Tag Archives: Pedagogy

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What online instructors want from their students

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the misconceptions–or complete mystification–some online students have about what their professors are looking for. In an asynchronous online class, there’s no regular meeting time when students can ask questions and professors can pointedly emphasize certain desired behaviors. I don’t want my students to have to guess what my expectations are for them–nobody likes that game. While every instructor will have expectations specific to each of their courses, there are some that, at least in my opinion, transcend contexts. In this post, I’m going to list and briefly explain several of these close-to-universal expectations.

  1. We want you to write like a real person, not a robot. I’ve been saying this for years, but the recent revolution in accessible generative AI tools has made this advice particularly urgent and very literal! An essay written by ChatGPT and an essay written by a student in a stilted, impersonal academic-ese, while ethically different, are both really boring to read. I want to get to know you through your writing, especially in an online class where writing is about the only thing we have to build a relationship on. Let your own voice come through!
  2. We want you to communicate with us. Often, students who email me will preface their message by saying something like “I’m so sorry to bother you.” I always reassure these students that answering their questions is what I’m paid to do and that my best teaching often happens through email. Again, since you’re not sitting in a classroom with me, I don’t have that weekly or daily time to check that you’re understanding the material and doing okay in life in general. If you’re turning in assignments, at least I know you’re alive, but I’ve found that the students who do best in online classes are those who communicate with me outside of assignments–asking questions, running ideas by me, letting me know what you think of the course materials, etc. And this might go without saying, but if you’re not turning in assignments and you’re not emailing me, then I have no choice but to assume that you’ve fallen off the face of the earth! I would much rather receive an email explaining that it’s been a hard week and asking for an extension than receive no communication at all. Talk to me!
  3. We want you to read our feedback. This one may sound like a pet peeve rant (“I spent all that time writing feedback and they didn’t even read what I wrote!”), but there’s more to it than that. I guess I can’t speak for all instructors here, but I try to grade with the goal of helping my students on future assignments, both in my class and later classes. I don’t make as many grading corrections as I used to (I was trained in the bleeding red pen school), but the comments I do leave are substantial and, I sincerely hope, constructive. If you don’t read my feedback, you’re missing out on a big part of what you’re paying for in my class. If an assignment has a rubric (and I think rubrics are used pretty much across the board in online education today), find out how to open and read the filled-out rubric–otherwise, you don’t know why you lost the points you did, and you’re left to assume the professor just doesn’t like you. I can’t promise that I like all my students (that’s a different topic for a different post!), but I never deduct points just because–the rubric always makes it clear!

I’ll stop there for now, because those are by far the three biggest expectations I have for my online students. Of course, students also have a right to know what they can expect from their professors, so look for a future post on that!

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teacher or tech support?

This post is part of a series on bringing a human touch to online education. See the series introduction here.

I try to keep abreast of ideas in my field by reading scholarly journals. Often, it’s a difficult slog to get through the articles, both because I’m not familiar with the concepts of all the many subfields of the very broad discipline of language and literature and because academics are not always the best at writing clear prose (and I’m pointing at myself here too). But occasionally, I get to spend a few hours of sheer intellectual pleasure as I’m doing my professional development reading, and yesterday I had one of those times.

I sat down with the latest Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, a special issue on how the pandemic has changed how we teach English. I was drawn to several articles (which I’ll cite at the end of this post) about teaching online, since that’s currently the only modality in which I teach. Although these articles were written by faculty who had to rapidly shift to online teaching due to the pandemic, whereas I teach for programs that were developed to be online and that have existed since long before spring 2020, I assumed I would find some relevance in them, and I wasn’t disappointed. Though they were written independently of each other (albeit responding to the same special issue prompt), the three articles formed a conversation about the deeper philosophical issues of online education, such as how it is subtly shifting the definition of learning to something that can be measured by metrics like frequency of log-ins and number of discussion posts. All of the authors readily acknowledged the benefits and possibilities of online education, but all of them pointed to trends and assumptions that could be pernicious if unquestioned and offered ways to push back against them.

One of the moments in my reading when I found myself agreeing aloud was in Mark Brenden’s article on learning management systems (LMS)–websites like Blackboard and Canvas where students and faculty conduct the business of online courses. Something Brenden said struck me so profoundly that I want to quote it at length here:

[the LMS] directs students’ interactions to mostly take place with the LMS itself, rather than with their peers or their instructor. Learning is presented as a digital maze–at the end of which apparently lies knowledge-in-waiting–that students must navigate. The teacher often functions more as a technician, or customer-service agent, who gets contacted if something goes awry with the students’ interaction with the LMS.

In other words, one of the most meaningful aspects of the college adventure–the encounter with other humans–is sidelined into an option to be avoided except when necessary. I mean no disrespect to people who work in tech support positions (their role is different, not less valuable) when I say that as a professor, I hope my relationship with students is deeper, longer-lasting, and less one-sided than a quick phone call or text chat with a troubleshooter.

We can get information from a website, but we can only get transformative, life-defining conversations (whether real-time or asynchronous) from real people. I believe we can get those in an online education setting, but this requires professors who are willing to be authentic and available. And that’s what this blog post series is about.

Back to more practical tips next time! Here are the articles I mentioned. All are from Pedagogy vol. 23, no. 2:

Bezio, Kelly L. “How to Subvert the Banking Concept of Education in Neoliberal Times.” pp. 263-274.

Brenden, Mark. “Learning and Management during and after the Pandemic: Reading Student Resistance to LMS.” pp. 297-310

Tidwell, Christy. “In Defense of Facelessness: Not In-Person but Not Impersonal.” pp. 321-332.