College: Online is all wrong.

This semester my family has done something remarkable. Every single person in my family is in college. I never thought I would see this day where everyone is pushing to learn more and make themselves smarter, more educated and better. Yet all 5 of us including:
-The newbie freshman at a state college who is pushing herself farther in college then she did most of her educational experience.
-My soon to be college graduate sister who is in her "victory lap" 4.5 year plan who has a passion for her private school that I haven't seen before.
-My full-time working mother who commutes 3-4 hours to work everyday plus works full-time (sometimes more) and is taking 2 fast-paced 8 week online classes through a pretty well known online private school that her company is supporting her with.
-My "senior" father at a local community college (who gets a discount woohoo!) looking to keep his sanity as well as push himself to learn new things and do something while he hunts for another job is taking an online business class.
-Myself, a full-time teacher who lives in another country and taking 2 graduate education classes both online at a private college.

There is no cookie cutter class where all the students learn the same way, all follow the same lessons, all have the same amount of time. Here we are a quite diverse group of individuals all going to college and 3 out of 5 of us are doing online classes and not one of us is satisfied.

Did you hear the record stop? That fact should throw you off a bit. Those of us paying the "big bucks" for college are actually not getting the education we are paying for.

As a teacher, I study HOW the teachers teach just as much as I study what is being taught. And I can tell you from the stories of my parents and from what I have "seen" in my classes. Most teachers do online classes wrong. We have seen the busy work, the dragged out lessons, the mind numbing copy and paste from the book, the dragged out readings, the pointless assignments, the stressful breakdown of the class, the professors that don't respond to our questions, the ones that don't get involved in the class, the classes that don't feel like people are in them, the ones that couldn't be more wrong.

Now, I won't say every experience we had this semester was a negative one. One of my ESL classes does everything almost perfect for keeping students interested, engaged and really keeping us involved and anxiety free. This made this semester an excellent, nerve-racking chance for me to understand what students need in an online class.

I am not a professor, I don't have a PhD and I don't need to know anything about the content to explain HOW to teach an online class.

10 Tips for Teaching Online from a Student AND Teacher Perspective:

1) Involve your students: They are in your class to learn. They chose this topic because it is one they hope to become better at. Let them enhance their lessons by adding in their experiences, by teaching them what matters to them. Ask questions they are interested in, let them answer their own questions. Let them explore something they could use.

2) Give feedback regularly: Show your students that you are on their side. That you support them, that you are there to help them, solve problems with them, and challenge them to look at it a different way. Don't put them down but lift them up. Make them better students.

3) Be available: The internet is everywhere. In this day and age, you need to be able to respond to emails, questions and ideas in a timely matter. Not everyone has every waking day to work on their class work and when they do have the time, they may have questions. You need to answer at the max within 2 days of the email.

4) Make your students better students: Tell your students how to get a better grade, don't just deduct points. Give your students resources if they are unclear about something. Google is just as powerful for the teacher as it is for the student. For example: if they don't know how to write a paper because they haven't had to in the last x years find an easy way to get them corrected. It will make both of you a little more confident and a little more sane.

5) Create a community: Teachers are not dictators. They don't get to parade around the class like nuns back in old Catholic classrooms. Classroom environments have changed since then and in online classes, students have the WORLD at their fingertips. Give them encouragement, give them praise, learn about who they are and support them. Allow them to talk to, vent to, complain to, and share with their fellow students.

6) Don't create learning robots: All my life education has been about regurgitating the information from a book. College shouldn't be that. College should be about higher order thinking questions, analysis, evaluation, experimentation. It shouldn't be about answering questions from the book but finding a way of making them useful.

7) Don't use hard books: Online classes are so heavy with reading it discourages every student. 65% of learners are visual. Use that to your advantage. Make the same powerpoints you would in a classroom and share them with your students. Ask higher order questions in them. Use resources that they can relate to. Find videos, draw pictures, do something hands on. And if you can't find the perfect resource: Create it. Youtube can be your friend.

8) Explain BEFORE assigning: New lessons should start slow, use scaffolding to your advantage. Explain the reason, show an example, walk us through it. Then let us practice and expand on our own. Don't just dump something on us that will lead us to a million questions. Be thorough with your work so when we are ready to work, we can do so without the stress.

9) Assign less: A couple higher order thinking questions a week is good enough. Give us the ability to expand what we learn. Challenge us but don't over burden us. You don't know what your students' home life is like and you want to make their lives better, not worse.

10) Allow students to help one another: The first discussion board in your class should be a question board. Let the students swap ideas, support each other, complain, vent, and most importantly grow.

As a student and a teacher, I shouldn't feel like without knowing the content. I could do a better job teaching the class then you. Students shouldn't feel like they are sinking, they should feel like they have floaties on the first few weeks and by the end they may not be masters but they learned how to take them off and dive in without a fear of sinking.

The students, my sisters, my mother, my father and myself, and the countless others in your class should NOT be punished or turned off by education. We shouldn't miss out on the education, the connections of classmates and teachers, the resources of the internet world and the methods of teaching ourselves. We pay way too much money to not get the best education that life has to offer.

(If you don't like that I am speaking from experiences and would like to hear it from the professionals here is another article at your disposal. http://www.designingforlearning.info/services/writing/ecoach/tenbest.html)