Pre-Grad School Reflections

I have reactivated my blog/site as I’m starting grad school in a few weeks, and given that I’ll be taking classes entirely online for a degree that specializes in online learning, I thought it might be wise to track my experiences and reflect on them to help make my own online learning development better for my own students. And it will be a fantastic procrastination tool.

While the application process for the degree was fairly simple, the initial enrolment procedures have been anything but. Universities, I am rediscovering, are a labyrinth of administrative protocols, a plethora of loosely-interconnected websites all requiring some sort of informational input, and occasionally conflicting or unclear information. Facing each different interface for the first time and determining the needs of the site is always a challenge. And I’m pretty good with this whole interwebs stuff.

Another concern I’ve been coming up against since receiving my letter of invitation to the program less than a week ago is the coming registration tomorrow evening. It took some scrounging to find at least screenshots on how to register, what the page was going to look like, etc, so that I could make the best use of my time. I still haven’t determined if there’s an easy way to know which courses are online and which are on campus. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

These ideas are especially pertinent as I teach (and have been teaching) some variation on blended classes for about 4 or 5 years now. The take-away for me here is, remembering that my students are often working in L2 (their second language) to:

1. Keep visual input to a bare minimum. Branding is reassuring, but too many options leading me out of a page to somewhere else aren’t helpful. I need to clearly know what I’m supposed to do, where I’m supposed to enter information, exactly what is required, and how to get all that done. Video demos are helpful. Help pages (popups/AJAX) are good. Rabbit-holing through series of links and general search boxes only mildly assistive, and then only when I can find what I’m looking for. It’s also very annoying.
2. One page does one thing. See above.
3. Succinct lists of what I need to do in one place, and auto-updating checklists of what I’ve accomplished.  In my invitation letter I received a checklist that was for every possible situation. I know the university is making it easier on themselves to send out one list for each student with sub-sections, but it’s not easier for the student. Ideally, I’m told where to log in and create a profile. Then I get to answer a questionnaire determining my next steps. From there, the website takes me through a full process where I can save my process at any step, much as my university’s online application process was completed. It was easy to see what was done, what needed to be done, and for me to walk away and get additional information without losing what I had started.
4. Websites that work. If I need to accomplish something important, like getting my ID produced so I can take exams, it’s good to have that webpage functioning. That is all. For my students, testing, testing, testing. My students this year have to use a website created by a textbook supplier. We found out a couple weeks into the process of getting students signed up that they couldn’t use the dominant web browser (or the version after that, but needed at least TWO upgrades) to use the web page. And professors couldn’t use the most recent Mac OS X version with the materials we had been provided. Well, that would have been good to know going in.