A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans (20 page)

As a Pagan teacher, however, the important thing to remember with any of these technologies—from podcasts to the cloud—is that you should choose the tool that's right for the job rather than going for the one with the most bells and whistles, just because you can. Some teaching is best accomplished with a simple, uncomplicated delivery. On the other hand, if you are tech-savvy, your options are broadening every day.

S
o
me General Guidelines
for Online Classes

Best practices for online teaching are changing rapidly as we learn about the many ways people interact with the web and the effect the web has on assimilation of information. (A recent book about this that you might find interesting—and a little scary—is
The Shallows
by Nicholas Carr.) And not many online teaching practices have substantial scientific validation behind them (so far). Without knowing what technology you might use to teach your class, it's impossible for me to make specific recommendations for your course. However, there are some general overall guidelines you can use to design and teach an online class that apply to many of the technologies you might use. For more specifics, I highly recommend you visit the eLearn Magazine website (http://elearnmag
.acm.org), which contains very helpful in-depth information on teaching online and designing online classes. There are also some sites and books listed in the resources at the end of this book that can provide more specific guidance for your particular situation and needs. And if you think you'd like to try Moodle, there's a strong Moodle support community online.

Course Description and Course Syllabus

The course description and course syllabus are important parts of any class, whether it's online or in person, but they are particularly essential in an online class, where students can't ask you questions quite as easily as they can when they're standing right in front of you. Use the tips in
Chapter 6
for creating a course description and syllabus for a traditional course. If students will be required to use any particular technology to access or participate in your class—email, IM, chat, video streaming, Skype, camera—list it up front, along with the version, if applicable.

When writing a syllabus for an online class, follow the guidelines for an in-person class syllabus from chapter 6, and also consider the ideas below. Remember that in a traditional classroom, you would probably explain a lot of these things on the first day in person:

• Post or email the syllabus well before the class.
  
• List any passwords students will need to access the class content.
  
• As with a traditional syllabus, the syllabus for an online class should be detailed and outline what you hope to accomplish with each class session (if your format has sessions), including learning objectives. The general wisdom is that since you won't be interacting with students as directly, it's best to make an online syllabus even more detailed than you might make a regular syllabus.
  
• List any texts students will be required to use. Sometimes online students like to have texts to refer to, especially if they weren't raised with the web. “Texts” can also refer to URLs for online texts or content.
  
• Include your “attendance policy,” if you have one (for example, rules about participation in a chat room with the rest of a class at a certain time), and what your overall expectations are for student participation.
  
• Make sure the syllabus contains your contact information and your online “office hours,” if you have them. If you have preferences about how and when you should be contacted, state those as well.
  
• Include in the syllabus the format(s) in which you would like students to submit homework or assignments, and how soon they can expect to receive feedback.
  
• Include information on what students should do if they encounter technical issues—contact you or a specified technology help person, refer to a troubleshooting website you create, etc.
  
• It helps to post the syllabus in multiple places and also email it to students. Students will invariably lose it (as they often do paper ones in traditional classes), so having the syllabus in several places is a good idea.
  

Getting Students Used to the Technology

Students might or might not have experience using whatever technology you're using to deliver your class. Here are a few things you can do to help them get used to the technology and feel more comfortable with it:

• Provide or point students to documentation or video demonstrations about how to use the technology.
  
• Make sure you understand the technology thoroughly yourself so you can help students troubleshoot if they have problems. Another option is to have a tech-savvy friend on call to help with problems.
  
• If possible, provide students with access to the technology or tool before the class starts so they can explore it a little.
  
• Consider making your first assignment one that will require students to use the main types of technology you'll be using in class.
  
• During class sessions, remember to allow download time for videos, etc. Not everyone will have a rocket-speed Internet connection.
  

Interacting with Students Online

Since you usually can't rely on facial and body cues when you're teaching online, the general wisdom is that you need to compensate for that in other ways. Here are some tips for communicating with students online:

• Give feedback quickly, constructively, and frequently. Students need to know there's someone there if they can't see your face.
  
• Use whatever tools you have at your disposal to foster communication between students so they can support each other and trade ideas. Use technology such as chat rooms, streaming video, and private email lists to help the group interact and bond.
  
• Make sure your expectations for everything—homework, class participation, respectful behavior between students, etc.—are very, very clear. Post them and restate them. Students can't ask you about expectations face to face, so they need extra support here.
  
• Even in this day and age, some students might not be used to interacting online, so you might need to teach them a little netiquette.
  
• When you're about a quarter of the way through the class—enough so that people are settling in but not so far that you can't change direction if you need to—ask for student feedback about the class and what, if anything, you could do differently to make it work for them.
  
• Set boundaries as you would if you were teaching in person. In certain situations you might need to explain these rather than model them, since you're not face to face.
  
• Positively reinforce well-reasoned answers and posts by students, either privately or “in front” of the group.
  
• Refer to students by name, as if they were in the room with you.
  
• Don't use sarcasm or irony. It doesn't translate well online, and it's possible people will misunderstand or be offended.
  

Leading Online Discussions

There are many ways you can lead a discussion online. Below are just a few ideas, which I hope will inspire you to come up with your own. As you would in an in-person class, be sure to model and reinforce respectful discussion and shut down non-constructive arguments or flaming. Remember, too, to give adequate reading time and think time after posing a question. Since many online discussions are in text (unless you're using video conferencing or Skype), people need time to read the question, think about it, and type a response.

• Have students post discussion questions, rather than you suggesting them. Consider having the student who suggested the question moderate the discussion about it.
  
• Raise an issue with two or more possible “sides.” Use the polling feature of an LMS or Survey Monkey (a website that allows you to build online surveys) to find out which position students agree with most and why. Use the results to discuss the topic.
  
• Break students into groups and give each group a few questions related to the topic to answer together. Have students post their answers.
  
• Post a question or issue for a particular class session several days before the class, using an LMS or blog. Have students use the comment feature to answer. You can use this technique by itself or to prepare them for a full-group discussion.
  

Organizing Your Content

Although the technology used to teach online varies from what you might use in the classroom, the basic principles and best practices for organizing the two types of courses often overlap. Using the class creation technique described in
Chapter 6
can serve as a starting point. Write your SMART objectives, place them in a reasonable order, and determine how you will teach each one, whether it be through a video or podcast, an interactive quiz in an LMS or discussion or activity staged in a chat-room. How you present your content will, of course, depend on the technology at your disposal.

One place where online course creation is very different from creating an in-person course is that depending on the technology you use, your students might have the option to navigate through your class material in an order that's different from what you intended. They might skip around, try different sections and return to them later, or simply go through the material in an order that makes more sense to them than the one you chose. This isn't always ideal, since sometimes topics build on each other and students need to understand a foundational concept before they can grasp a more complex one, but where the order of instruction is less crucial, technology can offer more flexibility to students to choose to learn or absorb information in the way that makes the most sense to them. Online teachers handle this in a number of different ways, including but not limited to setting things up so the content has to be read in a specific order, making suggestions of different effective ways to navigate through the information, and/or creating modules of information in the course that stand alone and aren't dependent on the others.

One generally accepted (but hardly unanimous) principle about online content is that it should be presented in smaller chunks than you would use if you were presenting it live. For example, a lecture that you might give in person would be tedious in type on the web (although it might work as a video or podcast), so you would break apart the lecture content into small, easily absorbed sections, and place them on multiple pages if you are presenting the content in text or find more dynamic ways to present them. Some other general guidelines for organizing the content of your class and choosing the appropriate technologies (or, in some cases, the other way around) are:

• Organize the content in a progressive way that makes sense to you, with one topic building on another, but when the nature of the content makes it possible, create navigation that allows users to use the content out of order or in an order that makes more sense to them.
  
• Don't use every technology at your disposal just because you can. Consider carefully whether the technology you want to use will be effective for teaching the particular objective you are working on. Don't use so many technologies in one class that you confuse people.
  
• Remember that not everyone will have the latest processor and fastest Internet connection. Some of the more bandwidth-hogging technologies might make it difficult for some students to complete your class.
  

Don't forget that although you have many options, simpler is sometimes better. At my day job we recently released two online trainings. The first consisted of a set of video modules, with the idea that a group of teachers would gather together, watch the modules, and have a discussion after each one. The other was a full-blown Moodle setup, complete with online quizzes, games, and other interactive features. Guess which one the teachers use? The relatively simple, uncomplicated video modules.

Teaching Techniques and Activities
for Online Classes

Here are a few general guidelines for online activities:

• Most activities you do online will take longer than they would if you were doing them in person, in part because of the time lag due to technology, and also because people can't see each other and interact directly. Plan accordingly.
  
• Try to use both synchronous (activities that students do at the same time or together) and asynchronous (activities done separately) techniques.
  
• As with in-person teaching, use a variety of large- and small-group activities, and try to choose activities and techniques that touch on multiple learning styles. It's harder to include hands-on activities online, but if all else fails, you can always assign them as homework or independent study to be done away from the computer.
  
• As you might have guessed already, many of the teaching techniques listed in
  Chapter 5
  for an in-person class need to be modified if you are going to use them online, but most of them are usable if you have an interactive online workspace or if you do some of the synchronous activities asynchronously.
  

A Note About
Web Accessibility

Making a website “accessible” means using certain practices to ensure that people with disabilities can use the site. For example, there are ways to tag images and links to make them more compatible with software and hardware used by the blind to convert text to speech or Braille. Explaining accessibility best practices is way beyond the scope of this book, but if you are interested in making your site accessible, there are a variety of websites detailing how to do it, as well as YouTube tutorials. Following accessibility guidelines will add another layer of complexity to setting up your class, but it might be worth it to you if it means a wider variety of students can access your teachings. Accessibility is considered very important in the professional teaching community.

Reconciling Nature and the Web

As I was writing this section about teaching online, I thought about the nature orientation of many Pagan paths and wondered whether it was possible to reconcile use of the web and other modern technologies with our love of the natural world. I am very interested in online education technologies—I use them constantly in my day job—and am very excited about the possibilities they have for teaching Paganism, but I also agree with what Patrick McCollum said in
Chapter 2
about teaching outside, or at least in a place where you can feel connected to nature. I suppose you could haul your laptop outside and take a Pagan course (as long as you could get wifi), but it just doesn't quite seem right to me.