Online Course Development and Changing Teacher Identity

I guess this is hump week, meaning I am halfway to developing my course. I spent the past week creating quizzes, assignment sheets, rubrics, and handouts. These are not any different than they would be for a face-to-face course. The only difference is I am developing them now instead of a week or two before I need them. For my hybrid course, I feel obligated, especially with using Softchalk, to develop all these materials now.

I see both pros and cons to developing materials early on, before the first class session takes place.

The pros are:

1. Develop them now, and they’re done, which means
2. the course has a higher degree of specificity, meaning, in effect, that I am forced to think more concretely about what I want to do and why, which probably helps with course coherence.

The cons are:

1. Develop them now, and they’re done, which means
2. I have lost the organic process of shaping course materials based on student learning and interests and on my formative assessment of that learning.

In regards to con #2, I feel I have lost something important in the way I teach. Whether that is true or not will play out once I start teaching the course. But, regardless, I know developing a hybrid course is forcing me to be a different type of teacher.

I became quite good, in my life as a face-to-face teacher, at creating materials out of and in support of what was going on in class. This ability spans back to before coming to DePaul to include teaching middle schoolers and high schoolers, and teaching in in-school and out-of-school settings. For all my faults and failures as I teacher, I have always felt I was the king of responsiveness. I would spend a lot of time between class sessions crafting detailed handouts, assignment sheets, rubrics, and activities in response to what was going on in class. I used prior class sessions to build a context for where I would guide students next, and it worked well. It was a big part of my teacher identity.

I suppose I can continue to do the same thing with an online or hybrid course, but I do feel pressure to create everything now (and make them pdfs and put them in Softchalk, and give them a permanency with which I am unfamiliar). Part of me knows that going back and revising is possible, but it won’t be as easy as before.

However, being forced to think differently is not a completely bad thing, and I suspect I will, in time, be able to hone a process of online course development and teaching that supports how I work best and what I aspire to as an instructor. But right now, as I develop a handout for week 9, I feel I have lost something that defined who I was as a teacher.

I would be curious to know how online course or module development has changed other instructors’ approaches to curriculum development and pedagogical processes. I welcome any feedback.