Webinars: For When You Need to Have Class in a Snowstorm

In honor of our other readings this week, I chose a webinar from EdWeek called Virtual Challenge: Creating Quality E-Courses. Since it was an archived webinar, I basically got to watch a PowerPoint slideshow with a voice-over, but it was still interesting. Honestly, I've never been in a college class that's taken advantage of these resources for their on-line classes, and my grades have suffered for it. The entire time I was in undergrad, I took a couple of on-line classes over the summer while working. I can tell you right now that every one of these courses averaged an entire letter-grade lower than my face-to-face classes and I still blame them for keeping me from graduating with honors (I was 0.02 points away!).

Anyway, this was a really well put-together webinar moderated by Michelle Davis, somebody I've never heard of but Kristen probably rode in an elevator with once. There were two other presenters as well--Greg Marks and Debbi Crabtree, and they presented a really in-depth study that to be honest I kind of tuned out but which they seemed really excited about. While the types of on-line courses they were talking about were not the sort I had any experience with, being primarily aimed at younger learners, some of the quality-control measures they proposed really made sense to me. One thing they emphasized over and over was motivational framing--making the student want to complete the course without having a teacher actually there to get in their face about it. This was especially important because a lot of the kids they were targeting were ones who had failed a class during the regular school year and had to retake it during the summer. In Crabtree's study, 83% who enrolled successfully completed their courses. Crabtree and Davis also emphasized the importance of making students feel unique, not just like one of the crowd. Teachers could do this by sending out emails which addressed the student by name, or giving them in-depth feedback on assignments (also something I never received).

As for the Matos reading: a) I had never heard of embedded librarianship before this and b) I now really want to know more about it. Honestly, I'm not sure its for me, though, as schmoozing faculty members and getting my name out there really isn't my strong suit. I know I'll have to interact with real people as a librarian, but I'd hope not to this extent, maybe? (Yes, this is totally unrealistic. Yes, I was one of those kids who thought being a librarian meant reading books all day. Yes, I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that this is not the case. Give me time.)

Then there's also the Montgomery and How People Learn readings, but I'm kind of running out time and I'd really like to finish up by talking about our workshops last week. So: maybe our workshop didn't kick all the butt I thought it would, but it was still pretty darn cool. I was glad that we went with the all-pictures slide show, since making our fellow students do a lot of reading in the six minutes (six minutes!) we'd allotted for the lecture section seemed a bit much on top of our very detailed scenario questions. I did most of the talking for that first six minutes, and luckily did not have one of my deer-in-the-headlights moments. There were a few more "ums" and "ahs" than I was comfortable with, but generally I think I conveyed the information that I set out to. The scenarios discussions were likewise very lively and engaging. I'm glad people really seemed to get into them. We tried to make them both as open-ended as possible, but one participant reported that his/hers seemed closed. Maybe we could do some tweaking, but I'm pretty satisfied with how that part went. The lecture section, however, proved problematic in feedback. I've come to the conclusion that given the short amount of time we had, we might have been better off to cut it all-together as I was only able to do a very surface gloss on the subject. Honestly, I don't think I gave them much in the way of new information. In order to do that, we would have needed to cut the scenarios all-together, and I think they were the stronger of the two sections. They certainly garnered some interesting results.