It's been a few weeks since the Faculty Congress where I got to share my mini- bag of goodies with fellow colleagues of the University of the Philippines. I'm trying to understand where my apprehension was coming from when I was asked by my Dean to handle this presentation in front of faculty members. I mean, out of all facs, why me? Could it be due to my buzzing about a research colloquim, Moodle Moot Aussie, or my sneak previews of Google sites and WizIQ during a workshop, or am I just the easiest one to bully for a performance of some kind? My portion for the Fac Congress was about "Engaging Learners", a task which I was uncertain of doing since I started my work as an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines Open U. Whenever I hear THAT title, it sounds more like an ASS-Prof since half of the time I feel like I am making an ass of myself while teaching online with all my trials and errors, and more errors.
To date, my work at UPOU is the worst teaching experience I've ever had in my life. If there is such a thing as best teaching practice, this is where the opposite of it happened to me--online. Something about higher ed and U.P. as THE state university, which make people assume that once called a 'Prof', one is an excellent teacher to start with. And so the expectation is great and that rubbed off on me: I too expect myself to be a good enough teacher to start with since I've been teaching for 20 years.
My 20 years was colored by teaching in schools/ set ups with very unique causes in the Philippine context: progressive education=Community of Learners, learning disabilities=Wordlab School, IBO-PYP=The Beacon School, teacher to the barrios=UP Oblation Corps. These were pioneering schools/programs in the Philippines.
Then comes UPOU...one of the pioneering open and distance learning institutions within the residential top state university of the country. Though I do have an agenda in Social Studies and Teacher Education to start with, my bigger cause is for the Filipino learners. I see distance education and UPOU as the university which can accommodate the kind of graduates from the types of thinkers and doers I encounter at the basic ed level. ODL is what my children at the K-12 will get into, a few years from now.
My cause is great and very much in place, but my teaching isn't at all.
How am I supposed to sustain this act...especially in front of an audience who are part of the bigger UP system which haven't fully embraced our presence as their Open University. Residential experts and scholarly faculty members view us with skepticism despite allies who see ODL as an opportunity to further the cause of their field. So the pressure of having to face senior faculty members teaching in the residential mode most of their teaching lives was something to reckon with. I don't think I even have enough experience with teaching online to swing a presentation.
Online teaching when I first taught at UPOU equals asynchronous. The first platform we used was IVLE. It felt like I was a frozen delight the whole time--I had so much warmth to give as an F2F teacher but trapped in some ice cold freezer of a platform. I was simply scheming through my students responses which I liken to responding to some email groupie, only that you aren't chums nor friends with these folks without faces and worse, what you're trying to talk about isn't about life at all. It was like going through the motions of Q's and A's to finally give a grade. It's as frozen as can be because teaching then wasn't an 'experience' at all.
Then came Moodle...but this time, I call my teaching as half baked despite my becoming more in touch with the undergrads under my supervision as Program Chair of Associate in Arts@UPOU. In my undergrad class, I was making gains as the course itself had to do a combination of online and offline activities. It's the blended formula I learned through the UPOU Community Site where I get to socialize with students and do informal consultations for ideas to implement program improvements. This virtual forum served as springboard to organize offline community building activities which facilitated my performance of administrative duties in monitoring and handling a big population of undergrads. When they see me F2F or online, I will always be Prof V, their program chair, ready to give academic advice. But this is not the major responsibility I have. On paper, professor=40% teaching, online teaching that is.
Teaching to grad level students was the part of me I was most dissatisfied with. It took an amount of effort to schedule an F2F with my grad students to let me feel connected in the first place. A common time was hard to find given that weekends are either make up time for catching up with other online classes or make up time with family. My students were mostly employed fulltime and already teachers at that. Sometimes it felt like they just wanted to get over my course in order to earn enough credits to become qualified examinees for teaching certification and licensure. It came to a point when I actually questioned my existence at UPOU and if in fact college teaching is the path for me.
Hence the apprehension to even share about 'Engaging Learners' as I may come across as superficial...well, almost not. Good thing I was able to dig into my bag of tricks as I experimented with WizIQ, a synchronous platform which allowed for things to finally come together for me as an online teacher. It's a kind of teaching I fondly call now as the 3rd Kind, lol. If the F2F was the 1st kind for me, and online ala asynchronous is the 2nd Kind, then going synchronous is teaching of the 3rd Kind!
WizIQ came at a time when I realized that part of me was indeed 'settled' in my job at the university. My recent attempts to do an autoethnography which I presented at Pune was telling of that journey into student support and distance education. I would not even come close to saying that learning about WizIQ was some form of divine intervention..hardly at all, lol. In fact, I learned about this online tool from a UPOU student with troll like behavior over at our virtual site. I tried to pick it up after I had a brief 1-1 finding out at Pune, to be continued via skype conversation and an actual demo. I have yet to be convinced of course. I finally decided to go for premium membership over the summer after reading some blog comparing WizIQ with a dimming Dimdim. I was being my usual self as a gradeschool teacher, fond of seeing a new toy and wondering how I can make functional, practical and crazy use of it.
As I was saying, I did have fun experimenting with my WizIQ toy over the summer. I tinkered with the virtual classroom features first with my gradeschoolers a few days before schoolbreak, like a show and tell session of some neat artifact I found in India. Then come April 2011, I was on a 30 day trial and tried it out with few UPOU forum members and colleagues---still in seclusion thanks to the private class setting. I didn't dare go public yet as it did take time to get myself comfortable hearing my kiddish voice. I patiently went through a few more demos handled personally by the WizIQ Support Team, viewed tutorials and even attended classes as a real student. I lurked in the discussion area of the E Learning Community to get the feel of the other teacher-members. I observed a few classes and I thought perhaps it will still take a length of time before I can give this tool a GO in my classes at UPOU.
As classes finally opened this June at UPOU, I found myself making good use of my toy. One time, this toy felt like a hi-tech gadget when our Moodle was down for almost a week--my class was up and running still at WizIQ while the rest of my colleagues were disappointed with some glitch in our asynchronous platform. Funny even, that when I first met my grad level students online, they commented on me as being approachable and cybergenic, lol--proof of the fact that the video+audio makes the teacher alive thereby making them feel alive enough to say those things about me. These live sychronous classes complement the revamps I was doing in my Moodle with the help of Google Sites and html codes. I had a bag of tricks to share with fellow facs after all :)
Looking back, this WizIQ tool a few months ago felt like a precious Parker pen I'd hardly use for the fear of misplacing....now it's becoming more like a whiteboard marker and my laptop which I can't do without. In the near future, perhaps it may turn into an ordinary ballpen or book I will easily misplace and eventually forget about. Technology, my teaching and I will surely move on.
These days however, I plan to enjoy going synchronous while I still can.
Teaching of the 4th, or 5th kind or whatever new toy will just have to wait. With improvements coming along at WizIQ, slowly but surely, I hope to see it happening more for Open HS and K-12 in the Philippines.
To date, my work at UPOU is the worst teaching experience I've ever had in my life. If there is such a thing as best teaching practice, this is where the opposite of it happened to me--online. Something about higher ed and U.P. as THE state university, which make people assume that once called a 'Prof', one is an excellent teacher to start with. And so the expectation is great and that rubbed off on me: I too expect myself to be a good enough teacher to start with since I've been teaching for 20 years.
My 20 years was colored by teaching in schools/ set ups with very unique causes in the Philippine context: progressive education=Community of Learners, learning disabilities=Wordlab School, IBO-PYP=The Beacon School, teacher to the barrios=UP Oblation Corps. These were pioneering schools/programs in the Philippines.
Then comes UPOU...one of the pioneering open and distance learning institutions within the residential top state university of the country. Though I do have an agenda in Social Studies and Teacher Education to start with, my bigger cause is for the Filipino learners. I see distance education and UPOU as the university which can accommodate the kind of graduates from the types of thinkers and doers I encounter at the basic ed level. ODL is what my children at the K-12 will get into, a few years from now.
My cause is great and very much in place, but my teaching isn't at all.
How am I supposed to sustain this act...especially in front of an audience who are part of the bigger UP system which haven't fully embraced our presence as their Open University. Residential experts and scholarly faculty members view us with skepticism despite allies who see ODL as an opportunity to further the cause of their field. So the pressure of having to face senior faculty members teaching in the residential mode most of their teaching lives was something to reckon with. I don't think I even have enough experience with teaching online to swing a presentation.
Online teaching when I first taught at UPOU equals asynchronous. The first platform we used was IVLE. It felt like I was a frozen delight the whole time--I had so much warmth to give as an F2F teacher but trapped in some ice cold freezer of a platform. I was simply scheming through my students responses which I liken to responding to some email groupie, only that you aren't chums nor friends with these folks without faces and worse, what you're trying to talk about isn't about life at all. It was like going through the motions of Q's and A's to finally give a grade. It's as frozen as can be because teaching then wasn't an 'experience' at all.
Then came Moodle...but this time, I call my teaching as half baked despite my becoming more in touch with the undergrads under my supervision as Program Chair of Associate in Arts@UPOU. In my undergrad class, I was making gains as the course itself had to do a combination of online and offline activities. It's the blended formula I learned through the UPOU Community Site where I get to socialize with students and do informal consultations for ideas to implement program improvements. This virtual forum served as springboard to organize offline community building activities which facilitated my performance of administrative duties in monitoring and handling a big population of undergrads. When they see me F2F or online, I will always be Prof V, their program chair, ready to give academic advice. But this is not the major responsibility I have. On paper, professor=40% teaching, online teaching that is.
Teaching to grad level students was the part of me I was most dissatisfied with. It took an amount of effort to schedule an F2F with my grad students to let me feel connected in the first place. A common time was hard to find given that weekends are either make up time for catching up with other online classes or make up time with family. My students were mostly employed fulltime and already teachers at that. Sometimes it felt like they just wanted to get over my course in order to earn enough credits to become qualified examinees for teaching certification and licensure. It came to a point when I actually questioned my existence at UPOU and if in fact college teaching is the path for me.
Hence the apprehension to even share about 'Engaging Learners' as I may come across as superficial...well, almost not. Good thing I was able to dig into my bag of tricks as I experimented with WizIQ, a synchronous platform which allowed for things to finally come together for me as an online teacher. It's a kind of teaching I fondly call now as the 3rd Kind, lol. If the F2F was the 1st kind for me, and online ala asynchronous is the 2nd Kind, then going synchronous is teaching of the 3rd Kind!
WizIQ came at a time when I realized that part of me was indeed 'settled' in my job at the university. My recent attempts to do an autoethnography which I presented at Pune was telling of that journey into student support and distance education. I would not even come close to saying that learning about WizIQ was some form of divine intervention..hardly at all, lol. In fact, I learned about this online tool from a UPOU student with troll like behavior over at our virtual site. I tried to pick it up after I had a brief 1-1 finding out at Pune, to be continued via skype conversation and an actual demo. I have yet to be convinced of course. I finally decided to go for premium membership over the summer after reading some blog comparing WizIQ with a dimming Dimdim. I was being my usual self as a gradeschool teacher, fond of seeing a new toy and wondering how I can make functional, practical and crazy use of it.
As I was saying, I did have fun experimenting with my WizIQ toy over the summer. I tinkered with the virtual classroom features first with my gradeschoolers a few days before schoolbreak, like a show and tell session of some neat artifact I found in India. Then come April 2011, I was on a 30 day trial and tried it out with few UPOU forum members and colleagues---still in seclusion thanks to the private class setting. I didn't dare go public yet as it did take time to get myself comfortable hearing my kiddish voice. I patiently went through a few more demos handled personally by the WizIQ Support Team, viewed tutorials and even attended classes as a real student. I lurked in the discussion area of the E Learning Community to get the feel of the other teacher-members. I observed a few classes and I thought perhaps it will still take a length of time before I can give this tool a GO in my classes at UPOU.
As classes finally opened this June at UPOU, I found myself making good use of my toy. One time, this toy felt like a hi-tech gadget when our Moodle was down for almost a week--my class was up and running still at WizIQ while the rest of my colleagues were disappointed with some glitch in our asynchronous platform. Funny even, that when I first met my grad level students online, they commented on me as being approachable and cybergenic, lol--proof of the fact that the video+audio makes the teacher alive thereby making them feel alive enough to say those things about me. These live sychronous classes complement the revamps I was doing in my Moodle with the help of Google Sites and html codes. I had a bag of tricks to share with fellow facs after all :)
Looking back, this WizIQ tool a few months ago felt like a precious Parker pen I'd hardly use for the fear of misplacing....now it's becoming more like a whiteboard marker and my laptop which I can't do without. In the near future, perhaps it may turn into an ordinary ballpen or book I will easily misplace and eventually forget about. Technology, my teaching and I will surely move on.
These days however, I plan to enjoy going synchronous while I still can.
Teaching of the 4th, or 5th kind or whatever new toy will just have to wait. With improvements coming along at WizIQ, slowly but surely, I hope to see it happening more for Open HS and K-12 in the Philippines.
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