Last week’s partner interview

The following interview was conducted by classmate Linnea Dolan:
"Amy is a high school English teacher for iQ Academy
http://www.iqacademywi.com/. iQ, is the state's largest online high school. Amy taught for 9 years in a traditional school. She later was offered the opportunity to teach online when her school district formed a partnership with KC Distance Learning 5 years ago.· KC Distance Learning eventually wants to have an iQ in every state. Wisconsin was its first. Amy enjoys teaching online so much that she wants to never return to a traditional classroom despite the unique challenges presented by online training. · Amy already has a master's degree. There are a lot of reasons why Amy is taking this class: She loves the idea of not having to leave the house to earn 3 credits. The new virtual school bill that was put in place this year states that all online teachers need to be trained. The training is vaguely defined, but Amy figures 3 .grad credits from a state university would cover her. And last but not least, Amy may be writing a course next year and would like to gain as much knowledge about assessments as possible.· One thing that you may never may guess about Amy is that she carried the Olympic torch in the winter games of 2002. Amy was nominated by a former student in a national essay contest, and her entry was selected from over 200,000 other entries.

· Amy most certainly cannot live without my family. Which consists of her husband, Dave, and our two sons Alex (who is 12) and John (who is 10) And there's also Atticus, our Rat Terrier."

Week One

I have to comment on the instructor's decision to make the Modules available one week at a time. I logged into the course before it officially started. By doing so, I was able to glance at all the Modules. When I logged in after the official start of class, I noticed that only Module 1 was available.
There was an announcement posted stating, " Module 2 will open this Friday. I will open each successive module the Friday before the start day. Therefore, please concentrate on the current open module and if you have schedule restrictions and a special need for access to a future module, please email me. Thanks so much...off we go....!!"

I think this is a great way to structure an online course. If a student has the entire semester's worth of work to preview, he/she may become overwhelmed by the content. As an online teacher, my course is set-up to allow students to see the entire semester (this is something I can't change). This has one advantage: students can work ahead of schedule. But I think the disadvantage of students becoming overwhelmed is too great. By allowing a week to week reveal, it allows students to maintain focus on the current week's topic.
In addition, this class requires a great deal of interaction between students (interviews, discussion boards). If one student is working on week 4 and everyone else is only on week 2, the first student has no one to discuss with. And discussion is a key component to any online class!