In which I teach an online class

This semester, I am teaching an online-only science fiction literature class at the University of Maine at Augusta as an adjunct. I requested to teach the class for a number of reasons, some having to do with my day job: copyediting medical manuscripts. If I want to go further in the copyediting field, positioning myself as an educator, particularly one with experience in distance learning, may go a long way. Partially, it’s an attempt to bring together some disparate threads of my life. I have been surprised that people find what I do as a day-to-day job interesting, and certain intersections between publishing and my academic interests are valued. So teaching a SF class may end up bringing together literature and copyediting in some intriguing ways, just like I’ve been able to link copyediting and my extensive experience in the publishing world with the academic journal I coedit, Transformative Works and Cultures. In addition, I can see the writing on the wall: copyediting is increasingly being offshored, and I may soon run out of work. Although I am pretty sure that I would prefer not to teach full time (although maybe this class will let me know otherwise!), I would welcome the opportunity to teach occasionally and work with topics that interest me.

I last taught in 2002–2003, face-to-face English classes on the topic of SF that met once a week. I taught two semesters in a row at two different local universities. I like adjuncting because I get to teach in my field, SF literature, without having to teach service classes like Composition or Intro to Literature. I’m particularly excited to be teaching again at UMA because I really like the student body: UMA is a nonresidential school, all their face-to-face classes meet once a week, and the student body tends to be less the traditional 18-year-old just out of high school and more the full-time worker who has decided to get a college degree, and they’re doing so one class at a time. The ideas that the student body comes up with are much different than the ones I see when I teach a more traditional student population.

Before I was permitted to teach an online class, I had to take an online class about teaching online. This class was organized through Blackboard. I found the experience valuable: I learned how to structure the class, how to handle Blackboard’s administrative tools having to do with various sorts of assignments and quizzes, and how to deal with asynchronous discussion. However, I was definitely not impressed with Blackboard as a tool. It’s nonintuitive (and, at least on my computer, agonizingly slow), and it seeks to replicate certain aspects of teaching without really pushing the envelope with possibilities inherent in online pedagogy. Students are familiar with Blackboard because it is used for their other classes, and there is tech support provided by actual university employees, so I, as the instructor, won’t have to troubleshoot.

I had mad, wild ideas about how to incorporate some of Henry Jenkins’s core competencies for engaging in participatory culture (read about them here), which involved choosing a text we were reading in class and studying remixes—perhaps with students even making remixes of their own! (Yes, we’re reading that classic upon which a number of remixes have been based: Wells’s The War of the Worlds.) I wanted to use the online experience as a metaphor for SFnal engagement with technology, and I wanted to bring into the class my own interest in derivative artworks.

However, on the basis of the feedback I received from fellow instructors in the online class, and on the basis of certain pesky requirements having to do with access (notably, making available to students a DVD of any visual media I might want to incorporate, such as me lecturing on something—this requires about 2 weeks’ lead time, which I am, realistically speaking, not capable of), I radically ramped back my desires and expectations. The class, as it currently stands, is largely text based, and it will revolve around reading and discussion. The feedback I got from my contact person indicates that such English classes are the norm, so the way it’s currently structured will be acceptable to the students.

I’m thus going to use this class as a test, to see how far I could go in the future. For example, rather than Blackboard, I would like to use certain Google tools, such as Google Documents, that permit collaboration; and I like the idea of a public class blog. Some instructors ask students to edit or create Wikipedia entries, thus incorporating research into the class while simultaneously letting students see exactly how much weight should be given to Wikipedia when considering it as a source. I hope to incorporate some of these elements into the class, but I’m playing a wait-and-see game first, so I can assess the students’ computer access, comfortableness with other media, and ability to generate non-text-based transformative artworks.

The class as it currently stands revolves around Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom, second revised edition. This book is a proxy for lecture. It’s a short, simple book that defines SF, provides its history, and then delves into topics such as race and gender. In addition, I’ve chosen Thomas Shippey’s The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories for our short-story anthology. It’s not that recent, but it’s in print, it has a nice historical overview, and I’ve used it before—plus I’ve shared beers with Tom and he’s really cool. Add to that five short novels, and that’s the reading for the class. Students are required to make two discussion posts a week, a long one on a prompt I write about the reading and a shorter one in response to another student. The midterm and final will be longish essays on a broad prompt. And staying current (attendance, keeping up with the reading) will be assessed by weekly machine-graded quizzes. The overall goals of the class are to read some classics in the field and come to some understanding of what SF is, and to consider SF narrative as cultural product.

I must acknowledge my colleague, experienced community college instructor and online pedagogy expert Craig Jacobsen, for providing me with advice and a sample syllabus, and for turning me on to Roberts.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 24, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

Posted in essay, pedagogy