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The distance classroom is quite different than a physical classroom. The most striking difference between the two environments can be found in the communication that is supported. In particular, the distance classroom relies on communication for its very existence and this communication is almost entirely student initiated. All of the activity in our distance classroom is really an attempt at communication, which can be more than confusing when students first attempt to orient themselves here. It takes some time and practice to get familiar with this new skill. A typical day is not easy to describe here, because our distance classroom is asynchronous and a list is necessarily synchronous or unreadable. The one thing you should take from the following list is that students will feel like their classroom has been turned upside down and inside out. We already know this and we take a lot of time to turn the students upside down and inside out to match. A typical day does not happen at first. During the first part of the course students will be engaged in activities that will help them get familiar with the distance classroom. So, this list is really a list of what you might see two months into the course. Students will be communicating with us mainly via the electronic course notebooks. We exchange course notebooks via the website and a web browser. Inside the notebooks the students, mentors, and instructor conduct a discussion on the math. After handing-in a notebook students immediately move on to the next notebook while mentors provide feedback to submitted questions. The first notebook will return while students are working on the second notebook. They can either let it sit while they finish the second notebook, hand-in the second notebook, and then review the feedback in the first notebook. Or, they might pause in the second notebook and see how the discussion has progressed in the first notebook. After working for a couple of months the description might include four active notebooks and a quiz. The instructor is reviewing the recently submitted quiz for lesson 4. The hotline is reviewing the second notebook from the lesson 5. The students are working on the third notebook from the lesson 5 while they are holding onto the first notebook from lesson 5, which the hotline has just returned. The sequence is not linear by any stretch of the imagination, it is more like a swirl. Students do not sit and wait in the distance environment. If they send something in then there is always the next notebook to open, which they immediately move onto while their submitted notebook is reviewed. There will always be several active notebooks that the students are revisiting. As the students think about the math they probably will have questions. Sometimes they submit these questions in a notebook. Sometimes they contact the hotline using Instant Messaging (IM). Sometimes they FAX homework solutions, quizzes, or exams and received FAXes back. A typical day might look like this:
Sit down with group at the computer
Send an email to mentor letting them know that Mrs. Weatherspoon FAXed in the Lit Sheets for them.
Take a look at their email. Two email receipts that the hotline and Lee returned two notebooks this morning.
Download notebooks.
Reply to the hotline in one notebook and send it back in.
Lee's notebook didn't have and further questions, so just save it.
Send Lee an email that they are ready for the quiz.
Start first notebook in next lesson, Read Basics.
They have a question in basics. IM hotline.
Hotline said to send in the notebook so they could create a graph to look at.
Send in Basics first section.
Start looking at second section in Basics.
Email notice. First notebook is back. Pause Basics. Take a look at notebook.
Reply to question. Send it back in.
Back to Basics, second section. Makes sense.
Jump to Give It A Try for that part.
Email notice. Hotline has returned Basics. Makes sense now.
Back to GIAT. Do two problems and hand in notebook.
Look at another GIAT section. Haven't seen this before.
Search for something in Basics.
Bell rings.
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