Week 2 - Communication

Communication, all aboard! The lifeblood of the online community. So, it was a little bit strange I thought to spend so much time and effort on students with disabilities. Not that I'm insensitive, I certainly think that online learning can be a real benefit for some physicial disablilities that make it difficult to participate in f2f courses. Distance eduction, especially asynchronous courses are also beneficial for some cognitive disabilities as well. Asynchronous courses allow students to work at their own pace and without distraction from the physical environment. And I do think it's important to be aware of a school's ADA policy, section 508, and resources available to students in online courses.

That being said, my sense is those are a minority of students and there is little that an instructor can do for them in the online environment, lacking the immediacy of f2f, other than refer them to the proper resources and try to accomodate their particular disability in choice of course materials and delivery once - and this is the key part - the student themselves make known their disability to the teacher. I did appreciate becoming more aware of the assistive technologies, however.

Yes, I found the disability web sites very interesting. And I found the opposition or lack of enthusiasm for Dr. K's idea of a course to teach instructors how to make their Vista course accessible a little puzzling. Working in the Ed Tech dept, I've become aware of just how intensive the process is to get a course ready. And I'm not sure of the percentage of online instructors that actually develop their courses in Vista.  But I would think if any dept took on the challenge, the ITEC dept would be leading the way. So, interesting but I'm not so sure I would have chosen that topic for such a short course when there is so much more to discuss relating to communication.

Unfortunately, I got pulled into instructional design and didn't get back on the board to participate in the more interesting discussion on managing communication, communication technologies and a communication policy. I've had plenty of experience in the last year using communication technologies in my course works and could have contributed to the discussion.

One of the hard parts of the online discussion or me is knowing how much is enough and how much I can pick and choose. I feel obligated to read everything and participate in every discussion. Sometimes that leads to burn out, or I get pulled away to something else and don't have the chance to come back and  jump into the discussion I'm really interested in. Even after a year plus of discussion boards, I still have a hard time striking the right balance. I think a whole discussion itself could be spent on the best way to manage online participation using the built in tools in Vista. Kind of like a tips and tricks of the pros for efficient time management in online posting.