Instructors need solid pre-service and ongoing training, professional development and mentoring opportunities to help teach their classes at any institution.
Over the years, I’ve taught at six institutions of higher learning:
- three large, public 4-year universities
- one medium-sized public 4-year university
- one private 4-year liberal arts college
- one community college
Pre-service training varied from a very basic, one-day orientation to an in-depth and thorough three-week orientation. Orientation activities included small and large group presentations about institutional & departmental services and policies, collaborative lesson planning, shadowing of experienced instructors, recorded micro-teaching lessons with accompanying reflection essays and personalized feedback by directors.
As educators, we are now living in an educational world that offers a wide variety of instructional modalities beyond that of the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom. Are our pre-service and ongoing training programs preparing educators enough for the teaching methodologies that change according to each variable on the technology-intensive instructional spectrum?
technology-enhanced > blended > distance/online
Over the years, I have been fortunate to have been involved in program-building and innovative projects. Technology always changes. It is undeniable that the ways in which students and instructors interact are changing. Some recent changes in student-teacher communication and interactions have been e-mail, discussion boards and videoconferencing. And here stems the need for professional development to train educators about the different approaches to and methods of teaching in different T&L environments. However, one thing to always remember: the principles behind good teaching and learning haven’t changed (Miller, 2013 – “The Adventure Continues”).
How do educators stay up-to-date in this ever-changing academic landscape? Beyond attending professional development workshops, one way to learn about ways to better reach and engage students -in any type of course- is to be a more connected educator.
I opened a twitter account back in April 2009. Back then, famous comedians were tweeting, and others tweeted endlessly about annoyingly uninteresting daily routines. I felt I had nothing to tweet about. My personal account lay dormant for four years. My personal life was just that, personal and pretty normal. Nothing to tweet about. Professionally, I was too busy teaching and directing a blended language program to sleep let alone tweet. And what would I tweet about? Then, I attended a conference here on campus,
innovate 2013. Prompted by the conference registration information and promotional announcements, I created a program twitter account to tweet about the sessions I attended at the conference. After that conference, I started to tweet messages about our individualized instruction (I.I.) language program @sppoF2Fonline , directed at students, about upcoming deadlines. The tweets synced to our
program blog.
While our program twitter and web presence took shape, my personal twitter account was still happily sleeping while my real, workaholic self was sleep-deprived. Then came our university’s adoption of edublogs u.osu.edu, which I had learned about at the
innovate 2013 conference keynote speaker Jim Groom during his presentation “A Domain of One’s Own.” When u.osu.edu went live in October 2013, I thought, “this is a big step in the right direction.” Ohio State now provides a platform for all students, staff and faculty to create websites and the ability to post media-rich academic and professional articles and resources. The u.osu.edu website platform is more than just a place to blog, it is a way to make important connections departmentally, institutionally, and (inter)nationally.
My u.osu.edu presence now has three main pages, all with a focus of professional development & program building:
One of the features of u.osu.edu is to link to social media accounts, which is when I decided I needed to revive my personal twitter account. My focus shifted to getting connected professionally via twitter. Who am I professionally? What is my aim? What is most important to me as an educator? Who else out there is doing what I am trying to do? With our u.osu.edu there is an option to link social media accounts, but not a news reel widget to list recent tweets, which is possible on our I.I. Program Blog because it’s currently hosted on an external WordPress account. I like the ability to sync recent tweets because our program tweets are more active and provide more frequent links to language resources and news items than our main blog posts, which are more geared toward main events in our program (registration, orientation, etc.).
Why are social media outlets like a blog and twitter important? We, as educators and administrators, are continually faced with doing more with less. We many times focus on the task at hand just to get it done and move on to the next pressing item on our never-ending to-do list. However, we periodically need to pause and to remind ourselves: we should not go it alone. We need to share. We need to collaborate. We need to connect with others in our field. If we want good things to happen and continue to happen, we need to open our eyes and ears and minds to the wealth of free resources and networking opportunities not only in our units and departments, but well beyond. Collaboration is key, and u.osu.edu and twitter are two ways to extend your reach.
I think it is crucial in today’s academic climate to provide professional development opportunities to build a community of educators ready to take on any change that may come our way. In the end, we want to provide valuable, quality learning opportunities for our students. More students are opting to choose blended, online and distance courses for the convenience of anytime, anywhere learning environments that are better suited to their busy personal, academic and professional lives. This is a trend that is not going away (Miller, 2013 – “Student Demand for Online Offerings”). Better educators build better programs, which in turn, help students improve and grow not just in that course or program, but prepare them for life beyond school. Better programs attract students. As mentioned in a previous blog post, departments and institutions with appealing, valuable course offerings and services attract students, and technology will, in part, fill this demand. However, it cannot just be a matter of offering technology-rich courses and services, but providing quality teaching and learning opportunities (Miller, 2013 – “Keys to Technology Implementation”).
I’m putting myself out there to be the start of what I hope is a larger discussion, with a larger audience than just folks in my department. To bring together educators (inter)nationally and start important discussions about how to provide students valuable, quality learning opportunities in technology-enhanced, blended, distance and online language courses. How am I going to do this? To start a professional learning network (PLN) for language educators. If we are giving students the choice of anytime, anywhere learning, we, as educators also need anytime, anywhere learning opportunities to hone our professional skills.
On twitter, I’ve created a hashtag #langblendonline for educators and administrators to include in their tweets when it relates to blended, online, and distance language courses, programs and policies.
I’ll be holding a weekly online chat Saturdays this summer starting Saturday May 03, 2014 10:00AM – 11:00AM EST and running through Saturday August 09, 2014 for anyone interested in chatting about
- blended, online and distance language courses and programs
- big ideas, experiences, lessons learned, research, resources and best practices
Depending on the number of participants each Saturday, I’ll be in a Google+ Hangout or Adobe Connect chat room. For discussion topics, schedule and sign-up tutorials click on the following link: http://go.osu.edu/gRX
Please reserve a seat by signing up via SignUpGenius by 8AM EST the day of each session: www.SignUpGenius.com/go/10C0A4FADAF28ABFC1-blended
- Google+ Contact Info: SPPO Individualized
- Participants will need to provide a gmail or Google+ contact info at the time of session registration
- Participants will receive an invitation message to their g-mail e-mail / Google+ e-mail account the day of the discussion session (if the gathering is to be held in Google+ Hangouts)
- If less than 10 people register, we’ll meet in a Google+ Hangout
- Adobe Connect (CarmenConnect) Room: http://carmenconnect.osu.edu/langprofdevpt2014/
- After you register, you will receive a password to gain access to the Adobe Connect virtual meeting room (if the gathering is held via Adobe Connect)
- If 10+ people register, we will meet via Adobe Connect
- Contact E-mail: spanishii@osu.edu or portii@osu.edu
I look forward to chatting with other language educators who are embarking on or are well into their blended/online/distance teaching journeys.
-Christine Miller, Director of OSU Spanish & Portuguese Individualized Instruction Programs
