It seems to me that there is no amount of preparation that can guarantee that something will not go wrong in an online course the first day of class. I looked at my list of things to do to prepare, I looked at my course from the student’s view, I looked for typos, for dead links, I reviewed the schedule several times, I emailed students to their external emails, to their internal emails, but I can never foresee what some students will find to be awkward or unclear in the course policies or the navigation of the course.
This term I am implementing VoiceThread for the first time and earlier things not working well. I was a bit nervous about it to begin, even though I had tested the tool many times. D2L was acting up and some of the problems in VoiceThread my students experienced may have been related to that. But now I see things are running smoothly and I feel excited about using the new tool. I am hearing student’s voices! I think that is a terrific improvement for the dynamics of the discussion; student’s responses are more personal, memorable, and more human. I still hope that most students will chose to record their voice rather than type. That will be the real test!
As far as other kinks in the course, I’ll deal with them one at the time.
Cheers to a great fall term!
~Carol
I have not used VoiceThread. Guess it is something I need to explore.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I check and recheck my classes, and yet there are still a few small errors. Very aggravating! Fortunately, most times one student catches my error before the whole class does, giving me time to fix it.
I have thoroughly enjoyed your posts. Mary