Sorry I haven’t been keeping this blog going but I’ve actually been busy teaching. I was offered not one but two sections of Medical Terminology, both I and II for the Fall 2009 quarter. I had 30 students in each section! I had a lot to learn in a hurry. I had to have my classroom ready so when the students logged on, the announcements were in place telling them what to expect. I watched a lot of video tutorials and read everything I could find on opening it up. My Dean at my college was very patient in explaining the steps and also referred me to the teacher who creates the instructional videos and other materials. He was gracious enough to give me some one-on-one time which helped immensely. The standard practice is to get your content from a Master Course on the website and use it for your instruction. This presented a couple of challenges. The Master had been written by the senior instructor at the time and was Loaded with his announcements and other motivational paragraphs as well as warnings. These had to be painstakingly deleted one at a time. The other challenge was the tests. They were replete with misspellings, obscure words that weren’t found in the textbook, wrong answers that were supposed to be correct, more than one correct answer for multiple choice questions, and other surprises. I had to go through a quiz and an exam and proofread them before I could open them up for the students to take. Any lingering mistakes were quickly discovered by the sharper students and corrected by me. The result, at the end of the long quarter, was a streamlined set of tests that I was proud to put in front of my classes. It was a ton of work that first quarter, but I now have my tests and announcements saved in my Learning Object Repository which is a priceless resource. At the beginning of each quarter, I can “populate my shell” with the content from the LOR and I’m ready to go.
I don’t get a class every quarter but usually get one or two. The class pretty much runs itself now and I can spend more time interacting with and encouraging my students and less time fixing. I hope to be doing this indefinitely because I enjoy it so much.
