Resources

Teaching and learning become rich and exciting when any classroom makes room for and taps into the resources of diverse backgrounds, contexts, and identities. Also, it’s the right thing to do. When I began teaching online, I knew classroom diversities might increase due to broadening access, but I suspected student diversities could also be less visible due to the individuating and sometimes alienating aspects of technology. Yet in online contexts, foregrounding and integrating room for diversities into teaching and learning is surprisingly easier than you might imagine. Online students have more ways to participate in conversation, experience greater equity from the outset, and often exhibit deeper transparency. How can an online educator make more of diversities in a virtual classroom and tap into their teaching and learning potential? Increased access to classroom diversities was an important draw for me into online education because I teach at a theological school in the far eastern corner of Tennessee. During a 2014 sabbatical, I traveled throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Mexico. In many places, vital and thriving ministry was happening without good access to theological education. Many of the people I encountered would not be able to relocate to my school. I began imagining a classroom where a male, Kenyan micro-lender in the Mathare slum district of Nairobi and a Chicago-based, African American woman in urban church planting could have access to theological education and both be in the same room learning together and from one another. The kind of diversities I imagined while traveling now exist in my online contexts, and I aim to embrace them as an asset in theological education. How can online teaching and learning make room for greater diversities? Begin by welcoming student engagement that makes connections to students’ own contexts and backgrounds. Then, incentivize, encourage, and reward these connections across your course design: in opening introductions; discussion posting; student selection of readings, assignments, and projects; and integrative exercises like papers or exams. In all learning tasks and rubrics, objectives should include making resourceful connections to one’s own history, identity, or current contexts. Keep students engaged and invested while simultaneously making learning moments more tangible by emphasizing the contribution of student diversities to learning. Doing so makes diversities a more visible and constructive part of teaching and learning. Students are invited to witness connections happening in the work of their peers and are drawn to do the same. They begin to hear, learn, and feel challenged by their own and others’ diverse perspectives and orientations. Yet, I’ve learned along the way that the contours of online classroom diversities are unpredictable and can unfold in unexpected ways. For example, a white, male American student in an online course entered imagining he had no resources from his own context for theological learning. He named his rural and poor upbringing, and his ministry experience in both conservative and progressive West Virginia congregations as limitations. In response, other students helped him recognize the displacements and pressures that were indeed shaping his theological convictions. Identity in online contexts includes complex and shifting aspects of race, sexuality, trauma, geography, economics, citizenship, displacements, and more. Often, students’ own self-awareness around this multi-layered complexity is shifting in the midst of a course and in response to readings, peer-to-peer engagement, and/or assignments. Hosting spaces where students are invited to name what they are learning from their own contexts and backgrounds and from those of their peers becomes vital. Online learning tends to feel more “democratic” because it allows all learners to enter discussions under similar parameters. But online educators must be aware of persisting inequities. Safety can be heightened by using netiquette guidelines and checking in personally with students when they shift into overly aggressive or suddenly silent postures. Yet, if “democratic” means majority opinions rule, minoritized students will be susceptible to overt and subtle forms of silencing by their peers, while being more exposed and vulnerable in the process. In my experience, subtle forms of deflecting peer voices happens when students champion what they already (think they) know, rather than sharing what they are actively learning. I prioritize and reward only the latter. Surfacing diversities that already exist, and making room for more diversities, enhances learning in the online classroom. It’s risky and needs adaptive and adapting postures, a self-aware and engaged teacher, and rethinking of all elements of course design. I remind students regularly that part of our learning together is about how theological engagement and conversation becomes welcoming and constructive. In that engagement and conversation, every person is a vital and valued contributor in the process of teaching and learning. Making more of diversities enhances every potential for learning, empathy, and relevance.

We live in exciting times. Even just 10 years ago, the technology to teach the kind of online course that I would dream about was simply unavailable. But not anymore. Today the technical tools needed to teach a course can scale the heights of one’s imagination. They are not only available, but affordable for instructors. In this post, I want to geek out over tech tools, especially as they relate to the online Beginning Greek class I am teaching this academic year. Unicode language keyboards If students are going to learn a language online, they need a no-hassle way of easily typing its alphabet. I am currently teaching on Canvas but what I say here would apply to Sakai, Blackboard, Moodle, or any other learning management system (LMS). The best keyboard available for most languages is Keyman (latest version 10.0; for Greek, pick the Greek Classical keyboard). It uses unicode (or ‘universal encoding’), which means that the keyboardist no longer has to worry about what fonts are installed on a given computer. In any font, when you type in Greek or another selected language, the output is consistent. The Greek classical keyboard is especially well-designed, complete with a tutorial and keyboard layout visual. It is available for Windows, macOS, the iPhone, iPad, and Android interfaces, and best yet, it is free. There is even a nice selection of ancient Hebrew keyboard options. Video production and encoding As I suggested in my previous blog, the language instructor ultimately needs to create personal instructional videos. I produced over 80 of them (7-10 minutes each) to cover the content of Greek 1 and 2 (two semesters). I quickly discovered that a microphone is more important than a video camera. Audio quality is more important than video quality. Since many universities now require captions with videos, the better the sound, the more accurate are the automated subtitle scripts produced by YouTube and other caption services. I find that I did far less editing of the subtitle scripts when my microphone and sound quality improved. Here’s my advice: invest in a high quality microphone, save on cheaper video cameras. I particularly like the Yeti USB Microphone ($128.73) for my laptop, but if one is recording off a tablet or phone, the Boya 3.5mm Microphone ($19.95) is excellent for shutting out background noise. But built-in microphones on your computer and phones are the worst. To avoid echoes and the way-off-in-the-distance muffled sound these produce, get a good microphone. Some decent video cam’s include: the Logitech 930 series ($68.00), or simply use your tablet or smartphone camera.   Once the video is produced, the course designer will need a good editor and encoder. I always want something simple and easy-to-use. Screencast-o-matic is excellent for cutting out video I don’t like. I can insert slides, text, photos, and even external video if I wish. It is a subscription service ($36 for 3 years or $1/month) and well worth it to save much grief for the less technically savvy person (myself included). It also encodes the video for easy upload onto YouTube, Vimeo, or other video channel sites. Headset for video conferencing and synchronous teaching It just takes one. Just one computer with bad feedback on its sound system and the entire video conferencing session is a disaster. Whether using Zoom, Big Blue Button, Skype, or other conferencing tools, getting a headset with microphone and asking your students to buy it are crucial to eliminate screeching distractions. Especially if one meets with a small group tutorial session online, or even a large synchronous classroom setting, having everyone log into the session with a headset will allow all to be heard without nasty feedback or echoes. My recommendation (and it’s cheap) is the Mpow USB headset/microphone ($22.99). I would add the headset as part of the textbook order.  Recommended OER’s Lastly, there are many free open educational resources (OERs, pronounced “oars”). I was surprised to find many good Greek tools online. The United Bible Society, for example, has the entire UBS5 Greek New Testament available for public use. Greek professors often post their own videos and other resources to help students (here’s a fantastic one called Daily Dose of Greek). The Perseus project has a parsing engine online for New Testament and other Greco-Roman texts. There is an exciting world of free OERs ready to be employed by the innovative course designer. The tough part is choosing which ones to use, but that is a welcome problem to tackle.

One of my favorite movies growing up was the The Sound of Music. I loved—and still love—the opening scene: the vast panoramic of Julie Andrews, arms outstretched, as Maria, belting at the top of her lungs: “The hills are alive with the sound of music!” Each song and every word from the film is etched in my memory! Perhaps you, too, can recall the scene where Maria teaches the children to sing: “Let’s start at the very beginning; a very good place to start. When you read you begin with A-B-C. When you sing you begin with Do-Re-Mi, Do-Re-Mi. The first three notes just happen to be Do-Re-Mi, Do-Re-Mi, Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Te-Do!” By the end of the film, the whole family has mastered the art of singing and it leads, literally, to their freedom. Mastery comes with a solid foundation and practice; with learning the basics, making mistakes, asking questions and correcting course. Mastery requires starting at the beginning—so that a certain freedom can surface once the basics are etched in our memories—even when learning online. As teachers, we need to provide an opportunity for students to master the basics not only of content, but also of the learning environment; to develop the thought and muscle memory of working with technology. Only then can they set aside the concern of technology and truly enter into the freedom and joy of the online learning environment. The greatest support I find for students in effective online teaching is to create a “Getting Started” module for every course I build. The language and idea of “Getting Started” is owed to the training module I completed with Quality Matters (https://www.qualitymatters.org/). I keep this language because it invites engagement with the full range of students, from neophyte to novice to expert in the online learning environment. All students are invited to review the basics. Some can be skimmed over; others perhaps not. The point is: there are many notes in this environment which need to become second nature and I teach them here. A typical table of contents for such a module contains the following foundational elements: (Do) How to upload your picture to your account, (Re) How to forward school email to your personal email account, (Mi) A tour of the course site, (Fa) How to post an original thread and respond to peers in a discussion forum, (So) How to access privatized videos, (La) How to create a video using PowerPoint or Zoom, (Te) How to submit and retrieve assignments, (Do) How to access the library e-reserves and more. These foundational elements are delivered primarily via videos and PDF documents using screen images highlighted with step-by-step instructions. These supports are made available the week before class begins and remain accessible for the entirety of the course. Students are encouraged to explore this module prior to the beginning of class to learn the A-B-Cs and Do-Re-Mis of the learning environment. I also provide an opportunity for a simple online discussion and assignment submission in advance of the course start to foster some familiarity and initial comfort with these processes. This module is partially transferable from course to course, so I am not re-creating the wheel each course. Personalizing a few videos however—such as a tour of the course site—communicates my care for the current group of students. As a practice, I meet with online students individually via Zoom one or two times a semester. During these sessions, I inquire what I could do better to support their transition to online learning and also how I can continue to support their learning in this environment. Last semester I learned—unfortunately late in the game—that a number of students never learned how to use the library’s database resources. This naturally impacted the quality of their research, learning and integration. As a result, moving forward, each course will contain a video showing how to do research using the vast electronic scholarly resources available through the library system. This will find its home in the “Getting Started” module. So remember, while we grow beyond neophyte, novice and toward master teachers in the online environment, the neophyte online learner will always be with us. While students need the “Getting Started” module to varying degrees, let’s keep providing the basic A-B-Cs and Do-Re-Mis because there will always be need for some students to start at the very beginning so they can set aside the concern of technology and truly enter into the freedom and joy of the online learning environment.

“I feel like I’m constantly grading now.”  My colleague’s comment was offered as a lament over so much more assessment now that our school had transitioned to an online curriculum. That online courses required more grading was a surprise, and a mystery, to me at first too. Why should the delivery format make such a difference to how a course gets graded? There is an answer to that question, and the nature of learning provides the answer. Online learning is learning mediated by distance and time. It doesn’t have the same social component, or the immediacy of interaction, that learning in class does. Going to class—and therefore, presumably, learning—constitutes the primary blocks of a residential student’s day, but learning done by students in an online school is often piled onto or squeezed into a daily schedule that is not otherwise centered around education. Online learning, therefore, occurs in isolation from many of the reinforcements to comprehension, inquiry, and creativity provided by face-to-face environments, e.g., shared space, informal conversation, direct and immediate access to professors, and even simple sensory aids like handouts, refreshments, show-and-tell objects, and rituals used to begin and end class. These sorts of things all contribute, in face-to-face education, to creating a learning environment that marks the moment of learning: “Now, here, learning is happening,” they convey.   In other words, they help sustain student engagement. Online instructors must find other ways to achieve what going to class achieves for residential students. We have to design our online courses in ways that grab our students’ attention and keep them motivated as they progress. We learn to employ strategies that encourage students to logon frequently, help them feel present within the online space and online community, provide them with frequent opportunities to verify their understanding of course content, to ask questions, to participate in discussion, to receive feedback, and to see their progress.  Frequent, small assessments constitute one of these strategies. They play a role in a larger ecology of learning that has many points and modes of engagement. Certainly, instructors can overload a course with too many little tasks and activities, but, generally speaking, lessons that are chunked into multiple small assignments keep students more engaged than do lessons consisting simply of reading and discussion—leading up to a big test or paper at the end of the course. In addition, when those smaller chunks are graded, students must complete them in order to succeed in the course. Grading creates a point of connection between student and professor, especially if it includes feedback and not just a number. As they accumulate, grades can provide students with a visual picture of their progress. This is the reason why online education can involve so much grading. It’s about engagement. It isn’t necessarily about the need to measure or evaluate every single thing an online student does. One does not even have to award numbers or letter grades each time.  (Continually having to decide where student work falls on a grading scale is what tires instructors like my colleague.) The larger point is that student engagement and motivation are keys to successful learning in general, no matter the delivery method. And this is what teaching online, with its seemingly endless assessment, has taught me about learning. There are many studies proving the connection between engagement and learning. Since I cannot do justice to them here, I will close by reflecting on my own experiences as a learner. Like many future academics, motivating myself to learn was never particularly hard and I got to study things that naturally aroused my curiosity. I did not need bells and whistles to make me interested. But there are always exceptions. When learning is obligatory or seems irrelevant, it’s been the graded assignments that have spurred me on. Several years ago, I had to take a course in driver safety to be allowed to shepherd students on field trips. The course didn’t involve any actual driving but, rather, watching videos and taking a test. I was largely bored and disengaged until it was time to be tested. Then my competitive nature kicked in. When I passed with a nearly perfect grade but did not receive 100%, I wanted to take the course over again!  To this day, I still remember the driving rule that I got wrong on that test.

I have a confession to make. For the longest time I have approached distance learning as the second best way to teach. I thought of it as a necessary evil in order to deliver theological education to those who could not receive instruction through the traditional face-to-face (hence F2F) classroom. Consequently, I approached teaching online as an effort to approximate the F2F experience but feeling that no matter what I do, I’ll always fall short of the “real thing.” I have since changed my mind. In my experience designing and implementing an online course to teach Biblical Greek for seminary students, I have discovered that there are principles and practices which do more than simply approximate the F2F experience—they surpass it. So what practices in the F2F setting can and should be approximated online? Here are two quick suggestions: 1) Create instructional videos as a means for students to receive course content. There are no short cuts to teaching the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of any language. Over the course of one summer, I developed over 80 instructional videos of approximately 7-10 minutes each to cover the entire scope of beginning Greek grammar. Across two semesters, students will watch me on YouTube explain the pronunciation scheme of the Greek alphabet, read the biblical text out loud, and then address nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. The instructional videos are the backbone to the content of the course. 2) Have students write out their homework assignments in a “messy” way. The textbook I use for the course is William Mounce’s The Basics of Biblical Greek. I ask students to work through the homework exercises by hand since no electronic version of the Greek workbook is currently available by the publisher. Students do the work in a “messy” way: they scribble notes, circle words, draw arrows, cross out and self-correct their assignments. Then they scan their work and upload it as a PDF onto the course management system (hence CMS) for grading. The “messy” way of completing the homework adds a tactile, motor-memory component to learning that many find helpful. It is worth trying to approximate this online as much as possible. When, or if, an electronic version of the workbook exercises becomes available from publishers, students can easily use an iPad or other tablet device plus stylus to approximate the “messy” by-hand learning experience. Now here are two methods of online instruction that I think supersede the F2F experience: 1) Assign audio and video recording exercises to students to upload for instructor review. Currently I am teaching Greek online and on campus. To my surprise, I have found that, overall, my online students read biblical Greek out loud better than the on-campus students. In the on-campus classroom, we practice pronouncing Greek during the first weeks of the course by reading 1 John 1 out loud. Students take turns reading a verse and we make the rounds until we corporately finish the whole text. For the online course, students don’t take turns reading just a few verses of 1 John 1. They have to read large sections of it on their own, record their reading, and upload it onto the CMS for me to grade. It takes time, but I listen to their recordings and write out my comments, or make my own recording, to send back to them so they can adjust their pronunciation. Every week, online students complete an A/V recording assignment but the on-campus class does not. As a result, the former read Greek better. 2) Form student-to-student cohorts. I cannot take credit for what follows. On their own, my online students formed a Facebook group where they exchange best study techniques, commiserate about the difficulties of the language, answer questions for one another, and share resources. While on-campus students also form study groups, these are typically much smaller in size, meet less frequently, and do not involve the entire class. The Facebook group invites the entire class to participate and they do. The level of collaboration is much more intense. I may even suggest to the on-campus students that they form online cohorts. Sometimes commuters don’t have access to study groups. Forming a Facebook cohort would allow them to join. These are just a few suggestions I offer as I stumble my way through teaching Greek online. I have been just as much a learner as an instructor in this journey. The pedagogical discoveries have been exhilarating!

In a recent study, my research group at Harding University explored how a person’s learning context and personal experiences contribute to learning in an online course (Westbrook, McGaughy, and McDonald, 2018). The analysis highlighted the importance of experience as a resource for learning. In his book Nothing Never Happens, John D. Hendrix (2004) provides a “Sunday School” teaching model that draws from experiential learning theory (see 18-19). Hendrix’s model resembles Kolb’s theory: both focus on the inward active mind of the student and the outward active behavior that leads to learning (see Kolb, 1984, 40-60). Hendrix divides the experiential learning process into four domains and uses terminology that will be easily understood in a ministry context. When I was first introduced to experiential learning theory, as well as to Hendrix’s model, I was a seminary student who was in the beginning stages of learning how to develop online courses for Harding. At that time, it seemed to me that this cycle of experience, exegesis (or course content), reflection, and application would nicely fit an online, asynchronous learning design. Now, 12 years later, this model has yielded not only successful student learning outcomes time and again, but also students who have expressed appreciation for how much they “related to” and “got something out of” their courses. In the paragraphs below, I’ll share how the model works online. Experience The experience of the learner can be something that happened in the past or something that is happening in the present in the student’s world. Everyone brings some kind of experience to learning spaces, and it’s the job of the course designer and facilitator to help the student tap into these experiences for educational purposes. In Hendrix’s words, experiences provide the “hook” onto which new learning materials may hang. When designing your online course, consider how you might activate the connection between your students and the course content. Encourage students to consider past activities that relate in some way to the learning outcomes of the course. Ask them to share something about their backgrounds. Allow them to share why they want to take your course. Write your discussion questions in such a way that requires them to dip into their own worlds and share them with the rest of the class. Furthermore, create assignments that create new experiences, such as local field trips, conversations with friends and family, interviews with colleagues, or some other type of assignment that opens students’ eyes to the valuable lessons surrounding them. Exegesis (Content) Exegesis is the “stuff” of the course. While the word “exegesis” suits Hendrix’s model for a class that centered on a biblical text, I prefer to use “content” in relation to general online course design. Educators should rest assured that no course content will be harmed or minimized in the creation of an online course. In fact, online courses, especially asynchronous ones often have more pages to read and more videos to watch than traditional classes due to the desire to replace classroom time with reading and viewing time. Providing the appropriate quality and quantity of content is important, but the job doesn’t end here. An experiential online course does more than transmit data to students’ computers. Reflection I like to define reflection as the process through which a student internalizes the course content. Another way to say this might be that it is how a student applies the principles and lessons of the content to one’s life. There are multiple forms of activities that encourage student reflection, such as journaling, concept maps, and personal essays. Any activity that helps students relate personally to what they are learning meet this goal of reflection, especially if the activity encourages metacognition, or thinking about their own thinking. Because of my commitment to social learning, I find great value in discussion boards that prompt personal reflection. Application In contrast to reflection, the application space encourages students to apply what they are learning outside themselves. In short, they are to apply the principles and lessons of the course to their real-world context. As with reflection, I prefer to create prompts in a discussion board that help students see the relevancy of the course to the world beyond the course. This may come in the form of a case study, a hot topic question, or some principle that has broad implications. A summative assignment in which students create real-world solutions with course principles is a great way to help students connect theory with praxis. Experiential Online Learning Model When brought together, these four learning domains create an enriching learning experience.   Students at a distance become personally invested in their learning because they have made a personal connection with it. They demonstrate that they have learned content because they are asked to analyze, synthesize, and sometimes create something new with what they have learned. When they reflect on course principles, they internalize what they are learning and discover personal relevancy. By applying what they learn to their contexts, students learn to value the real-world relevancy of their course. This basic four-part model transforms flat, digital correspondence courses into a dynamic, life-developing, learning environment.

Two years ago I decided to kill voice-over PowerPoint as an online teaching tool. It wasn’t nearly as hard to kill as I thought it would be. And, for good reasons, I won’t go back. If you are new to online teaching, someone will inevitably suggest voice-over PowerPoint as a core component of online course design. They may even insist it is an “easy” entry into online teaching. When I started teaching online graduate seminary courses in theology, I relied heavily on voice-over PowerPoint. I used it for several consecutive years. But not anymore. Voice-over PowerPoint is taxing, redundant, and rigid for both instructors and students. More important, it doesn’t support productive or engaged learning online. Voice-over PowerPoint allows an instructor to design a visual presentation and then record narration or lecture content in sync with the slides. Thankfully, individual slides can be re-recorded without starting over from the beginning. In the narration recording, the instructor controls when the slides advance for the viewer. In online courses, typically the file is converted into streaming video that can be posted for students to view. Slightly more sophisticated tools (Prezi, Screencast-O-Matic, Camtasia, etc.) provide non-linear options or include video. At first glance, these tools simulate residential classroom practices. In residential courses, PowerPoint can enhance learning by adding visual content, important textual information, and helpful organization and pacing. Constructing PowerPoint presentations without voice-over narration is relatively straightforward, and most residential classrooms have appropriate technology support. In residential classrooms, I use PowerPoint to support interactive lecturing, which includes collaborative in-the-moment conversation, clarification, and imagination. Recreating residential patterns for using PowerPoint therefore seems to make sense in the habitat of online teaching and learning, but there are uncomfortable surprises. Voice-over PowerPoint is time intensive, not easily updated, and it tends to lock-in problematic course design. Voice-over PowerPoint is more time consuming when it is an online course component. Even if you are not a stickler for articulate and well-paced narration, it takes substantial time to get it right. Rendering voice-over PowerPoint files to streaming files takes considerable computer processing time. The first time I rendered a video, my computer was locked and unresponsive for six hours. With adequate technology support services, the process can move faster. Yet this means working on lectures well ahead of time, and many instructors lack adequate technical support. In addition, once a PowerPoint is rendered into streaming video, any changes, even very small changes, are incredibly cumbersome and frustrating to implement. One colleague of mine finds rendering videos so exasperating that she works from the tight space of her bedroom closet where she can curse and pound the walls every time her laptop computer crashes. On one occasion it crashed seven consecutive times. In course evaluations and check-ins, my online students have reported that voice-over PowerPoint feels laborious and redundant while residential students often found it helpful. The difference has to do with how online students multitask and manage fulltime work environments while pursuing education. Online learners prefer content they can listen to or watch without long stationary stretches at a computer in a solely receptive rather than interactive mode. When PowerPoint is content heavy and stretches beyond 15 minutes, students report being confused and frustrated. For example, they struggled to take notes while watching and listening because both tasks required the same screen. I responded by providing copies of slides and note-taking guides, but the situation and frustrations did not improve. Relying heavily on voice-over PowerPoint lecturing is not good online pedagogy. In residential contexts it can be interactive and invitational, but online it is one-directional and redundant. Instructors spend a lot of time putting together content not easily updated or augmented. Students spend a lot of time tediously copying down content, memorizing content, and repeating it on an exam. This kind of copying and rehearsing is labor intensive. And in the end, it does not mean students can demonstrate how new information or paradigms are useful, fruitful, or relevant. The learning patterns of redundancy don’t truly engage a learner or enhance a learner’s agency.   Thus, no matter how much time you have already invested, it is wise to avoid relying heavily on voice-over PowerPoint and equivalent tools. Instead, consider these alternative best practices for promoting productive and engaged learning online. Try moving PowerPoint content to course pages. Course page content can include images, links, and embedded PDF readings. Components and texts can be easily updated and corrected by the instructor. Page content can be saved and transferred if your course platform changes. Make sure the information you want to convey to students is not already available from trusted online sources or trusted scholars. Curate, rather than recreate, the best resources to avoid redundant faculty work. In the discipline of theology, this introduces students to a wider range of voices, generously celebrates other scholars’ expertise, and models how and where to find good theological information online. Incorporate interactive learning activities that invite students into the learning process in ways voice-over lectures cannot. For example, one of my objectives in an online Christology course is to raise critical awareness around how images of Jesus can support nationalism, injustice, violence, and racism. I used to provide images in PowerPoint presentation. Now I ask students to go in search of images and post them to a digital bulletin board (such as ./>Padlet). Subsequently students move through page content, external links, and course reading. Afterwards, students return to their posted images and comment on what they have learned, see differently, or want to ask. Due to this small design change, learning became engaged and interactive while requiring far less time-intensive setup. I also widened my own pool of online images. Use short (approximately 10 minutes) recorded video segments to orient students to the content, learning, and objectives you have in mind for a whole course or course module. Basic computer apps and programs support short videos student can watch, listen, or download. Resist the editing impulse and keep it real. This allows students to hear and feel an instructor’s presence as an important point of orientation. Use PowerPoint or related tools sparingly for short forays into content that will not likely need updating. When slide presentation is crucial for course design, consider alternative tools such as ./>VoiceThread which allow students to comment, respond, or ask questions of the instructor in ways embedded in the slide presentation. (There is a yearly fee for VoiceThread, but it may be worth the expense.) Two years ago I killed voice-over PowerPoint in online teaching, and I won’t go back. The kill meant eliminating a central source of my own and student frustration. Not one student has complained about its absence, and the new course design gets strong reviews. Better strategies and shifting imagination have resulted in more sustainable online teaching and learning practices. Best of all, instead of repeating my recorded words and imitating my own voice, students are learning to exercise their own. And I get to see and evaluate more accurately what they are truly learning.

When you teach online, you get accustomed to classroom teachers telling you they can’t imagine not being in the same place at the same time as their students. Usually what they dwell on is not being in the same place. They profess difficulty imagining being geographically distant from their students. They question how it’s possible to teach without the body language, visual cues, tone of voice, and the like, that the physical proximity of being together in a classroom affords. Perhaps because I came to online teaching from a background in field education where, by definition, my students left campus to go somewhere else to learn, and in denominational leadership, where leading phone conferences with participants scattered across the country was the norm, I was not overly daunted by the prospect of communicating with people in other places. What I knew would be challenging is the lag in time. I had always relied on the immediacy of classroom teaching. There are some people whose thoughts come out of their mouths perfectly formed into sentences whose meaning is crystal clear. I am not one of them. I tend to economize too much with my words, or make leaps of logic in my head, or have to backtrack to fill in context. When people are taking in what I’m saying at the same time as I’m saying it, however, I can compensate. I am pretty good at quickly sensing what I need to clarify. I am most comfortable when teaching is like a dance and I can use my partner’s responses in real time to make it work. When you teach online, the song can be over by the time you realize that your students never got into the rhythm and have danced a different dance. The hallmark of asynchronous online education is that students are working at different times throughout the week, entering and exiting the class at their own pace and paying you attention on their own time. Their engagement with you and with the material may be just as high as in a classroom, but its timing will be unpredictable. You simply cannot know when a comment or explanation from you will finally reach them. And students experience the same thing, of course, from you. Unless you are willing to log in to the course every hour of every day, their question or confusion might not get addressed right away. Sometimes what happens while you are gone, therefore, is that a misguided thread of discussion can take on a life of its own, a set of odd assumptions can be built up about the reading, or simple errors in the assignment compounded. What I have learned about communication in online teaching—to switch to a different metaphor—is that it bears similarity to letter writing. You write down your thoughts, hit Send and put them into cyberspace, and hope they reach your reader in good time.  Then you wait to know whether your words made enough sense and what your correspondent thinks of them. If the correspondence is important, sometimes you find yourself anxiously going to your mailbox over and over again to see whether anything has been delivered back to you yet in the post. The comparison between online education and letter writing is ironic to say the least.  Usually we think that technology serves to speed everything up in our lives. But it is instructive as well. In the old days of letter writing, we used to take care with what we wrote, and there were conventions that helped us convey meaning. Usually we started with a few references to our correspondent’s most recent missive to us, commenting on their news. Then we would hit the highlights of our own, sharing some content and then reflecting on it. We often concluded with questions for the other to answer the next time they wrote, in part to encourage a swift reply. In online teaching I have learned to take almost excruciating care to frontload what I am trying to teach and to explain ideas and instructions in detail. I try to learn who is in class before it starts so that I can scaffold my teaching upon their experience. I communicate the most important ideas of the course as clearly as I can and follow with some pointed questions to invite them into the discourse. And then I wait and let time do its work.

We can boil successful strategic planning around distance education down to three things. First, know how to create lots of ways to use the digital environment for effective teaching and learning. Second, know your potential students. Third, bring the two together: develop a set of scenarios in which to leverage certain forms of online teaching and learning to engage those potential students. Let’s break it down. The core skill to designing good modules week after week for an online or hybrid course is to find the sweet spot between learning outcomes, learning activities, and supporting technology. It would seem like that is three different skills, but it is actually one integrated set of decisions. You start by producing a clear set of learning outcomes (not goals, and not objectives, which always tend to be descriptions of course content). Then, you try to figure out a set of activities (assignments, if you will) that if the students do them will help them master the outcomes. These often progress from individual work to interactive dialogue in community. Then, you go looking for the technology that will support the learning activities that will help achieve the learning outcomes. It is circular. The magic happens when you find the right CMS functionality, tool, or plugin that not only helps the students do what they need to do to learn, but also supports you, the faculty member—especially in time management ways—keep up with the grading, assessing, and giving feedback that is all a necessary part of facilitating good learning. Together, these integrated pieces usher the students through a set of individual, small group, and corporate activities that help them achieve each module’s learning outcomes. A vibrant community of online teachers share best practices and begin to develop an array of these module scenarios (complete with outcomes, activities, and technology) that can be tweaked and modified for different content and different outcomes. This is the heart of an effective community of online teachers. The other piece of strategic planning is to know your students. This includes the usual information: where your students live, what denominations they serve, and all the other sorts of demographics we gather. But none of that is as important as being able to describe the type of life (or types of lives) that include being a part of your seminary. What are the barriers that may prevent participation in your learning community? Is it the commute? Is it the second or third commute in one week that moves the equation from possible to impossible? Is it the requirement to disrupt family, jobs, and support networks in order to move to your campus? Is it having to fly to your city two or three times a semester? A series of focus groups with a set of current students and another with prospective students could create a clearer understanding of what those barriers are. Then, a set of brainstorming sessions by your community of effective online teachers might be able to identify a new set of technology-enhanced tools and processes that could help you lower the barriers and engage your students’ lives more effectively in theological education. Strategic planning gets interesting when we can do just that: bring our newfound capabilities for creating diverse learning scenarios to bear on lowering barriers to participation in the life of your seminary—without lowering the quality of your education.  Can we leverage a virtual learning community for deeper learning in the courses we already offer—essentially increasing the quality of our education? Can we penetrate our current region to a greater degree because more types of lives can take on participation in our learning community and succeed? Can we create new scenarios that transcend the boundaries that previously limited the distance or frequency a student would have to surmount in order to come to campus?  The information age has dismantled a lot that is familiar about the way we have approached theological education. But, it could also be an avenue through which we revitalize, deepen, and extend our theological education to more people.

As a professor at a Catholic graduate school of theology and ministry, I need to consider the spiritual, human, intellectual, and pastoral formation of my students as I develop course curriculums. Often opportunities for growth and learning occur when students experience difficulty and dryness; conflict and confrontation; rigidity and dissonance, as well as, tensions and varying degrees of self-awareness. All of this seems to me to be fodder for growth only if a safe space which invites vulnerability without judgement is created within the learning environment. The invitation to vulnerability is set by the tone of the classroom—a welcoming smile, a nodding of one’s head, penetrating eyes—all actions which communicate respectful presence, deep listening and acceptance; not necessarily agreement. These intimate actions which facilitate trust and safety in a face-to-face classroom can be absent from the asynchronous portions of hybrid or totally online courses. I imagine that you are familiar with the adage, “The family that prays together stays together.” By extension, I hope you agree then that the family that prays together also learns, grows, and experiences life together in all its ups and downs. This is my experience in the online learning environment: the community that prays together stays together, learns together, grows together, and experiences life together in all its ups and downs. This is not to say that prayer is dispensable in the face-to-face environment, it is not. And it is not dispensable in the online environment either. Perhaps it is even more essential because the smiling faces, the nodding heads, and penetrating eyes are absent. It is my belief that communal prayer and reflection—even when engaged asynchronously or perhaps in Kairos time—enhance our common learning experience. Practically, the importance of communal prayer is made clear in the syllabus and introduction video for any online class. Each class begins with prayer. It is built into the study guide and the course module. The learning community is encouraged to participate in the weekly prayer and offer reflections in a ‘prayer blog.’ As the professor, I monitor this blog, rarely, if ever, making a public comment.  The blog is accessible in two ways: via a link within the weekly module which is placed just after the prayer, and via the ‘class blogs’ tab in the table of contents. The weekly prayer takes many forms: from videos with images and voice-overs to links which steer students to a beautiful solo accompanied by a string quartet. Prayers are chosen carefully and support the week’s theme/content. For example, when beginning a course in theological field education, a simple reading of the well-known words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Trust in the Slow Work of God,” with the single image of the cosmos in video form, opens the learning community toward growth and conversion. When studying the spiritual themes of the gospels, a PowerPoint filled with images that break open the proclamation of the Beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel provides the moment of prayer. When studying Celtic spirituality, a link to a beautiful rendition of “I Arise Today” breaks open the heart. Participation of the students in this formative activity is generally between 80-90%. Some students honor the original postings with silence while others offer beautiful affirmations and gratitude. It is a sacred space. St. Teresa de Ávila writes, “Prayer is not just spending time with God. It is partly that—but if it ends there, it is fruitless. No, prayer is dynamic. Authentic prayer changes us—unmasks us, strips us, indicates where growth is needed. Authentic prayer never leads to complacency, but needles us, makes us uneasy at times. It leads us to true self-knowledge, to true humility.” Prayer in community, as you well know, takes on an organic, dynamic depth which touches the soul. If we participate with the Spirit, through prayer as a community—and in this case, as a learning community in an online environment—the Spirit opens us to create a space filled with palpable welcoming, felt affirmation, and attentive gazes. It invites us to authenticity by ‘needling’ us beyond ourselves and, in its capacity to ‘unmask’ and ‘strip us,’ together we find that we are better able to move through the difficulty and dryness, engage the conflict and confrontation, soften our rigidity and quell dissonance, and, as well, hold the tensions as we deepen into greater self-awareness supporting one another in mutual learning and growth.