Lower Division Studies here at GSU – aka my Benevolent Overlords – requires its GTAs to attend a training session twice a semester. It’s a half-day of discussions, generally held on a Friday – a week before semester start and mid-October in Fall, and Feb and April in Spring. Large group meeting, where we discuss any changes to the department and trainings required by the university, followed by breakouts called “mentoring sessions.”
These mentoring sessions consist of three different mini-classes taught by other grad students in the department. They can be over anything related to pedagogy. In my two years here, I’ve been to sessions on constructing syllabi and individual handouts to theming courses and extra resources. It’s also a chance to get together and discuss how miserable we are under the joint oppressors of the current political clime and our respective writing projects. We’re required to attend two per meeting, or four per semester, whichever works out.
Unfortunately, Life often happens, and not everyone can meet every time. So, being benevolent as they are, LDS has a built-in failsafe: if you can’t come, you can make up the session by attending any pedagogical-themed course held by the university at large (mainly the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning). You do a small write-up to include in your portfolio, and voila! Training achievement unlocked.
Last October’s session, I had a Life Event (gods actually know what it was, I’ve forgotten), and so opted to take a course with CETL called “Mastering Online Teaching.” This course, rather than being an hour-plus meet-up and lecture, was a six-week online actual class. Come to find out, it’s a certification course. Work at your own pace, interact with other students [read: faculty], learn how to construct online courses, the whole shebang.
You could choose two separate routes – participation, which offers the course and the chance to participate with other instructors, and achievement, which offers a certificate upon completion.
I chose the achievement route, though it meant my last six weeks of the semester were even more hectic than usual. The coursework wasn’t too heavy, but I did forget once or twice until the last minute. It required a discussion post, responding to prompts and each other, once per week, and then either an assignment or a quiz each week. The assignments included things like restructuring the objectives portion of a syllabus to be more clear and concrete and creating a visual map of an assignment you already had in place. Many of the discussion questions were focused on how we understood our coursework already, and what we can do to adapt it to online formats.
I chose to map my 1101 Argumentation unit, as it’s the one I’ve worked hardest on the past few semesters, and the one I’m most proud of. I mapped the reworked objectives (assignment two, I believe?), and spread out from there into the portions of the unit: Readings, Resources, Assignments, Lectures, and Engagement.
I feel the project – in fact, the whole course – helped to solidify my understanding of creating projects for students. You must be clear and concise with new writers. They want objectives, rubrics, things to help quantify this burgeoning process in their minds. Whether it’s for an online course or F2F, I as a teacher need to understand the process behind its construction before I can teach it.
I don’t think I’d like to teach online in the near future. It’s a bit of a headache setting things up, recording lectures and the like, and I frankly don’t have the time. I wouldn’t mind a hybrid course, as that’s something I do for hurricane/snow days already here, and I liked the construction when I experienced hybrids from the student’s side. For now, though, it’s a slow process to build my understanding of each project in our courses here.
P.S. I did actually get the Achievement Certificate. =]
For a text-based, interactive version of the image above, please click here to access the Mastering Online Teaching page.
The Crafty Medievalist 