Managing Time and Expectations

 

What's so different about teaching online?

Faculty in colleges and universities across the country often learn about teaching and classroom management informally through observing faculty whose classes they enjoyed taking as a student, discussions with colleagues, or consultations with your Instructional Technology staff.  When you begin to teach online, your exemplars and experiences from the face-to-face classroom may not be as helpful when you interact primarily with students asynchronously at a distance. While you'll find many little differences and make many little adjustments as you teach online, there are several major areas of difference that you'll want to make sure to consider.

 Time and expectation management

Keeping a sense of balance is key when teaching online. 

One of the most common issues that arises when teaching online is a feeling that there's just not enough time in the day to do what needs to be done.  Email from students needs to be answered.  Assignments need to be graded and grades posted in a timely manner.  Groups may need to be monitored, technology issues managed, or replies to discussion questions posted. 

The main areas that can cause challenges for instructors are

• saying they will reply to messages in a particular time frame but taking longer in reality
• saying they will grade and provide feedback in a particular time frame but taking longer in reality
• telling students to reply to others' posts with substantive comments and their own comments are "nice point" or "good example"

If students come to expect sporadic, delayed communication from the instructor and lack of substantive participation they begin to wonder why they should put forth the effort to be a timely and active participant in the class.  

A good way to keep your time commitments under control is to manage expectations from the beginning of the course - both your students' expectations and your own. You may not expect to be answering email at 3AM now, but when you find yourself doing just that a month into the course, it's important to take a step back and review the parameters you originally set. If your syllabus states that you will answer email within 24 hours or that grades will be posted within one week of the assignment deadline, that doesn't mean that you have to answer email as soon as it comes in and grade on the day the assignment is due. For some people, the psychological stress of an email backlog is harder to deal with than the backlog itself.  Knowing yourself and how you prefer to work will help you set expectations and boundaries that are reasonable for both you and your students.

Keep in mind that you aren't the only source of technical support for your students. There will always be students with technology challenges in any online class.  Troubleshooting technical issues can eat up time if you allow it. The most important thing to keep in mind regarding the tools and technology used in online classes is that you are not the only source of technical support for your students. Providing clear, tested instructions - using video if possible - will help reduce the amount of questions.  The Canvas Guides Links to an external site. are an excellent source of illustrated and video instructions for tools and tasks within Canvas. 

The EWU Help Desk provides extra-hour phone support at 509.359.2247 for distance students as well as walk in support for on-campus students.  If students are experiencing technical difficulties with a university system such as Canvas or a university supported product such as Microsoft Word, you can direct them to the Help Desk.

If you have the opposite issue of avoiding messages and grading, setting aside regular chunks of time throughout the week to respond to email, grade, and interact in discussions is helpful. Treat this time as a commitment the same way you would to physically go teach a face-to-face class.  Dedicate a portion of this time to open online office hours if you need external motivation to stick to a schedule.

One last thing, if you have a tendency to lose track of due dates and office hours/student meetings that you have on your Canvas calendar, you can add your Canvas calendar to Outlook by subscribing to your Canvas Calendar. Links to an external site. This will show you all the calendar items for all the courses you are teaching side by side with your Outlook calendar.