Before working at the University of Waterloo, Shannon Majowicz taught training courses at the Public Health Agency of Canada. She was also an instructor in the Master of Public Health program at the University of Guelph. Her first experience with face-to-face teaching was in applied settings, a far step from online teaching.
Shannon initially anticipated being ambivalent about online teaching, but quickly realized that she enjoyed the benefits it provided. For example, she found that teaching online had fewer constraints in terms of physical space and temporal length, and that the online platform allows her students to connect with classmates from around the world, exposing them to many different points of view.
Another benefit of the online environment Shannon noticed was the thoughtfulness of students’ discussion posts. Since there’s a record of the posts that have been made, students in her online classes have time to reflect on what’s been said and can revisit topics whenever they want to.
Shannon didn’t find that her approach to teaching needed to be modified drastically when teaching online. She always focuses on how she can best help her students apply the material. As Shannon put it, “I’m always asking myself…why are they paying us tuition money? What is it that we need to do for them in these courses to make it useful? No matter what, the content needs to have utility for their daily lives.” In her online courses, students engage with case studies and become topic experts. This approach aims to get students thinking about both the breadth of topics that will be discussed in the course, as well as the depth to which a particular topic can be explored.
Though there are many benefits associated with teaching online, Shannon noted that “the hardest part about online teaching is that you almost have to anticipate all the ways in which students can move through the material and have thought them through before the course goes live.” This is very different from a face-to-face class in which you can read your students and alter how you’re teaching in the moment, or what you focus on during the lecture. With online teaching, you need to anticipate where students may have difficulty when designing the course.
Though there’s a need to prepare for the difficult points in advance, there are still ways to get student feedback around challenging concepts during the course. By having weekly student-to-student discussions, Shannon is able to determine how students are interacting with the content, and where they may be off the mark.
Shannon’s advice for future instructors: be prepared for the amount of work that goes into developing an online course and try to anticipate where the sticky points might be in advance. She also suggests that instructors take advantage of the technical support available to them at Centre for Extended Learning. This frees up time to think about creating the best learning experiences for students.