Before making a transition into teaching online, I think I will reflect on how my teaching experience began. I received my California Secondary Teaching Credential in 1969. Yipes! Has it really been that long?! My teaching career began at a middle school in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. Teaching art to junior high school aged students when you're only barely past your teens is not something I would recommend to everyone. It was a fairly rough school and I suddenly realized that paints, plaster, paper, crayons, and glue can be used for more things than artwork. It was time to re-evaluate my future.
I enrolled back in college and received a Master's Degree in communication disorders with a specialty in audiology. I was hired by L.A. City Schools as an educational audiologist. This was certainly more like it! I enjoyed the hearing impaired students and learned that teaching them, their teachers, and their parents about hearing aids and hearing loss was continuing in the field of education, but was more in line with what I wanted for a future.
Jump ahead to 1982 and I am living with my husband and first child in Northern California. I was working two jobs as an audiologist. The first was in a developmental center where I assessed the hearing of the residents. There was some teaching involved, as I was able to convey to the staff working in the residence halls how the client's hearing affected their ability to learn. The second job was in the office of an otolaryngologist where I was testing hearing and counselling patients about their hearing loss. So, again, my life as an educator was continuing. I retired from the field of audiology in 1999.
Starting in the early 1990's I began to take classes in computer graphics at the local junior college. Photography had always been an avocation of mine and I was interested in the digital darkroom. I became an Adobe Certified Instructor in Photoshop and in 2001 landed a job as an adjunct instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College, where I had studied. It was great fun and I had come full-circle back to the classroom. I moved into teaching Adobe Photoshop Elements in a hands-on class with each student sitting at a computer and me helping them understand and use the program.
I'm finally up to my current job! Whew! I bet you thought I would never get to the point. I'm continuing as an adjunct instructor and teaching HTML and CSS. For those that are not sure what that means, it's the code used to put together Web pages. Many of the classes in our Computer Studies department are taught online. I would dearly miss working face-to-face with a classroom of students, but time marches on and teaching online is now a part of the field of education.
Teaching online certainly has its good points and I'm looking forward to developing the skills that it involves. It would appear that online students might be a bit more motivated to learn than those who actually have to physically go somewhere to sit in a classroom. Experience will tell me whether this theory pans out.
I have been surprised to learn that online classes can involve small group collaboration. This chance to provide a social experience in a class where people don't actually see each other sounds like an exciting direction for online teaching. I was not aware that online learning can become a group activity.
As I embark upon this study of the process of online education, I will add to this blog. Bye for now! Diane
