Britteny Howell, M..A., RPA

A few weeks ago I attended a community college faculty conference that I found to be very beneficial for my online teaching. I have been teaching online for 2 years now, in addition to traditional lecture style classes, and have come across quite a few challenges with online teaching. The biggest challenge for me is making sure the students feel like I am a resource for their learning. All too often online classes become very self-directed. While this is inevitable, I also wish for the students to contact me for advice and to talk about the class material.

The Bluegrass Community and Technical College Faculty Conference on February 27, 2010 was a rare instance in which I felt like I had learned something very valuable from a conference. This conference was not just a bunch of faculty reading their recent research but was instead directed toward improving our teaching. Most of the sessions were about teaching online, which is something many community college faculty members across the country are being ‘voluntold’ to do. There can be quite a bit of apprehension about teaching online for the first time. Even once you have been doing it for a while, you soon realize how much work is involved in keeping up with the latest technology and online pedagogy.

At the risk of sounding like I am promoting one individual speaker, Dr. Jeff Butterfield from Eastern Kentucky University really stood out from the crowd at this conference. His exhuberant presentation style was engaging but, more importantly, his learning lessons were invaluable to my current online teaching dilemma. He presented on how to increase the instructor’s presence in an online class with some very helpful take-aways that I can’t wait to implement. I find it very rare that a conference will leave me so inspired to try new things (with exact instructions on how to do it!). I look forward to getting to re-design my online courses this summer to include these new techniques. I also look forward to next year’s BCTC Faculty Conference. It was well worth the hour and a half hour drive!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Education/Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.