Time Management for Participants
Providing guidelines and expectations to your participants is one of the first ways to help them handle the time commitment of an online class. Many participants join online classes with the expectation that it won't take them nearly as long as we suggest to complete the work required. They plan to get everything done in one marathon session each week. Remind participants early in the course that they must log in multiple times each week and that the time estimates for successfully managing the online workload are not inflated. In PLS courses, participants should expect to spend a minimum of 6 hours each week working on course material; expectations may vary in your institution. Some weeks will require more time. Slow readers and web-surfers will find that they may need significantly more time to complete each module's tasks.
Judith Boettcher in her article "Socializing the CMS" addresses the challenges participants and facilitators alike face when it comes to attending to online learning (2008):
Rheingold, for one, has noted in a personal conversation that attention is a fundamental building block for learning. Yet attention is now a scarce commodity. In today's face-to-face classrooms, the "default" action, Rheingold maintains, is for students to have their laptops open and be multitasking, leaving little attention or mind space for the classroom activities. Observing these habits is part of what led him to conclude that students have a "strong sense of entitlement to put their attention where they want it to be." Translation: It's now more difficult than ever to get students to direct their attention where a faculty member thinks it should be.
What type of attention? Part of his challenge, Rheingold adds, is to create classroom events that are "at least as interesting as the rest of the internet." Similarly for the online environments, our challenge is to design systems that fit where students' minds are now and where we want to guide and support their learning toward. Rheingold also refers to the concepts of hyper-attention vs. deep attention discussed in work by K. N. Hayles. Hyperattention is the type of attention many of us exhibit while surfing the web or multitasking, while deep attention is required for sustained concentration and focus (for writing, creating, and complex problem-solving). Hayles' research suggests that it is critical for the new pedagogy to help students develop skills in both attention types, and to be aware of when these approaches might be most appropriate.
As facilitators we must encourage participants to utilize deep attention while taking online courses, even though they exist in the very place where many participants are accustomed to using hyperattention (surfing the net from home).