Oh wow. I just have so many thoughts running through my head about how to improve my online Spanish courses. I am frustrated because my students are not embracing the desire to learn another language. (What, they don't love the language as much as I do?) What it feels like they want is a quick in/quick out online class where they don't have to do a whole lot of application. I listened to students last semester as they were incredibly frustrated with the amount of work required on a weekly basis. I had always heard that in an undergraduate college course, a student should expect to spend 2-3 hours outside of class for every credit hour the class is worth. So for my 4-credit class, it shouldn't be unreasonable to spend 8-12 hours per week. And that isn't even including th 4 hours that would also normally be spent in classtime for a face-to-face offering. I started thinking that maybe this time frame was no longer accurate and that perhaps the model had changed. However, I am following a great blog by an online teacher, who re-quoted that exactly: 2-3 hours outside of class for every credit hour.
No, I am feeling validated about the amount of time my course requires for students. I have done my research. Reading that blog was a great find, and I've also polled a couple of the other professors at one of my schools and a fellow adjunct online teacher with my other school. It simply takes a lot of time to learn a language, there really is no way around it. But my goal now is to make sure I continue to offer the best online course I possibly can, with 2 semesters of experience now going to be under my belt.
I did have students voluntarily complete surveys near mid-term, so I can continue improving the course for next term. I have gotten some really good feedback from them that is helping drive my ideas for the future. I currently do not offer a discussion board assignment, well, at least not one that is required. I do offer an extra credit assignment in the form of a discussion board, and honestly, those are my favorite things to grade. But with Spanish, it is a little hard to create an additional assignment that won't eat up a bunch more of their time. Maybe for my level 2 classes, but level 1 would be difficult. One idea I have is to require students to pose weekly questions about course content, and then also go back in and respond to their classmates.
I also ideally want to incorporate more actual verbal communication, if that is even possible. Logistically, it would be a nightmare for me to grade any more than what they already do. But I want to re-vamp my oral assessments, making them more communicative in nature instead of just reading words and sentences from a page. Then, ideally, the grade for this would be more for understanding and less for grammatical correctness. I think I can save the grammar for the other requirements in the class.
These are the main ideas I have in reference to improvements in the classes. But I do have a few more brewing as well!
