Professor embraces retirement and online teaching with a little help from ITaP

Jack Spencer, Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology

When Jack Spencer retired from Purdue in 2017 the sociology professor was ready to leave West Lafayette behind and start the retirees’ life at a new home in Maryland. He was not ready to leave teaching altogether, however.

Spencer is continuing to teach his 300-level course, “Crime, Deviance and Mass Media,” but he isn’t making the 10-hour commute each way to campus. Instead, he’s teaching the course online.

“Initially, I had some misgivings, I had taught a few online courses during the summers, so I thought I had a pretty good feel for how to do an online course,” says Spencer. “It turns out I needed a lot of help.”

Spencer partnered with instructional designers from ITaP to develop his course, adding components like discussion boards, assignment rubrics and course objectives to help students understand what they were supposed to be getting out of the class – and he did it all remotely from his Maryland home.

“We were able to have meetings over WebEx, so they could look at what I was doing and make suggestions and point things out,” says Spencer. “It was very convenient for me.”

Before building his online course, Spencer said he felt fairly confident about setting up courses in Blackboard and that he had a good idea of what type of tools to utilize. Working with ITaP, he says, gave him new insights about online learning.

“I was of the opinion originally that group discussions for online were kind of a waste of time,” Spencer says. “But the ITaP designers convinced me, and showed me discussions could be a useful learning tool.”

Students in the course watch films and analyze them as they relate to issues in sociology. Spencer says the discussion posts help the students learn how construct an argument and justify their stance, forcing them to be engaged in the process.

He has also added an exercise that allows students to get to know each other – something he didn’t do in his traditional class – and virtual office hours via WebEx, so students can talk to him in person, instead of over email, if they want a more personal touch.

“ITaP made it so easy to transform my old course into an online course,” says Spencer. “Basically, all I had to do was tell them what I wanted to do with my old course materials, and it transformed pretty easily from there.”

Interested in developing an online course?

ITaP is offering a one-day rapid course development session designed to help faculty jump start the development of their online course on Thursday, December 6.

 The three scheduled sessions are:

For more information about course design or to request a one-on-one consultation, contact tlt@purdue.edu.

 

Writer: Dave Stephens, technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue, 765-496-7998, steph103@purdue.edu.

Last updated: Oct 15, 2018