The trials of teaching an online class, Pt. 1

Earlier this year, I made a transition from talking about web strategy behind the scenes, to doing so in front of a classroom of aspiring web professionals. This is the third term I’ve taught The Business of Visual Art: Web Design course at the Community College of Aurora, but it wasn’t until now that I even felt remotely comfortable relaying my experiences in the classroom.

Public speaking is no big deal for me, generally, but I the first term I taught, it was most certainly a “work in progress” sort of deal. The course has evolved and yet, there are some interesting issues related to the whole “connecting with students” through an online course. It’s an especially difficult thing when you’re the sort of person who relies heavily on face-to-face interactions to build understanding and trust, in order to deliver your message.

My class isn’t entirely online. 3 of the classes are in person, for two hours and the rest of the program is online (over a 10 week term) so there are opportunities to connect, but I’ve had to hone this over the terms, because it’s not a natural posture for me.

I’ve taken online classes in the past and I’ve had many of the same frustrations with taking classes online, that I’ve had teaching one. A lot of it is endemic to the tools that are used. We’re transitioning to a new system, so perhaps that’ll help.

But I think student engagement can be difficult regardless of what you’re using as a tool. I’ve adapted my methods to increase participation and a lot of that has to do with the format of the course, course loads and the traditional v. non-traditional student demographics. But I’ve been in online courses in the past, where I saw thinly veiled busywork exercises developed solely aimed at manufacturing class “participation” and I think this is the sort of thing you wouldn’t see in a regular format class. Does this improve the student experience? I’d venture to say no.

My gut reaction to most learning management tools, is they’re redundant and there are better ways to deliver this sort of content to campus, but it might require innovation and nimbleness from plucky entrepreneurs who understand the problem and are driven to solve it. (e.g. A higher ed-centered Basecamp, for instance.)

I’ve wondered a bit, as I’ve exposed my students to social networking tools they haven’t used (for instance, very few had ever used Twitter and maybe 1 or 2 were regular users and no…neither were teens.) whether or not the education we’re doing on campuses related to the use of digital tools is really working at all. For all the geniuses out there trying to teach people about how to ignite their web efforts on campus, I’m still wondering if we’re not leaving people behind.

For instance, if there were innovative and diverse ways to integrate Twitter into a classroom setting, would this result in a decrease in much of the widespread resistance to such tools? Now, I’m not advocating for a widespread blurring of the lines, but once people realize that social media isn’t magic, it might make it easier to increase conversations that might not otherwise happen.

Teaching has been great to explain things that we as web professionals might put in practice all of the time, but don’t necessarily think about some fairly basic user questions about how these tools can be useful.

The peril of being “social”

Welp, if you enjoyed using the social network Foursquare (like me), prepare to lose all of your mayorships and expect to contend with a ton of new traffic, as the NY Times has profiled the new service in today’s paper: (I’m mostly kidding, btw.)

Just seven months old with about 60,000 users so far, Foursquare is still getting off the ground — especially when compared with supersize services like Facebook and Twitter, which have millions of members. But that underground status is part of Foursquare’s appeal, its fans say. It is not yet cluttered with celebrities, nosy mothers-in-law or annoying co-workers.

“On Twitter, there are more than 3,000 people that follow me, and Facebook is more of a business community now,” said Annie Heckenberger, 36, who works at an advertising agency in Philadelphia. “Foursquare is more of the people that I actually hang out with and want to socialize with.”

That brings up a point that Michael Stoner touches on in his recent post, where he coins the term “engagement fatigue.” In short he says:

The disorder is engagement fatigue. Engagement fatigue will occur when mass numbers of people participating in social networking—everyone who is making marketers salivate because they’re swarming to Facebook, Twitter, etc.—get tired of brand engagement marketing and tune out.

What happens when you get tired of hearing from people? Don’t want to see their photos, don’t care what their kids are doing potty training and feel the need to create a nebulous profile blocks to ensure that certain people can’t see everything? What happens when the tools we use become too ubiquitous to be useful anymore? Well we know what happens, we move on to other things. But when those tools become a big part of our lives? I know my answers to this question, but it’s a bigger one I’m putting out there for the wider audience.

Is this some sort of permissive intrusiveness that we’re sanctioning through permissions on a web site? How far does it go and for what aims? I realize this is almost a backwards argument, given how far we’ve gone with most sites these days, but I wonder exactly what we expect to be doing with our Facebook profiles in five years.

At least when I used AOL in the 90s, you knew when you deleted your account, your profile and screen name went away too. As it turns out, those profiles weren’t all that interesting anyway. But now? Facebook is better than any family photo album you can find. I guess this is just part of their longevity strategy, but I really am mulling (and no, there’s no real punchline to this post, sorry..I’m just musing) over where we’re really headed with all of this and how profound an effect it’ll have on our social interactions over the next half decade or so.

It’s already affecting us, but I think we’re just scratching the surface. So much of what we talk about in these contexts almost becomes solely focused on how we can profit from these intimate details that people give up freely and I’m really wondering about the ethics of this and whether we’re not riding a bobsleigh towards a place that none of us really want to go until it’s too late and we’re already at the bottom of the course.

Thoughts?