Nadja Tadic
InstructorWeb Journal Editor
A&H Web Journal
"While I imagine it is difficult to create the atmosphere of an in-person discussion online, my goal for my next blended course is to find a format for online discussions that builds off of and further contributes to a sense of active engagement and community among my students; a format that motivates participants to share their thoughts and enthusiastically respond to those of others."
In the fall of 2018, I taught Academic Culture and Communication for International Researchers—a course designed to help international researchers communicate appropriately and efficiently in North American academic contexts. The course was intended for visiting scholars at Columbia University—a diverse population of researchers at different stages of their careers who specialized in a wide variety of areas, including sociology, architecture, film, literature, medicine, education, etc. It was structured as an eight-week blended course, with one online session and one face-to-face meeting each week.
I had taught blended courses before, but this was my first time preparing a blended course that I had not previously taught in the classroom. I knew I wanted to take advantage of our face-to-face meetings for “hands-on” activities, which would give my scholars the opportunity to practice actively participating in academic North American interactions. With that in mind, I used our online sessions to expose them to target language structures as much as possible before our face-to-face meetings, giving them the chance to listen to, read about, and discuss different cultural and linguistic norms for communicating in North American academic contexts. This not only ensured that the scholars would spend our face-to-face meetings actively using appropriate target structures, but it also gave them a chance to read, watch, and analyze these structures as much as they needed online beforehand.
I felt this worked quite well, and I would organize a course with similar objectives in a similar way in the future. But one thing I hope to do differently next time around would be my online discussions. Due to the limited number of hours I had with my scholars face-to-face, I needed to move some of our discussions around culture online. While I did appreciate that everyone in these online discussions could express their opinion, regardless of their fluency or their level of comfort talking to a larger group of people, I did at times find the discussions a bit stilted, lacking thoughtful participation and engagement. While I imagine it is difficult to create the atmosphere of an in-person discussion online, my goal for my next blended course is to find a format for online discussions that builds off of and further contributes to a sense of active engagement and community among my students; a format that motivates participants to share their thoughts and enthusiastically respond to those of others.
As I revise this course for next semester, I hope to find a way to foster more engaging interaction online. I think an important step in that journey will be creating a sense of community in my class, both onsite and online. And one piece of advice I would have for instructors teaching online for the first time is precisely that: Create spaces and opportunities for your students to build relationships with each other and with you. Online courses can easily create a sense of distance and disengagement among students, so we need to do all we can to help them realize that they are in fact a community.