Religious Studies News

In addition to forcing me to reorganize content more intentionally, I found that creating discussion board prompts and short essays that took the place of quizzes helped me create equally useful Blackboard projects for all versions of the class. Writing prompts forced me to articulate clearly what I wanted the students to get from the readings and how I wanted them to think about key concepts. Using the discussion board function showed me where students were likely to get bogged down by the technology and how I could communicate effectively to help them avoid that (the cumbersome difference between a “forum” and a “thread,” for example). I began to think in terms of applying the successful online course practices to the way I use Blackboard in the face-to-face version of the course. This is one of the great advantages to teaching online. In my experience, however, there is a noticeable difference in the level of resistance to technology in a course that also meets regularly in a classroom. Students in that situation tend to get more easily frustrated by being asked to do tasks online outside of class. The more clearly I articulate the justification for making an assignment online versus handed in or in-class, the more quickly the students overcome their discomfort with the technology and engage the material that I want them to be grappling with.

In all versions of my class, I ask students to think of examples for each of the dimensions and post them to the discussion board. The students in the online version of the class almost always use longer posts and go into greater detail discussing the examples. The students in the face-to-face version of the course see this exercise as some kind of “busy-work” that they can check off their to-do lists after they sit down and write one sentence to show they have completed the assignment. My response to this discrepancy has been to try to explain more clearly in class how I see the discussion board as an opportunity for students to:

1. Show me they understand the concepts even if they are too shy to speak out during class
2. Practice using the terms in a low stakes forum and get feedback before they are tested on them. In the online version of the class it seems to be taken for granted that all forms of communication are evaluated and therefore worthy of careful thought and attention.

In conclusion, I am grateful that my online course is a small version of a course I’m very familiar with. Creating the online version took a fair amount of work, but now that it is “up” it is relatively easy to adapt from one summer to the next. Once the summer session starts, the amount of reading and responding that I have to do are not unreasonable. On the other hand, because of the amount of reading involved in the online version of the course, I cannot imagine teaching more than a dozen students at a time. The way I have adapted this course — with no tests, no quizzes, and nothing that could be automatically graded or evaluated by Blackboard — my imagination fails when it comes to thinking of ways to teach hundreds or even thousands of students at once. I think maybe Wendy Verrai-Berenback of the Center for Teaching and Learning could help me if I had to do it, but for now I feel content to avoid that brave new virtual world.