After spending a number of years teaching IT courses in a traditional classroom you tend to get dependent on many communication devices. Raised hands, confused looks, scribbling diagrams on the white board, pointing at computer screens, and even asking a student politely “Can I drive” while taking his/her mouse and demonstrating a concept to them right on their computer screen. Now imagine a teaching environment where none of these things no longer easily apply. A place where there are no more faces, confused or otherwise. This is the world of teaching a course online.

Over the past four months I have embarked on teaching my first online course with the Nova Scotia Community College. This introductory course is entitled Flash Fundamentals covering the basics of Adobe Flash design and development. Flash Fundamentals is a course I know well as I have delivered it on campus for a number of years, so I wasn’t terribly worried about the content. What I was worried about was if and how my teaching style would translate over this new medium, and ultimately, would I be any good at it?

These are just a few things I noticed:

Uhmmm…Dead Air…Uhmmm…
One thing I wanted to make sure I added into my first online course is a weekly live online session with all students attending (virtually that is!). A weekly session really helps build confidence and fight the feeling of isolation that many students in online courses battle. Surprisingly, I also found that it was also a great social device for the course as many students took this time to get to know each other.

Sound all great, right? The down side is that running a live online session is kind of cross between being a radio DJ and a live television producer. At NSCC we use a tool called Elluminate to hold live sessions which has all sorts of features like a live chat window, microphone support, and a virtual white board. As a moderator of the session, you find yourself juggling several things all at once. Firstly, you have to make sure that there is no dead air so that the flow of the session is smooth. Lesson flow is an important issue to me as a instructor as I believe that if a lesson’s concepts flow together logically and smoothly the connections and learning happens a lot more naturally. Secondly, while you are doing that, you have to continually monitor the classroom chat window, the whiteboard, as well as answer any questions coming in through the audio. It is sort of like digital juggling, except when you mess up balls don’t go everywhere; instead there is just a disjointed lesson that confuses more than helps.

You Need To Be Always On…
Teaching in a traditional classroom setting involves all sorts of lines of communication, but naturally, the most predominant is your class time with your students. This is that dedicated slice of time during the week when you have every student’s undivided attention (we hope anyways). In an online course you either no longer have this time or it is hindered greatly by the online technology. As a result, all other lines of communication that are usually secondary suddenly are predominant to the success and understanding of your students. Email, web boards, etc. become a major life line for all students. Unfortunately, these aren’t always the quickest means for a student to communicate with his/her instructor. Not to mention that for students that are really struggling with the course’s concepts the wait times between a question and an answer can be excruciating. As a result, I find that you really need to be monitoring these communication lines a lot – every single day. Going even a mere two days (like a Saturday and a Sunday) without checking in is equivalent to a student asking you a question face to face and you sitting their mute for two days looking uninterested before responding.

A Large Toolbox is Confusing for Anyone…
Technology has been the main reason online courses are possible today. And although it has made leaps and bounds over the last decade, I would still say that it is only about 60% of the way there. Problems with microphones, lagging internet connections, etc. have all occurred during my first online course. But the biggest issue I see is that although there are lots of applications that help in their own small way, there is no application that does it all. As a result, students have to learn and use a large collection of applications and tools, many having their own logins, quirks, and setups. For students who are weary about technology in the first place this can bury them before the course even really gets going. My advice is keep the list of applications as small as possible! Pick the ones that cover all the minimum requirements you need and work within those restraints. The not so techno-savy students will thank you for it.

Be a Dictator of Your Online Course…
Speaking of multiple communication tools, I have found that as an instructor you need to control the online course experience as much as possible or confusion can result. A good example is using a webboard. During my first online course delivery all the students had permission rights to create their own topics as well as add replies to any existing topics. The problem with this is that at any given time there were multiple topics on a specific lesson or concept each containing their own replies…the web board quickly began to get cluttered and confusing for students to even use effectively to find answers. I found it is best to limit topic creation permissions so that only I could create them. This way the webboard is kept much more tidy and kept as efficient as possible.

Snuggle Up With A Good Book/Resource…
As a result of missing out on that face to face instruction, quite often it is much easier for a student to become confused over a topic or concept. This is why it is really important to have a well written secondary resource to act as a backup for students when they need elaboration or help on a topic. I like to choose actual books as my resources mostly because it allows each student to review or go over concepts away from a computer. Since online courses require a high level of computer usage, I think of book resources as a nice break from the glare of the monitor. Something that everyone needs (even me) from time to time 😉

I remember being a kid and in a mad rush to grab a hand full of cookies, pour a glass of milk, and run back to the TV before the commercial break was over…my father would always exclaim “Slow Down!”, and sure enough…there was always spilled milk.

It seems to me that information technology is moving in the same careless pattern. Technology companies are churning out new versions of their software at such a dizzying rate that there is a real disconnect from quality.

One company that seems to be the greatest offender of this is Adobe…I have been a college instructor for seven years and since then Adobe (Macromedia to a small extent) has released six versions of Flash…that’s right…six. Flash MX, MX2004, 8, CS3, CS4, CS5, blah, blah, blah! I understand that the IT industry is pretty ruthless and cutthroat (Steve Jobs), but there is real value in providing time for the development community to become efficient with a technology before new stuff is added to it again; or it is completely overhauled. Flash CS5/Flash Player 10 is riddled with inconsistencies with ActionScript behaviour, timeline glitches, and general weirdness. In fact, it is so bad that the animation department on my campus is seriously looking into other alternatives for 2D animation.

So, dear Adobe…get some patches out, fix these issues…and in the words of my father, “Slow Down”! Developers don’t appreciate spilled milk.

If you are a stickler like me then you are all about making sure everything you develop is compliant to W3C standards. This is as important as starting every sentence with a capital – ignore the rules and you look unprofessional and sloppy.

This can get challenging when working with server side scripting languages that render a lot of the HTML for you, like ASP.NET. Although .NET 4 does a pretty good job adhering to the XHTML 1.0 strict rules (although I would prefer XHTML 1.1) it breaks it when you have a radiobutton server control in your web app that is disabled. To disable it, the .NET 4 runtime adds a <span> tag around the <input type="radio"> tag. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! The disabled attribute can’t be inside a span tag.

I still really wanted to disable the radio buttons (duh!) so to get around it I used JQuery. This is definately a hacky of a solution, but when it comes to W3C validation tactics it is in good company.

First I linked in the JQuery library:
<script type="text/javascript" src="resources/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>

Second I setup the JQuery to disable four radio buttons INSIDE a panel and set its visible property to false so it isn’t rendered into the HTML until I want it to…

<asp:Panel ID="pnlJQuery" Visible="false" runat="server">
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
$("[type='radio']").attr("disabled", "disabled");
});
</script>
</asp:Panel>

Whenever I want to disable all the radio buttons on the page all I need to do is set the panel to be visible (visible = true). The JQuery inside will then be rendered into the page’s HTML and the browser will happily execute it – thus disabled radio buttons!
pnlJQuery.Visible = True