When it comes to teacher presence one thing I must balance out is the quantity and the quality of my feedback. Excellent feedback; in my opinion, is the most important aspect of education when it comes to student achievement and satisfaction with the teacher and the course. In the past I have found myself inconsistent. Some days I was able to give a great quanitity of quality feedback and on others I was forced to shorten my feedback because of time constraints. I want to achieve more balance in this area because I know that when dealing with anyone, especially young people, being inconsistent on important topics is dangerous. Student satisfaction with the teacher and the course will go way down and my ability to teach will be compromised.
My issue is time and I have been steadily creating more time as my organization and design has improved. My courses are more clayed out before hand giving me more time to focus on giving feedback. This also allows for me to facilitate more since my overall goals are more clear.
The development (chunking) of this online course and the class readings has given me more insight on how to be better prepared for the year by allowing me to put into practice the sitting down and preparing of an entire course before I teach it. For an online course I at first thought that it was more necessary for an online teacher to have there course completely planned before they began, but I now believe it is just as important in the F2F class. I only wish I had this kind of practice overall design as a rookie, but as a new teacher I was still unsure of how to teach and what worked. Even if I did plan ahead it was often changed dramatically. As this organization and design develops I find much more ability in forming a better class community.
Jarrod (4)

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July 19th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Hi Jarrod,
I couldn’t agree with you more. As I read over the course material this past week and viewed Alex’s presentation, I began to put into perspective my teaching presence within my face to face classroom. It seems as though with the amount of time, research, and planning we have put into our online courses, we could also put type of planning into our face to face classrooms as well. Yet in our face to face classrooms when planning ahead, those plans could often be changed or modified depending on the understanding students acquire.
This is a concept I am having some difficulty with as I plan my online course. When putting into perspective direct instruction and facilitating discourse in my online course it is difficult to pre-plan these components of my course because I do not specifically know my audience. Yes, I have developed this course for a third grade audience, but I can not predict their learning styles, needs, the way they will respond to the content, etc. I feel this part of planning for the course is something that will be developed or modified as the course is implemented. Do you agree?
~Amy