Best Practices 2014
Dorothea Salo - University of Wisconsin-Madison
Best practices:
I plan every course I teach, face-to-face or online, with a divided eye: half my attention on what students need to KNOW when we're done, half on what they should be able to DO when we're done. Their new knowledge should at minimum empower them to make smart, grounded professional decisions; the new skills they gain through work they complete in class should ideally be directly relevant to their workplace and their eventual research and service contributions to their chosen professions.
When teaching online, I rely heavily on humor and activist passion. Humor makes me human even to students who may never be in the same room with me; it also, I find, leads students to communicate more freely with each other, as my humanity in their eyes reminds them that their classmates too are human. Passion, too, communicates surprisingly effectively online. Activist passion is particularly important because the issues and challenges I teach about are anything but frozen in time; they are loci of active professional decision-making and debate. As students become professionals, they must not be afraid to form and express strong opinions, to take sides, to work for cultural survival and social justice. I do my best to model an information-activist spirit for them, and it thrills me when they respond with excitement, curiosity -- and yes, awakened activist spirits of their own.
Ellen Detlefsen - University of Pittsburgh
Best practices:
I try to use ‘real world’ assignments--reviews, "reference question of the week" discussions, site visits, poster sessions, etc.--as a way to connect students to the professional world that they will soon join. I use online tools that require students to share their assignments with their peers instead of simply submitting them to me. As I record a weekly session, I talk to my computer and recorder as if there were people in front of me and not just a couple of technological boxes. Keeping to a firm weekly schedule also encourages students to stay current with the class and frequent emails allow me to establish personal connections one on one with them; treating them as colleagues in digital space is the goal! I also try always to maintain a sense of humor, and to remember that my students are adults with lives outside the online classroom/lecture hall.
Nancy MacKay - San Jose State University
Best Practices:
One of the things I love about teaching at the graduate level is that my students are my peers, and I learn as much from them as they do from me. For example, my oral history class is a project-based learning model. Students conduct an oral history project—determining the mission and goals, selecting a narrator, conducting the interview, archiving, and considering responsible use of oral histories. Though I provide this framework of best practices for methodology, students can explore topics based on their own experience and interests, enriching class discussions with a broad palate of oral history applications. The steps in an oral history project require technical, interpersonal, communication, and organizational skills.
The online model (and by extension, the WISE model) is particularly successful because it allows for a geographically diverse classroom. Students from around the world, from rural areas to large cities, from universities to Tribal Nations come together to consider oral history methodology from their unique perspectives, enriching the discussion for us all.
My best practices are to listen deeply, consider all perspectives, try to bring out the best in students, and at the same time provide grounded lessons with clear outcomes.
Michele Leininger - University of Pittsburgh
Best Practices:
There are two things I strive for in all classes I teach:
1. To make a strong connection between theory and practice by creating assignments that build students’ knowledge, skills and behaviors necessary to work successfully in today’s libraries;
2. To facilitate a learning environment that allows students to learn from a variety of sources, including each other.
Within that continual quest, it’s critical that students know and feel comfortable with each other so they will share, rely on and learn from each other, so I do all I can to help them gain that comfort level not only with the material but also with each other. Learning is as much about networking and observing outside the classroom as it is about coursework. Being able to think about, share and get feedback about those encounters is what makes them learning experiences.
Finally, I think the key to successful education for most learners, regardless of whether it is online or physically attending classes, is having access to an experienced guide who listens to where they are in the learning process and gives suggestions and advice to help them get further along the path. Simply making myself available in whatever way a student wants to interact with me (in person or through technology such as telephone, chat, video chat or email) goes a long way in helping them successfully master the objectives of a given course.
Yoo-Seong Song - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Best practices:
The main objective of my teaching is to help students acquire relevant and practical skills which can be applied to diverse real-world settings. I find experiential learning as a key to fulfilling this goal, as students should not be passive listeners of lectures but must become active engagement partners to share knowledge and create solutions together. Online teaching presents excellent opportunities for experiential learning. Online sessions make connecting experts around the world possible, and I make efforts to invite information professionals from diverse settings to participate in class projects online. I have experienced that many information professionals are willing to provide their professional advice and expertise to students, and without having to travel to the campus, they can easily participate in class and share their experiences. In "real-world" settings, most communications between information professionals and their clients take place using online technologies, and the current online classes provide very similar environment. I try to help students experience both challenges and opportunities of working virtually with their clients, as information professionals must constantly evaluate how information services must be provided with efficiency and excellence. The online environment offers a great opportunity where students can interact with one another in a professional manner to meet the common goal, and online teaching also helped me become a better instructor using the latest technologies.
Leigh Gleason - San Jose State University
Best Practices:
I strive for omnipresence in my course. This isn't always possible, of course, but I am for it. To counteract the sense of isolation that students in an online program can feel, I require a lot of course interaction. Because I know that this is a lot of work for students juggling heavy course loads, work, and family obligations, I feel that it is especially important to show that I'm present in the class at least twice a day, primarily through responding to discussion posts or sharing a news item or relevant job posting. On the days the discussions are due, I send email reminders to students who have not yet posted. I want them to know that whether or not they post at the last minute, I am missing seeing their voice in class. It's another way they know that I'm watching, and quietly encouraging them.
I post a lot, and the students notice. In early weeks it encourages them to know they're meeting (or exceeding) my expectations, and I believe this gets them engaged with the course content much more quickly, because they no longer have to worry if they're doing a good job - they know they are. By later weeks, I try to shift my posting to probe more deeply on comments they make. I save this for later weeks so that they understand that I'm not questioning or criticizing their posts, just using them as a point of departure to delve more deeply into an important argument. Having a fairly constant course presence shows my students that they'll get back what they give to the class.
I also give my students the option to connect live to my weekly lectures. At the beginning of the term, I poll the class to see if they are interested in attending the lectures live, and, if so, if they have a day and time preference out of a selection that I list. I deliver my lectures at the day and time that received the most votes. Since attending the lecture live isn't required, only a few students show up (the rest watch asynchronously). I'm glad to provide that option for them - and it's more appealing to me to have someone to talk to than to lecture to an empty room, anyway. I prefer giving the lecture live than re-using recorded content from previous years because it re-centers me in the course each week, gives me the opportunity to acknowledge and engage the current class of students, and allows me to make sure that I'm delivering the most current information to the class.
Because I teach a photographic archives class, it seems fitting to close with a quote from Ansel Adams. In talking about the ways in which Adams so masterfully interpreted and printed his negatives, his quote is often cited: "The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways." Week to week and year to year, I think that this is true of online instruction and classes. We all have designed a course that we're proud of - one that we would want to take if we were students today - and I think a lot of its success comes down to encouraging that most ideal performance out of each of our students.
Gawain Weaver - San Jose State University
Best Practices:
Teaching online is a challenge. The communication that is so fundamental to effective teaching is mediated by the miraculous, but in many ways still primitive and experimental, modes of online communication. For me, best practices is to use every technological tool that I can muster to teach my subject matter. I have a long ways to go; I mostly see the ways that I fail. But I also utilize video, audio, and lecture slides to their fullest. I present my lectures live whenever I can. Though it takes a lot of additional effort, and not all students are able to attend the live session, the payoff is a direct connection with students. In addition, a variety of exercises in addition to standard reading and writing assignments helps to keep the class more varied and interesting. The inverted classroom is my next challenge, but I haven’t yet found the appropriate implementation of that concept.