The last three or so months I’ve been a little more quiet than normal. Yep, even for my normal introverted level of quiet. I’ve happily committed a pretty sizable amount of time to the BBST Test Design, Instructors course, and co-instructing my first class for AST (Bug Advocacy).
The instructors class was really useful, mostly in the sense that it gave a good base of education theory and also in the sense that it gave a good method of communicating with students. The one area I found lacking in the course was how instructing works practically. Things like class flow, how to do certain common things within moodle, how much or little to interact with students, and so on. Some of this was resolved while co-instructing for the first time which I’ll speak to in a bit. Overall though, the class was a pleasure and very informative. The instructors manual created by Dr. Kaner, Dr. Fiedler, and Doug Hoffman was wonderful, useful during the instructors course and even more so for my first time co-instructing.
On to my first time co-instructing a class. Though the students have finished their parts of the classwork, there is still work to be done by the instructors. I participated minimally his time and frankly felt lost quite often despite talking with the other instructors. It seems like this is a common experience for first timers though. Learning the administrative side of moodle as well as figuring out my role as a co-instructor was trying. The experiences in the first class should make the next classes much better. That’s a good thing since I plan to lead classes eventually. I think early communication with new instructors and having some set of tasks specifically for new instructors to ease them in would go a long way to make that experience better. Actually, just something listing typical tasks that new instructors are generally successful with would be helpful. I aspire to participate much more for the next class which is in January if memory serves.
Oh! I’m also really excited to be helping with TWiSt an an editor. I edited my first episode this past week. If you haven’t listened yet, you can download the mp3 here. Free registration is required.
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