One of the big hazards of teaching online is that it's very hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. In an internet course the chaff just hangs around, because you can't put their toes to the fire in quite the same way as you can in a face-to-face format. In my in-person classes, I call on them. They have to show up having read, or they will lose points from their final grade. There are also restrictions on absences and tardies. You can't do that with an online class. The result is that in my face-to-face course, out of about 32 students that began the semester, only 14 will be taking the final. Most of them are serious and most of them will also do well. They are the wheat, nearly every one.
Meanwhile my online course remains very…chaffy. Ne’er do wells that only turned in half the work are now emailing me about the final. They want to know what’s on it. Some of them assume the entire final is going to cover only the last text they were supposed to read.
Think again, Chaffy.
But while online courses do get front-loaded with the lazy, the benefit is that I, their professor, can mercilessly fuck with them at this time of year, because though it is an online course, every one of my online students taking any face-to-face course at all at my university (in other words, any student that is not truly a distance learner) must come to an in-class final. This in-class final is worth 30% of their grade. The laziest among them are, understandably, wetting themselves. Because I like scaring lazy students into wetting themselves, today I sent out this missive to all:
Doubtless many of you are worried about the in-class final. But you shouldn't be worried as long as you've been steadily following my advice about proper study habits, and keeping up with the work for the course. If you have carefully read all the assignments, and have taken lots of notes, you should be more than prepared! Of course you are trying to come up with ways to do the best that you can, so if you have paid less than stellar attention to the additional required reading other than the primary texts, now might be a time to catch up. As for format, the syllabus covers this, but I thought it would be good to remind you as well that your final will consist of a mix of short answers and essays. There will be no multiple choice or true/false questions. It is cumulative, and any reading and viewing done for the course is subject to inclusion. Good luck! Now is when your hard work all semester will pay off!
For the next couple of weeks they will be writing me. Unfortunately my answers will frustrate them, as they will be long on encouragement but very, very short on details, other than a reworded restatement of the above. What I don’t tell them is that I mostly base the contents of the test on the weeks in which the least amount of students turned in homework.
Just because that’s how I roll.
Suck it, lazy online students. Suck it.
That's a good Friday afternoon post to put me in a good mood and propel me towards the weekend.
ReplyDeleteAs I sit here in hour 5 of grading a class' worth of chaffy essays, I read your post with the sort of glee one usually associates with hand-rubbing, mustache-twirling, and chortling.
ReplyDeleteWell done, Stella. Well done.
Dr. Jekyll: I hereby nominate this for post of the week. It is well-written, full of vengeance, and offers a useful teaching tip.
ReplyDeleteProf. Hyde: "What I don’t tell them is that I mostly base the contents of the test on the weeks in which the least amount of students turned in homework." This made me squee.
best. post. ever.
ReplyDeleteTeaching lesson- learned! Any more insightful tidbits? Love it.
ReplyDeleteThat's a strange assessment to me, because I have the opposite problem. If there are silent kids in class, I can call on them and they deflect in various ways. "I agree with so-and-so" they say. Or even "I didn't get a chance to read today, sorry."
ReplyDeleteGits.
But online, if they don't post at least 3 substantive interactions in the online forum, then they don't get the points for that discussion. It's as though they didn't come to class. And so they bring up points, they reply to me, they engage.
You don't get overwhelmed by the over-talkers who dominate a brick-and-mortar classroom. It's much more egalitarian.
The online discussion forum is, in my experience, much more effective than face-to-face discussions.
All in all, though, I love your approach of basing the final on the least "attended" modules of the course. Well done there, bravo.
ReplyDelete"Just because that's how I roll."
ReplyDeleteWhat a thing of beauty! I may have to completely re-evaluate the way that I write exams.
I'm misty in the presence of greatness.
ReplyDeleteI'm shocked your school doesn't have an attendance policy for online classes. My CC has a college-wide attendance policy, and online instructors are required to designate an activity which constitutes attendance. I use discussion board posts and require a certain number per week to count as having attended. I allow students to post up to 24 hours late and get a "tardy" (which means no points but counts as partial attendance).
ReplyDeleteLike you, I do have some hangers-on, however. After the midterm grades come out, a couple of them will write to me and say, "What can I do to improve my grade?" When I tell them the truth, which boils down to "Do the damn work," they happily go about their lives and keep doing the same stupid stuff they did in the first half.
The online discussion forum is, in my experience, much more effective than face-to-face discussions.
ReplyDeleteI struggle with this issue. Yes, they have to post something substantive. And there is the cool advantage of being able to continue multiple threads at once. Every topic can be discussed to the end. The topics don't fight each other for time. But...
I recently discovered a nifty function in the online platform of one of the schools I teach for. It shows me which percentage of the posts so far in class a particular student has read (that is, clicked on and perhaps only glanced at, perhaps read). The numbers I see there tell me that online isn't working. We have all kinds of discussions going, and students aren't even "there" for more than 10-20% of them. They read their own posts, my instructor responses directed at them, and - most - also read the minimum required additional classmate posts so that they can post their minimum required responses. They notice nothing else going on in class. So while what the students "say" is indeed more substantive, it simply isn't being heard. It isn't just being ignored or forgotten, which happens in the live classroom as well. It is as if the students aren't even there for the rest of what happens in class.
Imagine a live discussion where you only hear what comes out of your own mouth, what others say directly and personally to you and a random selection of two utterances from classmates. That's how online looks right now from where I'm standing.