To be completely honest, sharing my work with my classmates overwhelms me. Despite my years of teaching, and having taught many different classes and doing SO many lesson plans, the fear of someone looking at my work and saying it isn’t good enough scares me. I know the importance of feedback. Feedback is essential for my growth and development. Feedback provides me with new information from a different lens which helps me to improve my work. That said, I am very grateful for the feedback and comments my classmates provided me. Their feedback made me look at how I can make my course better.
“It’s incredibly exciting to have your work seen by others, to have others respond to it.”
I’ll begin by discussing the feedback I’ve received and outlining how I can make improvements. Afterward, I’ll share some positive comments from my classmates regarding aspects they appreciated in my course.
Feedback #1: Reaching out to each student individually at the beginning of a course. Yes, I completely agree that this would be incredibly time-consuming. An expectation that we have as online teachers, is to send a welcome email to all students that are enrolled in our courses. This email is just an introductory email to welcome them to the course and provide a bit of information about the course and how they can contact me. I ask students to respond to my email- usually but asking them a few random questions- so that I can confirm that they have received the email and that this is the correct email address they would like me to use during the semester.
Feedback #2: I indicated that interactions among students can be challenging due to learners completing assignments on different timelines. A suggestion could be for me to encourage students to collaborate through Discord and that is a great idea. Moving forward with my classes, I am going to try a platform like Discord, so that students have a place where they can ask questions and connect.
Feedback #3: In one of my interative videos, I need to add a pause so students have the opportunity to read and answer the questions. I will definitely make that improvement.
Feedback #4: There are some technical issues that I need to fix. My audio wasn’t working in my H5P Presentation, and for my Blog Post some information was cut off. Both will be easy to fix.
I am grateful for the positive feedback I received from my classmates. I appreciated learning that they found my course “professional” and “ready to go”. I am glad that they found my course easy to navigate and that my course “accommodates learning styles through choice of assignments, lessons and assessments.” I took all of the feedback and comments I received and created a wordcloud.
