A Long-Winded Setup / Analogy

One of my favorite memories about my doctoral students when I was teaching overseas was their enthusiasm and hard-working approach to the world. The classrooms, though, were another matter. Here I was in an agricultural university in the NE part of this country...and we used chalk and chalkboards, stencils and hand-typed texts, cassette tapes and tape players. The podium usually was constructed of wood and usually had some broken pieces, so one's leg could ostensibly be stuck in the floor while one was lecturing. The windows would be broken (without screens, of course), and dust would blow in from some faraway place and cover everything. The rooms would be concrete and generally unheated. The fluorescent lights would not be turned on until nighttime...so there would be some moments of darkness at dusk. Electricity was not turned on in the daytime as it was channeled to factories. Students would have left cigarette butts, newspaper clippings, crumpled notebook paper, and all sorts of garbage all over the floors. They had to clean up after themselves, and often, they would get to it maybe once a week... Anyway, I entered the classroom one day and was a little tired of the floors being in sorry shape, so I picked up a small broom and started getting all the garbage on the floors into a big pile, which I planned on shoving out into the hallway...where someone would sweep it up. (Oftentimes, street sweepers would make little fires in the street to burn up the garbage they came across, which of course, added to the air pollution.)

As I swept, cultural ignoramus that I was, I apparently made my doctoral students feel bad that their instructor had to sweep. So they suddenly sparked themselves into action. My male students, who generally have been much adored and much spoiled because of their intellects and their hailing from humble agricultural backgrounds, didn't really know much about cleaning. They ran into the room with wet mops...mopped the floors and then mopped the desktops.

A Virtual Version / Analogy

An online classroom needs maintenance and housekeeping, albeit with a digital broom and a digital mop. Once a course is set up and people start entering an online course, you can be sure that they will turn your virtual furniture upside-down. They'll post messages in the wrong places. They'll double or triple or quadruple post. They'll upload files that are unopenable because they're the wrong file type. They'll post to closed discussion forums. They'll post late homework. They'll sometimes borrow their colleagues' work and even forget that they did. They'll ask obvious questions even if the answers have been posted in a number of places. Indeed, it's all good. That's to be expected the first few weeks. However, by about Weeks 4 and 5, this starts getting old.

The housekeeping of an online classroom may be enhanced with a clear policy about what goes where, well defined assignment instructions, and supportive follow-through of these policies and practices.

Maintaining some semblance of order in an online classroom should help an instructor stay sane.