The conference was a massive success, folks. The presentations were fantastic, there was a million questions, and I had a mighty good time. The presentations were not read, which is the best. We delivered them in a conversational manner without any props or technology. Which is ironic, given the subject.
First of all, I want to tell you about the presentation that I found the most impressive. It was delivered by a colleague who specializes in online learning. He had taught his first fully online course back in 1997. Today, not only does he teach online but his research consists of theorizing online education. When he spoke, it was obvious that the guy is a brilliant pedagogue. The way he speaks, calculates his time, modulates his voice, pauses, keeps the audience’s attention, makes it impossible not to listen, strategizes his delivery, never trails off, finishes every sentence as strongly as he began it, and forces everybody to forget that cell phones exist – all of this testifies to his enormous pedagogical experience. Fuck it, the guy is a better teacher than me, which is not something I find myself saying often.
So here is what he had to say:
1. It is possible to deliver a good online course, but only if we remember the following:
a. A good online course costs MORE to design and administer than a regular course.
b. Enrollment caps (i.e. the number of students in the course) should be LOWER in an online course than in a regular course.
c. The professor should be online, administering the course in an active way 7 days a week, at least 3-4 times during the day.
2. Having a PhD in a discipline does not qualify you to teach that discipline. Instead of content authority, we should rely on pedagogical authority.
3. Striving to create a psychologically and emotionally comfortable environment in the classroom is a MISTAKE. In order for learning to happen, there should be a degree of productive anxiety (God, I love this phrase) in both the students and the teachers. To put it bluntly, learning should be uncomfortable.
4. A professor should not be the person who awards grades. It’s a good idea not to reveal any grades until the end of the course. [This is something I’m already doing, in part, in my courses. Students resist but I don’t give way.] Instead of numbers (grades, percentages, etc.), we should provide verbal feedback (“Good, excellent, etc. because. . . since. . . however. . .).
He wasn’t allowed any more time to speak, which is a pity because I could have stayed there hearing what he has to say all day long.
Clarissa's Blog 
“It’s a good idea not to reveal any grades until the end of the course.”
Maybe this is problematic only in mathematics courses, but I find this really objectionable, in any course. If a student is hopelessly out of their depth in background and will be unable to finish the course with a passing grade, it is cruel not to let the student know this so that he or she can withdraw from the course. It is not fair to surprise such a student with a grade of F at the end of the term.
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I really think verbal responses are effective. That’s not the culture of my institution though. Students would revolt (at least in the form of student evaluations) if they didn’t get grades they could track all semester long.
I like what the guy said about online learning. It is really not true that online is cheaper. Administrators need to get their heads out of their asses about that.
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@Fie & David
I wrote a scathing student review of one of my courses because the teacher did not give feedback of any sort, let alone numerical grades. She set up the course so we’d have to hand in homework and have online discussions which were supposed to be graded weekly, but she didn’t post anything for two months. I had several emails from other students about this. I’m not sure she read anything we submitted. I told them that if I wanted to take a course with no feedback I would have opted for Barnes & Noble and YouTube instead of choosing to pay for college courses, and trying to deal with correcting a month’s worth of errors in a week was just too much. I told I knew it wasn’t her only class, and this wasn’t my only class and just like she had a life outside of class, I had one too. I was so irritated.
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Would a lack of feedback and/or numerical grades allow the Dunning Kruger effect to operate in a much larger extent in any class? I wonder.
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I tried to give verbal feedback instead of grade once. I paid the price in my student’s evaluation. BUT, two years later, many students in this class came back to me and ask me to direct independent studies and honors thesis. I do not know whether there is a correlation between the king of feedback I gave in that class and my student’s belated appreciation of my persona. The sad thing is that I cannot afford more mediocre stud evals, so I stick to provide plenty of grade feedback on a very timely fashion.
I would love to see research on what your colleague had to say about the human and economy price to pay to deliver a good online course. That would shut some of my colleagues mouth.
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We all experienced productive anxiety on our best seminars, right? Such a great sentence.
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