Week 4: Sep. 17th I-RISE Class Colloquium

Week 4: Sep. 17th I-RISE Class Colloquium

Since I cannot listen to the teacher and glance at the Week 4 Agenda at the same time, I did not notice the direction -“Anyone who is a trader must become the leader of that group”, so I stupidly said that I want trading. It is tough for me to present for 5 minutes in English especially when I am so nervous. But I appreciate my group partners’ support and their giving me ideas and confidence at that time. Thanks to my classmates for listening to my presentation even though it was without structure as well. Actually, in my mind, I would like to say: “no, give me a break. Please” However, I did not say that because I know it is a challenge that I need to take. If I want to change, I need to change now.

According to the one of the articles I read about-“What Do Online MBA Professors Have to Say About Online Teaching” and “Motivation & Incentives for Distance Faculty”, the content of “Incentives to Teach Online (I)”are organized and listed below:
1. Flexible contents- teachers can get ideas from different perspectives of cultures so that they can create great systems.
2. Flexible schedules- Teachers can provide more options to facilitate online learning. Information can be expanded, updated, and corrected quickly, and distributed immediately.
3. Flexible location- online teaching can happen in hotels, conferences, and different countries.
4. Greater flexibility in “Assessment”- online teaching provides more flexibility in evaluation using different methods like blogging, wikibook, on course discussion and googlegroup.
5. Intellectual challenge- online teaching provides the desire to improve the learning environment and uses different skills for teaching online, helping students learn more and getting to know students better.
6. An extrinsic incentive is monetary stipends- the more enrollments, the more money and control.
7. Possible research publication
8. Sense of empowerment
9. Wider and varied audience- to teach online: usability increases and recognition as a professor increases.
10. Self-motivated and self-satisfaction- online teaching enhances personal growth; online students were highly engaged and self-motivated in the learning process. “Put in another interviewee’s words, ‘their level of motivation helped keep my level of motivation high.”

All in all, I think that the most important factor in incentives is the flexibility of all dimensions. I also believe that the issue of incentives is most important to teach online. Other issues like “online instructor roles”, “training”, and “support” are also important issues in different articles. However, for teachers, the internal and external incentives provided by online teaching are vital, especially for those incentives that we don’t even feel about and find out.
When we find out those incentives in online teaching, we then can build a platform that can accumulate findings. Incentives are something like the stimuli we are talking about in the Behaviorism. It is natural that when we want to learn, we will be willing to learn. Similarly, if we want to teach, we will be willing to teach. After we teach, we will find more things that we don’t know and want to know, and that we should teach and want to teach; then accumulation happens. Incentives produce stimuli that generate accumulation, which affect human progress in online teaching.
What I found interesting is the charter given by Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist at Intel. She stated that, “At Intel, my charter is pretty simple and straightforward: provide insights and inspire innovation.” I think insights and innovation are crucial in educated progress as well. To broaden and deepen the understanding and innovation of online learning – incentive is the key! When we find out more incentives, there will be more inspiration and possibilities in online teaching. So, we should care about how people learn and teach, how people want to learn and teach, about what matters to them; we strive to understand how technologies are used, understood, and imagined in online learning around the world. That is why issues of incentives play an important role in online teaching.

When Bonk’s presentation on online instructor roles began, I could finally take a deep breath and feel calm again. Speaking up is really a big challenge for me. I Hope that my failing spirits revived!