Brenda Teaches Online Exclusively From Home

 

Brenda is an assistant professor, teaching for a community college with a focus on instruction. Because of her community college affiliation, she does not have research requirements and has few service commitments. Brenda travels periodically to the community college campus for faculty meetings but teaches online exclusively from home. Her discipline is science, and her course duration varies from eight weeks to a full 15 or 16-week semester. Enrollment averages 20 learners per course. Her courses are primarily content-based. Brenda teaches six online four-credit courses each semester, for a total of 24 credits. In addition, she mentors new online instructors for two to three hours a week. Brenda has had experience teaching online and through this experience has developed specific strategies for design, support, teaching, and time allocation.

 

 

Design	Plans and organizes all courses ahead of time, so that she can focus her teaching effort on monitoring learner participation and responding to their needs.For any new course she develops, she spends about 100 hours. For a course that is already developed, she spends about 20 hours before her online course begins to update and revise her materials. Once the online course has begun, she spends another two hours to revise and update as the course progresses.
Support	When Brenda moved her courses from face-to-face to online teaching, she received in-depth course design assistance from her institution to develop her curriculum units. Receives the institution’s instructional designer support for copyright clearance, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance, and feedback on her courses.
Teaching	Carefully selects textbooks and uses an asynchronous discussion board with prompts, along with lecture concept maps in which she highlights important parts of the assigned textbook readings for the learners. Incorporates quizzes and an extensive webliography of web links for additional resources. Offer two types of labs – a virtual kitchen lab where materials can be gathered at home and a “wet” lab that requires a more traditional lab kit. Learners, through engagement, create a sense of presence with each other while she can serve more as a guide. Students are involved in two large field projects during the semester. Prepares prior to the beginning of the course are quizzes, a mid-term, and a final exam. These are integrated into the online course and she keeps track of them through an online gradebook.
Time-Allocation	Allocates about one and a half hours a day, seven days a week for working on the online courses. Is available 16 hours a day asynchronously to respond to learner questions and needs, and works her time around her family’s schedule (while her children’s nap time is a dedicated time during the day that she can use to focus on her online courses).  Tells her learners know when she will be unavailable. Occasionally uses synchronous technology for feedback, but only when requested.

 

While teaching online exclusively from home can be a benefit, it can also be a deception because it can easily take over your personal life. Brenda discovered early on that she needed to set boundaries to distinguish between her work life and her personal life. Though she is constantly connected to her online courses, she tries to communicate with her learners when she is not accessible. Telling learners that she is unavailable is a way to establish course expectations and have a sense of control over her personal life. In addition, Brenda perceives that her time spent on online teaching can be misleading to skeptical classroom instructors. However, as an online instructor, you do not need to feel a sense of guilt and prove your workload to others. Instead, you need to focus on how to manage your workload to fit your needs and anticipate the needs of your learners. Everything else is irrelevant.

 

 

Reference

 

Conceição, S. C. O, Lehman, R. M. (2011). Managing Online Instructor Workload: Strategies for Finding Balance and Success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.