Concord.org - @CONCORD Spring 1999

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All In a Day (and Night)
Long Hours and Hard Lessons Online

So you read that online teaching is the wave of the future and you want to try it. You take a class that teaches you how to teach online. You work day and night designing a course. One day you find yourself with a virtual classroom of twenty students spread out online all across the country. You spend months putting into practice all the things you learned about online collaboration, threaded discussion groups, and multimedia presentations. At the end of the term, you pat yourself on the back, you're an honest to goodness experienced online teacher. So how do you feel?

Exhausted! say many teachers.

"Everything took more time than I would have expected," explains Marsha West, who teaches WebQuest from Forks High School in Washington. Writing lesson plans, responding to questions, making assignments. The usual. But it all takes place on the computer.

"For me, the hardest thing about actually teaching a VHS course as opposed to the theory of teaching a VHS course has been juggling all those different things at the same time," says Susan Leavey, who teaches photography in Marlboro, Mass. "Some days I have 30-40 comments, questions, assignments to try to keep up with and answer on top of my teaching load and life as we know it."

No doubt about it, for a VHS teacher committed to teaching well, the time commitment is considerable. So is the need to be creative. How do I get students talking to each other? How do I develop rapport with students I can't see? How do I get reluctant students to respond? How do I assess student work from a distance? What do I do about a student who doesn't come to class? "It was a humbling experience for me to have students fail regardless of what I tried to do," says Leavey. But she also had some "great students who knocked my socks off with the quality and thoughtfulness of their work."

Teachers face other surprises in the virtual classroom. "There's far less room for 'winging it' for teachers in an online environment," says Matt Huston, who taught in Los Lomas High School, Calif.

Teachers like David Jost, who teaches music at Westborough High School in Massachusetts, believe that the VHS preparatory class, the Teachers Learning Conference (TLC), is essential for learning new skills, but also for experiencing an online course from the students' point of view. "It made me realize what the students were going through in my own class," says Jost. "I was able to see how VHS actually looked and felt."

"The TLC is where it's at for anyone beginning to work in this area," agrees David Senecal, who teaches one of VHS's most popular classes, Project Sail. "[TLC] gives you the training to utilize the software for developing your course and also the opportunity to create a methodology for delivering your class."

Jerry Lapiroff has been watching all of this from somewhat of a distance. He is a VHS site coordinator in Fremont, Calif., where he helps VHS students with their courses. "I never expected that - even the first year - some students would find an online course the best experience of their high school careers," he says.

So rest up, teachers. It may be a sign of your success that student enrollment is expected to double next year.

VHS Special Issue | VHS Table of Contents | Spring 1999 Newsletter | CC Home

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