I teach a face-to-face course that is more or less a part of a freshmen block. Traditional first-semester freshmen take my tech class, an introduction to education and a special education course. The instructors for the three courses try to coordinate activities so that one course’s field experience doesn’t leave everyone else with an empty classroom.
Last week most of the students were in the field. I have a few online activities in the tech course so I planned an online class for Thursday. Since my students were in the field during regular class hours, I had to have an asynchronous activity. Most of my students had no high school experience in online courses, so this whole process is something new for them.
I recorded (voice and screen recordings) some background material using Elluminate and made it available to the students. I created a discussion board and asked that all communication about the activity take place in the discussion board.
As is typical for this first online assignment, a few students can’t avoid emailing me their questions. I kindly explain that other people will probably have the same questions and for that reason the questions should be asked in the discussion board.
The more difficult problem for the students is creating the proper context for the question. I see posts like:
I keep getting an error.
There is no sound.
I can’t save the file.
These “one liners” don’t give me a lot of information to work with. I don’t know if the question concerns the resource material or the construction of the artifact. I have to add a followup question to the question (which I don’t like to do) just so I can have enough information to understand the context of the question.
I have come with a three-step-bop for online course questions.
1 – Tell me what you are doing.
2 – Tell me what you expected to happen.
3 – Tell me what you observed happening.
Those first two items are usually absent from the post, but are needed to give me enough information to understand what is being observed.