students to do what we are asking them to do.
Because thinking about the purpose of classwork is so foundational to our teaching, in the next chapter we will take a closer look at backward design. This framework helps us bring intentionality to our teaching. Backward design may be new to you, you may have unconsciously been doing it all along, or you may be well acquainted with the approach. Whatever your familiarity with backward design, we'll consider how we can be more deliberate in the design â or planning â of our online courses, and how, using small teaching strategies, we can reinforce and make explicit our online course design for our students.
Chapter 2 explores how we guide and support students through our carefully designed online courses, ensuring that they have a clear view of the purpose of each course component. In a face-to-face environment, we have frequent, informal opportunities to remind students about the big picture of the course, and about how a piece of content or an assessment contributes to that big picture. We can intervene on a regular basis to check student understanding, respond to spontaneous concerns and questions, and support students through the learning process. Students in online courses can feel isolated from these essential learning supports. Chapter 2 provides small teaching approaches that will help students keep the purpose of the course, and all of its components, clearly in view. It also offers models that will help you monitor the progress of your students and provide you opportunities to intervene with support and guidance when they most need it.
After considering how to intentionally design the course, and how to create structures that support student learning, in Chapter 3 we'll examine how to intentionally select technology and media tools for our online classes. The tools and media that we use comprise a huge part of the course experience, yet it's easy to fall into the same kind of default thinking that we were susceptible to when we first began teaching in person. Maybe your department chair gave you someone else's online content to use, so you just stuck with that content and the tools that were already in the course. Maybe you weren't so lucky; maybe you had no example to follow and little guidance, so you created an online course based on your best guess of what it should contain. Maybe you've taught online for a while but have fallen into a rut of using the same technologies that you've always used. Whatever your situation, we'll examine a series of small teaching questions that will help us think through what tools and technology we're using, and why.
Learning doesn't happen by accident. Successful and engaging online classes don't, either. Designing an online course is a large endeavor, but even large endeavors have to start small.