Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Confessions of a FIT...

Before I really get to the heart of this blog, I feel I must say that I really have enjoyed my FIT experience.  That being said, I have had my snags along the way.  What I would like to focus on in this blog, are 1) the uncomfortableness I felt writing comments on students responses to the activity I was facilitating and 2) time (yes, I know I've talked about this before, but...).  

As mentioned in an earlier blog, I had to facilitate an activity for Week 11.  After the students uploaded their responses to the activity (which, by the way, was about imperialism), I had to provide them with feedback.  While this was great experience for me, I felt quite uncomfortable about doing this because I don't have a degree in history.  I love history, don't get me wrong, but I don't feel qualified to teach it.  However, I was able to critique their critical thinking skills, which may have been the only thing my FIT director's wanted me to do anyway.  Yet I still felt very strange and apprehensive about giving feedback to students who are not my students.  I guess more than anything I worry that my FIT directors won't like the feedback I gave, will feel like I overstepped my boundaries, or will think "what the heck is she talking about?".  I'm also dealing with younger students than what I'm used to.  I teach college-level communication courses; I've never taught high school students.  At one point I felt as if I was being too harsh with the comments, so I went through all of them again before sending them out and added more comments that praised the student for their efforts.  Hopefully, the directors find them to be appropriate.

2) Time, time, time...it's sooo different when you're facilitating an activity online.  I made the mistake of waiting until all the students responses were submitted.  This seems very silly when I think about it now, but I thought this was appropriate because I was thinking of face to face courses.  If someone turns in an assignment early, I don't look at it until I get everyone else's assignment.  I do this so that I can grade them all in one sitting (or perhaps two) and recognize areas that students did not do so well - that way I can consider being lenient and not counting off so many points if it seems that all or most of students struggled with a particular aspect.  But for the most part, you don't have a lot of students turning assignments in early during face to face courses - however, since students taking an online course encouraged to work at their own pace, they are often working ahead and turning things in early.  Anyway, one of my directors gave me some good advice and said that I should really try to respond to them 24 - 28 hours after they send in assignments in order to keep the students motivated.  I had a problem too because it's just so easy to say, 'I'll e-mail them tomorrow' - and then tomorrow turns into 3 days later.  It's easy to do this because they are not in front of you so it's easy to escape from the responsibility of communicating with them.  Right now, I feel like they are 'invisible' - like they aren't really 'real'.  Surely other online facilitators have felt this way at times...

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