Week 8 Reflection

This week we talked about what we would require of the instructors who would teach our course. The first thing I would require and Ali and I both agree it's the major item in creating a successful course is communication from the teacher to the students. I would want students to understand the objectives and know that if there were any questions they had, there was a way to contact the instructor or have a "help support" system. It's also important for instructors to provide feedback 24 -48 hours is the maximum amount of time to give feedback. If the students are going to do the work required, then it is respectful for the teachers to provide feedback on a timely manner. Matthew mentioned in his post how in his courses it's difficult for his students to communicate in the web conferences. I mentioned a list of questions or agenda to post during the session. I also mentioned for students to have a chance to lead the discussion, same as students in the Diffimooc class I'm in do on Twitter. Each week a different student leads the discussion. This doesn't always have to be on twitter, but with this type of communication students can collaborate together and learn from each other. In a course, there needs to be some type of learner to learner instructing as well. On Ali's blog we all discussed our needs assessment survey and our evaluation survey we sent out. We are all disappointed in the response we received.  Out of 5 teachers we only heard back from 1. Which implied a tutorial video would have been more efficient to a live face to face meeting. Through the blog comments, we discussed how it's important to have communication with the teachers. Mia thought, having 5 instructors and Dr. Graham is a little over whelming for the teachers. The teachers were first contacted by Dr. Graham and then each one of us contacted them about something else that we have created. Where this is fine to branch out and create our own thing, I wonder if we need to think about the teachers we are working with and delegate only one person to contact the teachers. This will create a knowing "contact person" for the teachers if they have questions or concerns. I think for our future training session we should think about how we would like to communicate to the teachers and how to have them respond to our assessments we provide. Assuming what teachers need for a training, is not successful. It might be for the ones who responded to the needs assessment, but if we don't hear feedback we are lost into what to create for them. Communication and a way to contact personal is important to have in a course.