How much should you keep in the course?

So many apps can help us do our work as online writing and literacy instructors, and I do think it's important and valuable that you play with new tools, as such ongoing experimentation will inevitably refresh and perhaps improve your pedagogy.

But I was struck by a recent conversation with a friend of mine. His bright high school student was struggling a bit, and one of the issues was that the student had many different web sites/stops for reading, resources, and other materials for his classes. He had trouble keeping track of it all.

That made me think and reflect on my own practice. While I believe paragraph one above--after all, I wrote it!--and I am always introducing new tools outside of the LMS to students, I think sometimes we can get too fancy for our own good--perhaps to the detriment of our students' learning.

For instance, there are great meeting and appointment apps: think Doodle. But when I want to set up conferences with my students, I usually set them up right on the discussions; I list times and then have students respond, asking them to change the subject line to include their last name and time choice. It's a little clunky, but that conference conversation is right there when they do their other work in the course.

In fact, in my asynchronous course, I continue to have much of the "action" right there on those discussions. Teaching approaches that might perhaps be conducted via blogs, wikis, or even more advanced versions of discussion boards themselves (such as that solid communications app, Slack), I still often conduct on the LMS discussion board, warts and all.

I supposed this thinking drives my ongoing use of a Weekly Plan in my OWCs: I'm trying to reduce the amount of virtual "traveling" students will do so they can focus on developing their writing and literacy.

I think we have to consider critically how much we ask students to venture outside the LMS and to what ends. Hey, try cool tools, but be mindful of the student experience.

Now of course, students are whisking and cycling through social media all the time, so it might seem kind of dumb to worry about their use of a meeting app, but I continue to think that an important part of my job is to make students comfortable with the interface--and then I'll push them, often outside their comfort zone, when it comes to the writing work in the course.