Online Teachers@Work Symposium
Notable Quotes
"We had one school district with a 100% completion rate for its online courses. For us completion meant completing and passing all the courses. You can't get a 100% completion rate for even traditional face-to-face high school courses but they kept doing it semester after semester. We finally asked them how they did it. They responded, 'In our district, any student can take an online course and we will pay for it if he finishes it. If the student doesn't finish it, the parent pays for it and we hold up his diploma until we get payment, just like with any other fee.'"
"As we move further along with online education, the definition of the online teacher has to diverge more and more from the definition of in-classroom teacher. With online schooling, the bulk of the responsibility of the child's education is going to the home. And to be successful, the parents' role almost has to be mandated."
"In K-3 online education, parents play a significant role in their child's success. That is why we put our parents through a rigorous training so that they serve as facilitators for their kids learning. The teacher is simply a guide."
"We have a Web designer who designs all the graphics for our home-grown curriculum pages. It is one thing to come up with all the content, but quite another to have to also know how to design the Web page that best delivers it."
"For me, the promise of online education is that students have the opportunity to move at their own pace as far as their curiosity and ability takes them."
"The way I keep evolving my practice is by asking my students for feedback at the completion of each unit. As I get the feedback, I make the changes necessary to make the unit more effective. I think that this is what an online teacher's job is: to continually improve the teaching based upon feedback from the learner. My guiding question is, 'What course design changes must I make to increase student engagement?"
"When we started ten years ago, we didn't have any models of online teaching to follow. Teachers actually developed all of their courses based on what we taught in the classroom and how we taught it. We just tried to replicate that online. Boy did we find out real fast that you can't do that. You can do it, but you won't be successful. It's so different when you instruct online."
"I think increasing skills so our students can better engage in an online classroom is most important no matter what content we are teaching."
"The beauty of online teaching, and I'm talking full-time online teaching, is that I have the opportunity and the real chance to work with a kid one-on-one. In an online classroom, I can have break-out sessions with each student and continue the communication by e-mail. The beauty of online education is that we are paying attention to each and every one of them."
"With online education, we just turn the technology over to them and let them use it express themselves in their own unique ways. It's that 'wow' factor when we put technology into their hands that draws them in and the opportunities technology offers to address different learning styles through different modes of instruction. We create the structure and then tell students 'Go learn.'"
"What makes an online course good? A good online course helps every kid get to a determined outcome. The only way I can get every student to their determined outcome is by offering many different options for them to use along the way. A good online school has the potential to offer multiple entry levels based upon student abilities, student preparation, student goals, and student interest. Through good practice and good instruction students can go off in many directions and still end up meeting state and national standards."
"At our school, our goal is to create a banquet table. We invite students and their parents to meet with the teachers and counselors and collaborate on the best program for this particular student. The student picks and chooses from a variety of options to determine what would work best for him. I wouldn't want to hold a student to one approach alone. I don't care which delivery method the student chooses. I care that I've addressed the student's learning style and delivered the content successfully."
"I teach in isolation. I am the Math department and I live miles and miles from other math teachers. A critical piece that makes best practice work is collegiality. To be a good online teacher I need to talk to other math teachers. What I am missing is the collegiality in online teaching."
"Online education excites me philosophically. I would like to see it moving in a direction away from the box that the district and state policies have put it in. I would like to see a 6th grader in my 10th grad English or my high school Creative Writing class because that is what the student is ready for. I would like to see us doing more integrated curricula and no longer be bound to constraints, like scheduling and chronological age placements, that bind in-classroom education."
"One of the biggest challenges with online teaching is that I can't rely on my personality to engage the students. I'm just not as much fun online. I've been teaching online for three years and hope to learn to be as strong a teacher online as I was in the classroom."
"It amazes me that most of us at this Symposium are teaching at-risk students because we know that to succeed online, a student has to be motivated. I think that some students come online because they have tried everything else and nothing has worked for them. At-risk kids discover this new way of learning and sometimes, it is their last hope. I enjoy working with them but if they don't make the initial effort to relate to me, we can't develop a relationship that lets me reach them." "I find that I can't cover as much in an online course as I can in the classroom because everything takes longer. The good news is that it is easier for me to individualize instruction for students because I can more quickly determine the student's needs and make modifications."
"What makes an online program strong is the quality and frequency of teacher communication. There are phone calls and e-mails that teachers use to respond to student work. There are many hours of back and forth interaction between student and teacher. Teachers judge the student's progress not based on amount of time student is logged into the system but on what the student is doing while logged on and showing the teacher with his work."
"Plagiarism can be a temptation for online students. The way to get around that is by creating assessments that make it more difficult. Creative assessments based on more than a report or an essay or fact regurgitation. Perhaps you ask them to keep a journal that shows the teacher everything the student has learned about life on the Mayflower. By making assignments more personal, student-centered, and engaging, students are challenged to express themselves more creatively."
"We need to some educating about online teaching because we are working in the infancy of this business. I don't think state or even federal administrators know the value this has for education. I don't think online education is for everyone but I do think it serves a very critical function that is not known yet. I don't think we've even begun to tap the growth in learning that online education can stimulate."
"A nice element of online teaching is that I don't feel tied to the pedagogy of the textbook. I just use the textbook as a resource and students do the activities but how I deliver the content is completely separate."
"We have face-to-face orientations with our incoming students. I tell them that online learning is harder than in the classroom because I'm just coaching them through their learning. They are teaching themselves and I'm just steering them through it."
"I tell my student through every facet of the course, that I am open to suggestions. I say that the course is an organic process that we are evolving together. I encourage them to help me make the changes that will make it more interesting and more fun and less confusing."
"Technology is changing the teaching and learning process. When we ask ourselves, 'What do my students know?' we direct our students to take a pre-test in any curriculum area and because of an integrated course management system like Blackboard we determine very quickly how to differentiate instruction for any particular student. We know what the student knows and offer enrichment or remediation as indicated."
"When a student submits a paper to us online, we can review it and send it back almost immediately for revision. It's not a matter of what we grade it based on how many correct and incorrect responses the student turned in but on how well the paper demonstrates what they know. We have the ability to influence their understanding of the concept because we question them while they work on it."
"We are having a degree of success with at-risk students because we don't penalize them for the time it takes them to learn and to grow. They learn that they can do the work, at their own pace. As we work with them and see their deficiencies, we teach them the skills they need to progress. Once they trust they can do it, they step up on their own to read and think about new things and try new activities. This is the benefit some of our at-risk students are getting from online education."