Please feel free to insert comments after the section in question. I tend to use the horizontal line to demarcate comment areas (or boxes--whatever). --Cheers --Elizabeth

How is EVO different from other online courses?

Elizabeth Hanson-Smith, with

Dafne González, Vance Stevens, Buthaina al Othman, Aiden Yeh, Chris Jones, Nicolas Gromik, Christine Bauer-Ramazani from the EVO Coordination Team

Contact: ehansonsmi@yahoo.com

Experienced online instructors agree that using technology in the Internet-based environment is secondary to the human factors. This wisdom is perhaps doubly important to keep in mind when you are conducting a volunteer, non-credit course with your peers. Both you and the participants will not be subject to the usual constraints of classroom structures: You aren't getting a salary, you don't have to make up a final exam; they haven't paid tuition, and they aren't going to get graded.

Even more importantly, these "students" are your peers, fellow teachers with their own areas of expertise in which they are authorities--maybe in the same area as yours--and they have their own expectations and phobias about online teaching and learning.

The Electronic Village Online (EVO) has an already considerable history behind it (see Hanson-Smith & Bauer-Ramazani, 2004), and will host many return participants who are expecting a rich, rewarding experience. To make the EVO experience a good one for both you and your participants, this short article attempts to delineate how some of your expectations about online teaching and learning--whether you have taught online before or not--may differ from what you will experience in EVO.

Berge (2005) talks about four areas significant to online teaching and learning: the technological, the pedagogical, the social, and the managerial, but notes that the four often are difficult to distinguish. I will comment on all four, but give shorter shrift to those of lesser import for the EVO.

The Technological Environment

Yahoo Groups (YG), our home base, is very user-friendly, and you will have a mentor to help, but remember, the Coordination Team are also volunteers; they have personal lives; and several of them also have their own sessions to keep in order. Make sure that you read all the documents about setting up and using YG, so that you at least know where to look for information. You should be able to help people join your group and leave it, understand why they need a Yahoo ID, know how to add a moderator (so that someone can take over quickly in case of need, or assist you with the settings), know how to create folders and move files around when they are in the wrong place, be able to delete spam and ban spammers, etc. If you haven't tried it out, you aren't ready for prime time.

If you are comfortable with the technological environment yourself, you can aid participants quickly and your session will be focused on the content, not the medium. Many of the advanced YG features, such as polling, calendar reminders, and databases, may become crucial in keeping your session lively (more on that later).

Even if you have used YG before, you should expand your technological horizons. EVO uses Tapped In (TI) frequently, and we will have a regular chat time for moderators at TI throughout the EVO season. We also have voice chat available, courtesy of the Webheads, at both LearningTimes (log-in required) and at WorldBridges. (You'll learn more about these venues in the course of training.) The Coordination Team expects you to join us to share problems and solutions, and to get the social and technological support to run a successful session. Chat can save a session that is in trouble, and it can keep a free, all-volunteer course together. Many of your participants already use chat and will expect it as part of their time with you.

I added info about LT and WorldBridges in the paragraph above --Elizabeth

The Pedagogical Environment

You may go into your EVO session expecting that the pedagogical aspects will be the most important. You know your field and have some good questions or activities. You assume everyone has read the description of your session and has signed on to it because they want to discuss your topic or learn more about a cool tool. So why do all your participants suddenly go silent in Week 3?

We have found that the differences between EVO and the usual online class may not really impact you until the 2nd or 3rd week. At this point, volunteer participants seem to pause to catch up with the other aspects of their lives. So, without the stick of grades, you've got to keep the carrots coming. When online discussion flags suddenly--or none of the participants seems to do the project or task for a particular week--you will need a few tricks (and we'll mention others in our e-list discussion):

Remember, if the discussion or even the whole session doesn't go well, you are not a bad teacher or a bad person. Working in an all-volunteer environment is very unpredictable.

The Social Environment

With all-volunteer participants, the social elements can be as important as the content, or more so. You might expect teachers to want the content, the meat of the discussion or the technical expertise. In fact, despite its great usefulness, your session, which doesn't give them credit toward their profession, is going to seem less important than almost everything else in their lives. Conversely, even in the most technically oriented hands-on workshop, where social grouping might not be expected, we've received comments from participants to the effect that the group and/or the instructor was "unfriendly."

You may not have time in your EVO session to form small groups, but you will want to ensure a warm friendly atmosphere in your YG that keeps teachers coming back for more. You don't have the luxury of attendance requirements, and you aren't giving a grade, so you will need to make social cohesion and attendant social/peer pressure happen faster than in real life.

We've put together a few guidelines that will help make your session a cohesive social environment:

*Make sure you get group cohesion early by having participants introduce themselves and post a picture--put time for introductions into your syllabus

*Respond to the introductions directly and set a good example by including your own

*A Web page with the introductions and pictures is a great ice-breaker, and you will learn about your participants as you create it

*Use these introductions to "pull" people into the group: "Andrew, didn't you have a similar experience while teaching in China?"

*Be accepting of lurkers: you have no way to force anyone to participate; assume learning is taking place and try to entice them in by knowing their names and teaching situations

*Leave up your YG for several months after the EVO session--in most evaluations, participants say they want to revisit archives, links, and files

*Humor and sarcasm don't work well online, especially with a culturally diverse audience, so be sure to use "smileys" even if you think a joke is obvious

*Refer to and use the "Netiquette" statement--cut off flamers politely but firmly and quickly

*Be responsive to individuals and refer to them by name in your posts, particularly in the subject line--we all like to see our names "up in lights"

*Many of your participants will be non-native speakers, so occasionally you will need to "translate" by asking a clarifying question

*Invariably, some participants will not use normal e-mail conventions or will ask obvious questions--help them through without embarrassing them; there are no "dumb" questions

*The only "face" participants may see is your writing--be sure it's a friendly one

 

 

The Managerial Environment

 

Even though you may be an experienced online instructor, you will find that an EVO session with an all-volunteer audience will throw you some curves. You will be asked by us to produce a fairly detailed agenda or syllabus, but you may find your most active participants want to jump ahead or take a detour to a totally different subject--or they may simply not agree to perform the specific task needed to advance to the next stage in a sequence. What should you do?

 

If you are too forceful in insisting on your syllabus, you may alienate your fellow teachers--they are your peers after all--so you need to be as flexible and non-authoritarian as possible. You may also need to use a greater repertoire of group management skills than you are used to, so here are a few managerial strategies that might help to keep moving forward:

 

*Leave at least a week in your syllabus for introductions and getting used to the YG setting

*Leave the final week for catching up, sharing final summaries or group tasks, and evaluations

*Don't wait a week before deciding there is a problem, either with the discussion or the technology--you really have only about four weeks of content

*Don't overload the content--your peers may be working fulltime, have families to care for, may have trouble getting online, etc.

*Be courteous and flexible, even when correcting someone who appears to be very rude--your participants will be from many different cultures and may be making many different assumptions about the session than you are

*Ban spammers (remove them from membership) and delete spam immediately

*Be sure all documents are accessible online as well as in a downloadable file--many participants will be working from public computers and may not be able to download materials

*YG makes it easy to create html documents--learn how and ask your mentor to help

*Don't hesitate to call on your mentor for help

*Don't hesitate to write an individual outside of the group e-list

 

We also strongly urge you to have at least one other moderator (besides your mentor). You can share the burden of responding to the e-list (you will probably need to post at least once daily), have more contacts to invite as guest speakers, and generate more ideas about how to keep the discussion afloat. It's not too late to invite someone to help.

 

Even if you have taught EVO before, each season is different. Your participants this year will probably be more knowledgeable about technology than last year--or not! In any case, we hope you enjoy the experience.

 

 

References

 

Berge, Z. L. The Role of the Online Instructor/Facilitator. (2005). http://www.emoderators.com/moderators/teach_online.html.

 

Hanson-Smith, E. & Bauer-Ramazani, C., with Robb, T. & Gaer, S. (2004). Professional Development: The Electronic Village Online of the TESOL CALL-Interest Section, TESL-EJ, 8(2). http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej30/int.html.

 

LearningTimes. 2006. http://www.learningtimes.org

 

Tapped In. (2005). Stanford Research Institute. http://www.tappedin.org/.

 

Webheads in Action at World Bridges. http://webheadsinaction.org/.

 

Yahoo! Groups. (2005). http://yahoo.com/.