I’m teaching a course that is both face-to-face and online and find myself frequently trying to gauge the ability of the online student to navigate their way through the course content without me standing right behind them. After yesterday’s face-to-face course, I had a minor freak out moment where I started to question if this week’s content was too heavy. Rather, than deciding to amendment the amount of work before the student’s even have the chance to do it, I’ve added in safety measures for student’s who begin to feel overwhelmed. My thought is this will give me a better perspective on workload and student’s abilities to complete the tasks without me. The idea is for me to work from a public computer lab for an afternoon and allow students to “book” time with me. One can assume that if they are not booking time with me, they are assuming my physical presence isn’t an incredible value add. Additionally, it will give me an opportunity to informally survey student’s perspectives on the online experience.
After doing some searching for an online tool that would allow students to grab free appointment times, I landed in the my obvious place: Google. If you are at a Google Apps for Education school and logged in with your work address, you can use Google Calendars for appointments (Side note: I’m not at a GAFE school but I’m using my Pepperdine account to complete this task!)
Here’s what the students see:
Although, I’ve made it very explicit in my emails so far that this week is fairly dense, my plan is to throw up a caution flag on Friday with a link to booking me the following Monday. My hope is student’s spend the weekend gauging how much they know and if they need my help or not. We shall see!
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