6x6

  • 6x6

    Building Relationships with Online Students

    For the past 11 years, I have been working with a company whose sole focus is helping people build relationships, both personally and professionally. I have helped hundreds of business owners develop a strategy for communicating with their customers in a way that creates long-term relationships. The secret lies in appreciation. People want to be seen and heard; we want to be known. With the simple act of sending out appreciation to those in our life, celebrating their successes, empathizing with them when life gets hard, we tap into that core desire to be known. Here’s the interesting thing–we don’t have to be physically present with a person to build…

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    How Students Inspire Me

    Every once in awhile I still have the old nightmare–the one where I wake up and realize that I am late for the final…in a class I forgot about all semester. Up until a few semesters ago, I thought that could only be a nightmare, and then a student e-mailed me the last week of class and told me he totally forgot about the class. He was hoping he could get caught up. I know that students can have some really terrible circumstances in their lives. They have unexpected illnesses (one semester a student got a cancer diagnosis), children get sick (another student had a child hospitalized at PCH), family…

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    Lemon Lavender Cookies…

    Last fall, I found myself teaching on campus for the first time since Spring 2010. As prepared my lesson plans for the semester, I searched my old files and sent the online course I’ve been developing for over a decade back to its beginnings. Reincorporating all the in-class activities and instruction that are lost in the online format reminded me just how much online students are missing out on. Yes, online courses offer students opportunities that didn’t exist when I started teaching. They can work full time and still attend classes. They can stay home with their kids and attend classes. They can care for sick loved ones and attend…

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    What I Learned from QM

    Last fall, I had the opportunity to submit a course for QM certification, and I learned that the course was approved for certification yesterday. Since our topic this week is evaluation, I thought I’d take a moment and reflect on my experience with the process. Though we all have access to the QM standards, and we are supposed to be using those standards as guidelines for our courses, actually submitting a course is an intense process. It is not enough to know that assignments connect to course learning outcomes, for example, you have to be able to articulate how they connect to folks who may not even be familiar with…

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    Creating Culture in the Online Classroom–6×6 Week 2

    While students who attend classes on campus are exposed to the diverse student population of their college/university as they attend classes, walk across campus, and eat in the dining hall, online students may not even have a picture of the other students in their classes. Likewise, while college campuses might strive to create community through campus events, clubs, and school spirit, online students can be left out of the loop because they are spending time in an online environment. Whether they are returning students or first time attenders, online students likely have families, jobs, and other responsibilities that prompt them to choose to take their classes online. So, they may…

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    Kindness Matters–6×6 Week One

    Last fall, I had the privilege of bringing some of my ENG 101 students to a seminar with Dr. Rupert Nacoste. His presentation, entitled, “Respect Starts with Me–How to Handle Neo-Diversity Anxiety” encapsulated for students some of the key points in his book, Taking on Diversity: How We Can Move from Anxiety to Respect.  (I highly recommend this book, by the way!) Dr. Nacoste points out that we are in a time of vast social change, and notes that change tends to make people nervous. Often we don’t know how to deal with situations or with folks who are different than we are; yet, we are thrust into these diverse situations…