I’m nearing the end of my book and I barely have enough material to finish out the last two book notes. So, I’m reading one chapter this week and finishing off the book next week. This week I read “Asynchronicity: Delivering Composition and Literature in the Classroom” by Richard Courage. In this article, Courage discusses the challenges he faced as he began teaching online versions of his courses in the fall of 2001. Throughout the article he compares and contrasts the differences between in-person teaching and online instructing. For instance, he describes how he likes the emotional barrier online teaching enforces. He undertook his first online class on 12 September 2001, and instructing online was much less emotional than instructing his in-person classes. Courage also likes how enforcement of deadlines is much easier online; he can close off a conversation thread when the deadline has been reached. One of the challenges he faced in his online class was not being able to read his student’s faces for clues about how he was instructing and clues about where they were emotionally. The article was semi-interesting, but it wasn’t very helpful pedagogically. There was nothing in this article I feel I could take with me into an online teaching environment.
charityjoy 