Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD

A blog posting by Betty Gilgoff on Betty’s Blog about Collaboration got me thinking about how things have changed since I was in a student in college and in medical school. These days there is much more of a push, especially in the online arena to have students collaborate on project particularly in cyberspace.

This image summarizes my prior conception on collaboration. I had a lot of difficulties in my online teaching training with the collaborative efforts. I found it way too easy for those who weren’t willing to work on group projects to ride along on the coattails of those who were and get a decent grade without doing much.

I shared my thoughts with Betty:

I haven’t incorporated many collaborative efforts into my teaching because I am still trying to find a way to have efforts equitably distributed or be able to account for each person’s contribution. I did end up developing a way of capturing everyone’s contribution on a group project using a form to create a composite group paper.

For this 2005 teaching course that I was taking, I used a form builder to capture information for all of the participants in my teaching group as a way of demonstrating who had contribute what and creating a way to collaborate in fairness.

If I were to do the project again today, I would use a wiki, which would do exactly the same thing. Unfortunately wikis were not as prominent or available in 2005 when I took the course.

Collaborative Efforts for Graduate Course

With my graduate course this past semester, I had the students all contribute resources to a wiki. I used PBwiki to create a collaborative group where each student would be able to contribute additional weekly resources and readings as a group effort.

With a wiki, it is very easy to see which student (or collaborator) has contributed what to the assignment or the project.

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Journey of Hearts – A Self Funded Venture

For more than 10 years now, the Journey of Heart website has been a self-funded venture. Grief is not a popular topic and is also not one that is readily recognized, funded nor has it been one that reimbursed for physicians.

To date, the entire operating costs of the website as well the estimated thousands of hours to write, design, host and maintain this web resource, have been donated by myself and my husband as our gift to the grieving Internet community.

Since we’ve been self-funded with the Journey of Hearts site, out of necessity to minimize costs I’ve scoured the Internet looking for freely-available or low-cost options to some of the proprietary programs and web tools.

Necessity the Mother of Discovery

Plato is credited as saying that

Necessity is the mother of invention.

I think for many of us who spend a lot of time online, without a lot of resource backing–early website owners, small business owners and the typical adjunct professor–that

Necessity is the Mother of Discovery.

or perhaps a corollary

Lack of funding is the Mother of Discovery.

Online Ed Resources I compiled some of my favorite online education resources in a permanent blog page on the Ruminations Blob the Online Ed Resources page.

This is an evolving list of resources from applications to list serves that I have found online to use when teaching online classes or taking online classes.

The page includes the list of resources that I’ve also recommended to colleagues.