Act+3+-+Initial+Challenges

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Text for Assignment 3:

The popularity of online classes has increased tremendously in recent years. Since the beginning of times, education has happened face-to-face. As teachers and students adjust to this increasingly popular mode of delivery, challenges come into the picture. We will discuss five of the most common challenges learners and instructors face at the start of online classes. We will also provide some examples from literature and from experience on ways to overcome these challenges. The first challenge we would to discuss is communication. Porter (2005) suggests that there are several challenges facing online education and she describes how communication poses a challenge for teachers as well as for students. At the start of a class, teachers are not used to the diverse written communication styles of all his students. At the same token, students are not familiar with the communication style of their instructor. Porter sees the need for teachers to write well and to be able to articulate the ideas s/he wants to convey about the lesson. There is also a risk that students will not be able to efficiently articulate their ideas to the instructor, thus causing a communication breakdown. It will be important for the instructor to share guidelines on how s/he expects communication to happen, i.e. email, discussion boards, phone calls, for example. Besides clarifying the medium to be used, it will be equally important to address the communication style. It will be advisable for the instructor to post guidelines on expectations on the use of proper language, grammar and style. As simple as this step may sound, it will make a difference to make communication flow smoothly during the online class. Another challenge, continues Porter, is the students’ expectations to receive his/her lesson in a more interactive way, such as multimedia materials and activities. This is a challenge for faculty because they have to learn new ways to communicate their material, not only delivering in class. The challenge also comes from the fact that effective online classes should be interactive. If the teacher is not prepared, then the interaction will not be effective. At the same time, if students do not participate in scheduled activities such as chat rooms or discussion boards, then the desired interaction will not take place. The next challenge is technology. One of the conclusions from the study conducted by Levernier (2005) is that teachers are challenged by technology. This challenge could be in mainly two areas. One is the lack of technical support resources provided by the school and the other is the students’ lack of technical expertise. In my experience at the College of Lake County (CLC), it is a frequent occurrence that our platform delivery method, Blackboard, is not refreshed in a timely manner. Faculty often have to contact the support desk to request assistance when they are preparing for a new class. For example, copying class material from semester to semester often does not happen at the most appropriate time and at times the material has been temporarily deleted – especially when updates on Blackboard have taken place. In other instances students’ names have not appeared on class rosters and more often the class has not been accessible to any of the students. As for students, technical challenges vary greatly. Some students have all the necessary technical means needed for an online class, while others might not even own a computer. Besides having easy access to computers, many students do not have the necessary software or hardware to participate in an online class. Others do not know how to access different multimedia formats that are part of the course material, posing a great disadvantage for students in these situations. At the College of Lake, a college-wide committee was established last academic year to address the issue of online readiness and the committee proposed two major responses. One of the responses was to provide more information on the college’s website about online classes. The other response was to create a self-assessment tool to evaluate how ready students were. The tool would ask questions about the student’s technical skills as well as questions about time management and learning style. A fourth challenge we would like to bring up is direction. Often times an online course starts and students are expected to jump in and navigate the course without information about the course itself, there is lack of a roadmap, an introduction, or a presentation of expectations for the class. At CLC a college-wide committee was formed to address student readiness for online classes. At these meetings faculty shared their frustrations about their students not knowing what they were supposed to do for an online class or the students expecting to do considerably less work just because they were in an online class. On the other hand, advisors shared students’ comments that they did not know what to expect in the class. At CLC faculty are supposed to post information on the web about their courses: whether orientations are mandatory, if campus visits are required, if there is a policy on deadlines for assignments, how finals are given, etc. While some instructors update this information promptly every semester, a lot of them do not, causing students to be in the dark when it comes to course expectations. Some of the most effective and popular faculty in the division where I work have created orientations particular to their courses. Some of them have a quick quiz about the syllabus, some have a presentation of expectations, some spend a significant amount of time interacting with students trying to find out about their background, and others give the students the opportunity to ask all the questions they want about the instructor or the course before they jump in with the course content. Most of these introductory activities have proven to be of benefit to the students and are worth being replicated. Creativity is another challenge present in online classes. If faculty are able to overcome this challenge, there are good chances that the online class will be successful. Creativity does not imply that activities are presented as the faculty feels is better on this day or the other; creativity does not imply presenting activities on an impetus. On the contrary, effective creativity takes planning. A study was conducted by interviewing ten faculty who were nominated by their peers as creative (Morrow, 2010). Morrow talks about “purposeful creativity” and points out that the faculty who participated in the study were not being creative only because they were naturally creative, but rather the faculty had a purpose in creating the activities. The study evaluated factors such as the learning curve, technology need, implementation, cost, how much time it took to implement the activity, and the students’ skill levels to determine the value of each creative action in their online classes. So the study did not focus on the artistic perspective of creativity, but rather on how creative activities are implemented and what the outcomes are. The results suggested that creative activities contribute greatly to effective delivery of online classes. As we can see, online classes have challenges. We discussed communication, interactivity, technology, direction, and creativity. Some of these factors have a stronger effect at the beginning of the online class, but all of them generally have some kind of impact throughout the course. As more research is conducted and attention is given to this topic, it is our hope that these findings will continuously improve online delivery, a very fast growing mode of delivering instruction that is changing the landscape of education.
 * Initial Challenges in Online Classes **

References ==Levernier, E. (2005). An analysis of perceptions of online instruction by department chairs in the field of higher educational administration in the United States. //Georgia Southern University.// Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.proxy1.ncu.edu/docview/305352743/abstract?accountid=28180 == Morrow, A. (2010). Faculty creativity in distance learning: A phenomenological study to understand how the online learning environment impacts faculty creativity. //University of Nebraska-Lincoln.// Retrieved from [] Porter, L. (2005). Developing an online curriculum: Technologies and techniques. [|//Information Management//],  <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> (Spring 2005): 15-16. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.proxy1.ncu.edu/docview/205295820/13810BA9B8A4721EC5/8?accountid=28180